MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, Manhattan (PIX11) -- The tent encampment is gone, the classrooms and offices of Hamilton Hall are cleared, and NYPD officers are on campus at Columbia University after cops shut down pro-Palestinian protests on Tuesday night.

On Wednesday, though, protests continued just outside of campus. Members of the Columbia community expressed frustration over what had happened and wondered what the next two weeks leading up to commencement at the Ivy League institution would look and feel like. 

At the central campus, which takes up about a third of a mile in this Upper Manhattan neighborhood, the scene looks very different than it has for weeks. On the lawn where the pro-Palestine encampment had been set up, there are now large, light green, square patches of grass, similar to the tents used to be. 

Also, next to Hamilton Hall, from which the NYPD had removed about 100 protesters on Tuesday night, there was another protest late Wednesday morning. A couple hundred faculty members, graduate students and undergrads marched and held a rally. 

Joseph Howley, an assistant professor of classics, was among the speakers at Wednesday's protest. 

He said that the Hamilton Hall raid, which was on the 56th anniversary of the police raid of the same building during the anti-war protests in 1968, had only added to a volatile situation. 

"We've got to get through exams, got to grade papers, we've got students who have been trying to graduate," he said, "[all] while the university has been winding up to do what they did last night." 

What happened on Tuesday night was discussed at a briefing at police headquarters Wednesday morning by NYPD top brass. Mayor Eric Adams attended the event, during which police officials said they had discovered clear and specific plans for campus takeovers like the one at Columbia circulating nationwide and online. 

Just before that briefing, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism said that the department had arrested some people in their raid on Hamilton Hall who were not students. 

"We see Individuals," Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner, began, "who have been known to us over the years and who've been involved in professional protesting across a wide range of causes." 

The NYPD has not named the people it claims were involved, which is one reason its claims are being disputed. 

"There is no evidence that we have yet found from our One Police Plaza sources," said Jennifer Lena, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia, referring to the address of police headquarters, "that those [protesters] are outside [of the university] at all."

Current students describe the situation on and around campus. 

"It's been crazy," said Rory Wilson, a Columbia senior.

When protesters first took over Hamilton Hall, he confronted them to try to get them not to barricade the building. It didn't work, and cops swooped in Tuesday night. 

Now that that work is done, Wilson and many other students said that life around the college is a bit unsettled. 

The administration, Wilson said, is "recommending to either just cancel the finals, render them a lot smaller, easier. They're just slashing the workloads down."

Another student, Noemi Morrison, a first-year at Barnard College, Columbia's sister institution, was trying to communicate in person with a friend who lives on the central campus behind its locked gates and tall, ornate iron fences.

She was trying to return a pair of sweatpants she borrowed from her friend, but because people weren't even allowed to approach the fence surrounding campus, she had to shout a conversation from the sidewalk to her friend inside. 

Morrison said she was not looking forward to the campus remaining closed off for the foreseeable future. 

It has only one entry point; getting to it from the other side of campus can be a 10-minute walk. 

"I have like finals over there," Morrison said, referring to the other side of campus. "I have to go all the way around, I have to go to the gate, and like see if my name is on the list [to allow entry]. It's just dramatic, for no reason."