Columbia University’s move to use police force to clear demonstrators from a campus building last spring could potentially have been avoided, as some students were urgently asking if they could leave voluntarily, according to a report released Tuesday by the university’s senate. The students, who early that morning had broken into Hamilton Hall and barricaded the doors, told faculty intermediaries that they had enlisted the help of a Harlem pastor to help them depart safely. But university administrators, saying time had run out, allowed hundreds of police officers to come onto the campus to remove protesters from the building. The new details of the final hours of the occupation of Hamilton Hall on April 30 were among the key revelations of the 335-page report, which was written by a group within the senate, a Columbia policymaking body that includes faculty members, students and administrators, with faculty in the majority. The senate is independent from the administration and has been critical of its protest response. Called the “The Sundial Report,” it provides a play-by-play chronology of the events surrounding the protests on campus related to the war in Gaza beginning in October 2023.