Ahead of Congressional Testimony, Columbia President Cracks Down on Student Advocacy for Palestine

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik heads to Washington, D.C., this week, to testify in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce — the same committee whose previous hearings on antisemitism helped force the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania to resign. 

While the Wednesday hearing is titled “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism,” Shafik’s testimony may illustrate how her administration has cracked down on pro-Palestine speech. Since October 7, the university has suspended student groups that advocate for Palestine, created an amorphous “task force on anti-semitism” that students and faculty worry will serve to punish criticism of Israel, dragged its feet on an investigation into reports that students were sprayed with a chemical during an on-campus rally for Gaza, and more.

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Columbia’s readiness to severely discipline students advocating for Palestinian rights is not singular. It is one of multiple schools, including California’s Pomona College and Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, that suspended, evicted, or even expelled students protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza in recent weeks.

The escalation by university administrators across the country shows that even as mainstream discourse around Israel shifts — particularly in the wake of Israel’s April 1 fatal strike against seven World Central Kitchen aid workers — those in positions of power are working hard to maintain the status quo of unfettered U.S. support for Israel, said Kouross Esmaeli, visiting professor of media studies at Pomona. 

“I think the more the ruling establishment loses control of the narrative, the more they realize that the world, and even their own constituencies … are beginning to question their narrative,” Esmaeli said. “As that happens, they need to make sure that they silence the people who are actually pushing for real change in policy.”

Private Investigators

Earlier this month, Columbia suspended and evicted four students for hosting an unauthorized event about Palestine. The university’s action against the students who held the “Resistance 101” event — during which at least one guest speaker praised Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel — was aided by “an outside firm led by experienced former law enforcement investigators.” 

Within 10 days of the March 24 event, the suspended students were evicted from campus housing and prohibited from accessing university buildings, dining halls, and health care services.

“I did not become a university president to punish students. At the same time, actions like this on our campus must have consequences,” Shafik wrote in a statement. “That I would ever have to declare the following is in itself surprising, but I want to make clear that it is absolutely unacceptable for any member of this community to promote the use of terror or violence.”

The punishments, according to the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, were doled out without due process. The group said in a statement that a private investigator visited a Palestinian student at their home, rattling the doorknob “as if trying to break in,” and that investigators “demanded to see the private text messages of students in order to ‘comply’ with the investigation.”

“Columbia is endangering students to boost their public image before President Shafik’s testimony at the April 17th Congressional hearing,” the student group said.

In her statement, Shafik also promised to discipline people who were involved with a separate unauthorized event on campus on April 4. That event was a solidarity protest organized in response to Israeli forces’ siege and destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. 

A Columbia spokesperson did not respond to questions about the school’s investigation into that protest, including what policies the participants violated and whether the school is pursuing every single participant.

The expediency with which Columbia dealt with the March event, meanwhile, stands in stark contrast to its handling of student protesters reportedly being sprayed with a noxious chemical on campus — the investigation for which is still “ongoing” nearly three months later. 

“Students received no assistance with medical bills, nor with the emotional trauma of such a direct attack on our bodies,” said Daria Mateescu, president of Columbia Law Students for Palestine and member of Columbia University Apartheid Divestment, about the school’s response to the January 19 on-campus demonstration. “Yet, it is more than willing to suspend and evict students, just while they are investigated regarding speech at an event. It now goes so far as to hire private investigators to show up to students’ homes, which to our knowledge it has never done before.”

The school deferred questions about the investigation into the January incident to the New York Police Department. An NYPD spokesperson told The Intercept that the investigation remains “ongoing,” and that while there was a person of interest, the spokesperson “didn’t know what happened with that,” and now the suspects’ identities are “unknown.” (In January, a few days after the protest, the university said it banned the suspected perpetrators from campus, a claim it has maintained since, while otherwise continually deferring to the NYPD.) 

Students and faculty have charged on in their advocacy. Last week, Columbia’s Arts & Sciences Graduate Council and Law School Student Senate both voted in favor of a resolution that would have the university divest from “companies profiting from or engaging in Israeli apartheid.” Meanwhile, 23 Jewish university faculty members sent a letter to Shafik, urging her “to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism.”

A Canceled BDS Vote

Vanderbilt University in Nashville, meanwhile, expelled three students, suspended one, and placed another 22 on disciplinary probation earlier this month. The disciplinary action came in response to a recent campus protest over the administration’s cancellation of a vote to boycott certain companies entangled with Israel’s violence in Palestine.

Students at the school had organized an amendment to prevent the Vanderbilt Student Government from purchasing goods or services from companies identified as “complicit” in Israel’s violence in Gaza and Palestine. During spring break in March, the university unilaterally canceled the referendum, citing “federal and state laws” that punish boycotts of “countries friendly to the United States.”

In response, the nonprofit law center Palestine Legal sent the school a cease-and-desist letter, accusing it of violating students’ rights to free speech and association. Meanwhile, some two dozen students protested the decision by staging a nearly 24-hour sit-in inside a campus building on March 26. The school doled out interim suspensions to 16 students, with three students arrested for assault and bodily injury. After preliminary hearings, the school issued disciplinary measures on April 5. 

The charges relating to assault stem from the students’ entry into the campus building. The school released a video that shows students making physical contact with an officer as they attempt to walk past him. Students have countered that the blurred video doesn’t fully show the officer dragging one of the students by their neck. The university has also accused students of making physical contact with a staff member inside the building; students refute this, and the university has refused to release video corroborating this charge. 

Vanderbilt police also arrested Eli Motycka, a reporter for the Nashville Scene who was covering the protest, for alleged trespassing. The university and police have claimed that the journalist was warned multiple times not to enter the building where the sit-in was taking place. Motycka, for his part, maintained both during and after the incident that he did not hear any warning by any officer about such a thing; he was also arrested while outside the building. Motycka was later released and not charged.

Through an open letter, over 150 faculty members have criticized the administration’s actions. The university did not respond to questions about the letter, nor on whether it could provide video corroborating the charge that a student physically confronted a staff member, instead referring The Intercept to a log of its public statements on the incident. Vanderbilt also did not respond to questions about the laws it cited in canceling the referendum. 

Tennessee’s law that punishes boycotts — known as an anti-BDS law, part of a wave of legislation targeting the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction entities that participate in Israel’s occupation of Palestine — applies to state contracts valued at at least $250,000. The Vanderbilt Student Government, however, only has a grand total budget of some $200,000.

Police Response

In southern California, Pomona College this month deployed 25 vehicles’ worth of riot police to a Palestine solidarity demonstration, where police arrested 20 students from Pomona, Scripps, and Pitzer — schools all under the Claremont Colleges consortium. Pomona immediately suspended its seven students who were arrested and kicked them off campus. The school did not respond to The Intercept’s questions but said in a public statement it has “provided alternative options for housing and food.”

The protest was prompted by campus staff’s removal of an “apartheid wall” art fixture that students constructed, focusing on Palestinian people’s suffering under Israel’s occupation. The move prompted students to gather, chanting in support of Gaza and Palestine. They soon entered a campus building, entering President Gabrielle Starr’s office, with more soon occupying the hallway outside. 

The school rallied some two dozen police cars in order to detain the students; all the while, campus safety officers forced out a student reporter and blocked a window, impeding the reporter’s ability to record.

Twenty students were arrested and taken to the Claremont Police Department. An attorney for the students told the Los Angeles Times that he was not allowed to see his student clients and that he was told by both the students and an officer that they weren’t read their Miranda rights.

“We went into the administrative building to reiterate our demands for the college to disclose its investments and divest from weapons manufacturers and all institutions aiding the ongoing occupation of Palestine,” said Amanda Dym, a Jewish student at Scripps College who was arrested and suspended following the protest. “As students we faced jail time, suspension, and anxiety about pending charges and temporary houselessness due to a campus ban. But Palestinians face bombs, starvation, and martyrdom.”

Students at the various Claremont Colleges regularly spend time on the other, nearby campuses, whether to eat or to attend class. Because of her suspension, Dym was barred from doing anything on Pomona’s campus other than attend class — not even visit the school’s dining halls or access campus resources for her classes. As the school continues its investigation, some students have been allowed to return to campus, while it remains off-limits to others, according to a college source familiar with the situation.

The apartheid wall was constructed after students voted by wide margins to approve five demands of the school: “cease all academic support” for the State of Israel; disclose “investments in all companies aiding the ongoing apartheid system within the State of Israel”; divest completely from said companies; disclose investments in weapons manufacturers; and divest completely from those said companies too.

Days before the vote — which garnered some 60 percent voter turnout — Starr said “there are many ways to help heal a broken world,” but the vote was “not one of them.” She went on to criticize the referendum as reductive and as one that “raises the specter of antisemitism.” Each proposal passed with at least 75 percent approval, some up to even 90 percent.

Esmaeli, the visiting professor at Pomona, told The Intercept that the referendum revealed how “it’s not just a small number of activist students” who support boycotting or divesting from the Israeli government, but rather that those activists “represent the majority of the student body.” 

He added, “I think that’s why they had to make sure that they quelled the students.” 

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