Columbia Cuts Due Process for Student Protesters After Congress Demands Harsher Punishment
Students protest Columbia University’s decision to suspend Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters for holding pro-Palestine events on campus, in NYC on Nov. 15, 2023. Photo: Shawn Inglima/NY Daily News/Getty Images
After congressional criticism and subpoenas, Columbia suddenly decided to skip speaking to student protesters and go to hearings.
by Jonah Valdez
In early August, Columbia University told Congress that most of the students arrested in the past year for protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza would be allowed to return to campus for the fall.
Then a congressional inquiry applied pressure. Last week, the Republican chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which has been conducting an inquiry into Columbia’s handling of the protests since this spring, published a letter blasting the school for not punishing students harshly enough and issued a subpoena for internal records.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C, accused the university of having “waved the white flag in surrender while offering up a get-out-of-jail-free card” to student protesters. She further blamed “radical students and faculty” for interrupting the disciplinary process, and called protesters “antisemites.” (Students are facing accusations of violating the school’s policies on protest, and not harassment or bias against Jewish students.) Foxx then subpoenaed the university later in the week for records related to the protests, including communication among administrators in handling of encampments, meeting minutes from the board of trustees, and documentation of alleged antisemitic incidents on campus.
Now dozens of student protesters have received notices that their cases are being fast-tracked to university disciplinary hearings, short-circuiting Columbia’s own investigation process. Scheduled interviews with students have been canceled, and cases are moving directly to the University Judicial Board, which can expel or otherwise punish students, according to an email reviewed by The Intercept.
Moving a case to a hearing without interviewing students for their version of events is an unprecedented move, and likely a sign that the university is caving to external pressure from Congress, said Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School. She has spent the summer advising students facing discipline for protests.
“The sense we have is that much of this was motivated by the congressional subpoena and the pressure from Representative Foxx on the university,” Franke said.
University President Minouche Shafik stepped down just days before Foxx issued her statement, and has been replaced by interim President Katrina Armstrong, former head of Columbia’s medical school. A university spokesperson said in a statement that “the disciplinary process is ongoing for many students involved in these disruptions, including some of those who were arrested, and we have been working to expedite the process for this large volume of violations.”
Foxx’s criticism that the school has been light on punishment is simply untrue, Franke said.
More than 70 students who were accused of camping on school grounds and occupying Hamilton Hall were placed under interim suspension, evicted from university housing, and barred from campus, including dining halls and health services facilities, before any hearings were held. In addition, students were placed under disciplinary probation, freezing their academic records, leaving them unable to register for classes or apply to graduate school, while others lost out on grant money, according to advocates for students.
The university lifted the majority of suspensions over the summer after pushback from faculty, but a dozen students still remain under interim suspension or probation, according to school data provided to Congress.
The upcoming hearings handled by the Judicial Board — which is made up of students, faculty, and administrators — will cover more than 70 students accused of involvement in either the first encampment set up in the school’s South Lawn in April, a later encampment during alumni weekend in late May and early June, or the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
Although the majority of students set for hearings will be allowed to return to campus when classes resume September 3, the hearings are expected to run into the fall term and may lead to other forms of punishment.
“We’ve never seen anything like this, where the students have suffered sanctions before a finding of their responsibility for violations of the rules,” Franke said, “And the sanctions that they received before any finding of guilt are far more stringent than anything we’ve seen with much more disruptive protests.”
Students who took part in previous demonstrations, such as the 1985 protests against South African apartheid, which included a blockade of Hamilton Hall, and further occupations of Hamilton and Low Library in 1996 pushing for the creation of an ethnic studies department, were not suspended and did not face sanctions.
THE CRACKDOWN ON students taking part in pro-Palestine protests began in November, when the school suspended campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace after those groups led an unsanctioned rally. Then in early April, the school suspended four students for hosting an unapproved rally which featured a speaker who is an alleged member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has been designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.