On March 13, Columbia University suspended, expelled, or revoked the degrees of 22 Columbia students in retaliation for their participation in pro-Palestine protests last spring, primarily for involvement in the encampments and the occupation of Hind’s Hall. Nine Barnard College and Columbia students in total have been expelled for pro-Palestine activism thus far. This comes on the heels of Columbia allowing ICE officers access to graduate housing owned by Columbia to arrest and detain recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil. One of the targeted students was Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) union president Grant Miner, who was expelled just one day before the union was supposed to begin bargaining with the university for their new contract. The university subsequently walked out of bargaining with SWC on the first day of contract negotiations — making it clear that they are union busting. This marks a huge escalation in the attacks by the university on students and workers for their participation in protests for Palestine, and an attack on the democratic rights to free speech and the right to protest.
The university has intensified its crackdown on students after the White House canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, citing the school’s failure to “combat antisemitism.” In a letter sent Thursday, officials from the General Services Administration, Department of Education, and Department of Health and Human Services outlined immediate next steps for the university to fulfill to potentially get some of its federal funding back. These steps include completing disciplinary proceedings for the occupation of Hamilton Hall and participation in the encampments, specifying that meaningful discipline “means expulsion or multi-year suspension”; implementing a mask ban; holding the student groups involved in pro-Palestine activism accountable; and ensuring that Columbia security has full law enforcement authority, including the “arrest and removal of agitators.” Other provisions include putting the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) Department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years, which would require an outside chair to run the department and likely work towards censoring it. The letter also demands Columbia to formalize, adopt, and promulgate a definition of antisemitism, stating that Trump’s Executive Order 13899 uses the IHRA definition:
Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
This definition provides eleven “contemporary examples of anti-Semitism,” seven of which are related to the State of Israel, such as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, i.e., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” The letter also demands Columbia to address “anti-‘Zionist’” discrimination against Jews in areas unrelated to Israel or the Middle East.
Students should not be used as bargaining chips in an effort to get back funds that have been held ransom by the government. Instead of making any concrete effort to resist the attacks by the Trump administration, Columbia has been rolling over and showing its belly. Interim President Katrina Armstrong sends messages to all Columbia students, faculty, and staff about being “heartbroken” to let the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) onto campus to search two students’ dorm rooms even though she is responsible for allowing them in. Mahmoud Khalil has been abducted from his home. The union president Grant Miner has been expelled. Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank, was arrested by ICE for overstaying her student visa. Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation had her student visa revoked for “participating in pro-Hamas activities,” and chose to self-deport to Canada via the CBP app. How many more students will Columbia continue to sacrifice to stop the hemorrhaging of all of the academic work and research that make a university more than a giant hedge fund?
As we recently wrote, Trump wants to erode the most progressive elements of the neoliberal university, alongside defunding the entire institution. They will stop at nothing to repress the student movement into submission. In this moment right now more than ever, we need the unity of students and workers to fight with one fist against these attacks. In a rally on Friday March 14, students and community members at a rally organized by Columbia Palestinian Solidarity Coalition, Within Our Lifetime, and other Muslim community groups joined an emergency SWC rally protesting the abduction of their coworker and firing of their president. As we chanted at the rally, “You take one of us on, you take all of us on!” As the attacks escalate, we must fight to not only reverse the suspensions and expulsions but organize ourselves from below to advance an alternative vision of the university. A university that is not only free of ICE, cops, and repression, but a free, public university run by students, faculty, staff and the community, and more; in short, a university that can truly serve its students.
