NEW YORK >> Columbia University resumed classes Tuesday with students sunbathing and eating ice cream on the lawn that was home to a pro-Palestinian encampment last spring. But there were also fresh demonstrations just off campus, and students and faculty say they’re planning for more as the new school year unfolds.

In recent weeks, the university’s new leadership has embarked on listening sessions aimed at cooling tensions, released a report on campus antisemitism and circulated new protest guidelines meant to limit disruption. But student organizers are undeterred, promising to ramp up their actions — including possible encampments — until the university agrees to cut ties with companies linked to Israel.

Someone splattered red paint Tuesday on a statue in front of the Low Memorial Library. Outside the gates of the university, a small group of protesters marched on a picket line and urged arriving students and faculty to join them rather than go to class.

“As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist,” Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student who represented campus protesters in negotiations with the university, told The Associated Press last week ahead of the start of classes. “Not only protests and encampments, the limit is the sky.”

The new year begins less than a month after the resignation of Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, whose decision to bring police on campus to clear a protest encampment in April set off a wave of college demonstrations nationwide. After a second encampment was erected and a group of students occupied a university building, hundreds of police officers surged onto campus, making arrests and plunging the university into lockdown.

Since Shafik’s resignation, the interim president, Katrina Armstrong, has met with students on both sides of the issue, promising to balance students’ rights to free expression and a safe learning environment. While the message has inspired cautious optimism among some faculty, others see the prospect of major disruptions as all but inevitable.

“We are hoping for the best, but we are all wagering how long before we go into total lockdown again,” said Rebecca Korbin, a history professor who served on Columbia’s antisemitism task force. “There haven’t been any monumental changes, so I don’t know why the experience in the fall would look much different than what it did in the spring.”

In a report released Friday, the task force of Columbia faculty accused the university of allowing “pervasive” antisemitism to fester on campus following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The report recommended that the university revamp its disciplinary process and require additional sensitivity training for students and staff.

Demonstrations against the war have already started bubbling up on college campuses this semester, including one at the University of Michigan that resulted in multiple arrests.

The University of Maryland announced that it will not allow student organizations to hold any on-campus demonstrations on Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attacks in Israel.