NEW YORK — The City University of New York is beefing up security and surveying students on discrimination across its 25 campuses, university officials announced on the first day of school for many of its colleges.

After a wave of pro-Palestinian protests last semester culminated in hundreds of arrests at City College, its Harlem campus, CUNY said Wednesday it has hired about two dozen new public safety personnel going into the training academy and deployed 50 additional private officers to campuses.

Officials also announced a system-wide campus climate survey — coming later this fall — of students’ perceptions of feeling included or experiences with discrimination. Those results are expected to inform CUNY’s plans to combat hate on campus and track its progress, they said.

“I’m full of hope for the year ahead, and I want to congratulate all of our students on their return to school,” Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez said in a statement. “Let’s use these opportunities to grow, both as individuals and collectively, and never forget that we’re stronger when we come together as a community.”

As classes resumed at CUNY’s four-year colleges Wednesday and at all but three of its community colleges this week, it appeared unlikely that students and some faculty were through with their protest of Israel’s war in Gaza and demand that CUNY divest from companies with ties to the Jewish state.

Protesters at the Borough of Manhattan Community College overnight spray painted “DIVEST” on the sidewalk outside a CUNY public safety outpost in lower Manhattan, social media posts show. At Queens College, students unfurled banners on campus, including: “It is right 2 rebel.”

“Our demands have not changed, and we will do anything that is in our power to achieve them,” the Brooklyn College chapter of Students for Justice on Palestine said in a statement.

CUNY is currently the subject of a state antisemitism investigation, ordered by Gov. Kathy Hochul in October. A report of Judge Jonathan Lippman and his firm Latham & Watkins’ findings was expected last spring — but has yet to be publicly released.

In June, CUNY entered into a voluntary agreement with the U.S. Department of Education, which had launched a civil rights probe into the public university system’s concerning response to allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has dropped the charges for most protesters arrested on April 30 at City College, but cases involving people accused of assaulting police officers or possessing a weapon were still ongoing this summer.

With the steps announced on the first day of school, CUNY will try to avert some of the conflicts that came to a head last school year, as students and faculty with differing views on the war accused administrators of quashing the protests with too heavy of a hand — or for not taking action sooner.

CUNY was part of a meeting earlier this week with Gov. Hochul to prepare for campus protests, and this fall will launch faculty trainings on “navigating difficult conversations in our campuses,” officials said.

Milton Gordon, a senior at Baruch College in Gramercy Park, created illustrations through an internship this summer for a social media campaign launched Wednesday, called “#OurCUNY,” that connects students and faculty with resources on free speech, doxxing and other issues related to discrimination.

As the semester resumes, Gordon hoped his art could promote “togetherness” on campus, after a school year roiled by campus protests.

“The need is always important, and as a matter of fact, it’s always there,” he said. “I just think that in these times, we just need to emphasize it — but it doesn’t mean it’s not always there.”

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