To chants of “cut the funding, end the war,” hundreds of Columbia University students gathered in the center of campus yesterday to protest the war in Iraq and urge the university to divest from corporations that have military contracts there.

The protest was one of several that occurred on college campuses across the country yesterday. The organizer, Columbia Coalition Against the War, asked professors to cancel classes and urged students to walk out of class in protest.

At the height of the rally, more than 200 students gathered to hear professors, students, and community activists speak against the war. Many speakers drew a connection between the war in Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Columbia University College Democrats earlier withdrew their support for the rally, in part because of disagreements over whether to call for divestment. Group members said they had wanted the protests to focus on Iraq to the exclusion of other issues, such as Israel.

“Military contractors aren’t responsible for what is happening in Iraq,” the president of the Columbia Democrats and a senior at Columbia College, Mike Nadler, said.

A spokeswoman for the anti-war coalition and a senior at Barnard College, Blair Mosner, said the decision to call for divestment sprang from a desire to take action on a local level. “At Columbia, that means divesting,” she said.

A university spokesman, Robert Hornsby, said in an e-mail that the question of divestment might be “brought to the attention of the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing,” but that university trustees would have the final say.