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University President Minouche Shafik stepped down just days before Foxx issued her statement, and has been replaced by interim President Katrina Armstrong, former head of Columbia’s medical school.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.”
“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.
In April, a day after then-President Minouche Shafik testified in Congress on antisemitism in college campuses for Foxx’s committee, Shafik called the New York Police Department to dismantle a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” set up on campus by students, ending in mass arrests. More aggressive police tactics followed when administrators approved an NYPD raid of Hamilton Hall, which had been occupied by student activists. Officers used flash-bang grenades while entering the building, firing one gunshot. Dozens more students were arrested.
The disciplinary process for students involved in the series of encampments on campus between April and June and the occupation of Hamilton Hall began just as school was letting out for summer, and has been troubled from the start.
Students and faculty have accused university administrators, including Shafik, of failing to follow its own rules in punishing students, such as sanctioning them without due process, inventing new rules, such as funneling cases into the school’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, an office formed in 2022 that largely handles cases of academic integrity, such as cheating in tests, not protest-related activities. Campus policies say the school’s rules administrators are to handle such protest-related incidents.
After students, faculty, and the University Senate, which also includes school administrators, objected, the cases were eventually reassigned away from the CSSI academic office and to the school’s rules administrators.
Further complicating matters, the school hired an outside investigator, Omar Estrada Torres, rather than rely on its own staff. Torres also handled investigations into students involved in pro-Palestine protests at the University of Michigan, in which he referred the cases to the state attorney general to file charges against students. A spokesperson for the AG’s department told The Intercept prosecutors are continuing to review cases for “potential criminal conduct” related to protests at the university.
Torres’s investigation at Columbia has been riddled with “incompetent” missteps and alleged violations of state and federal law, according to a series of letters sent by faculty members who have been advising students, which have been obtained by The Intercept.
Columbia Law School professor Kellen Funk sent a letter to Torres, school administrators, and the school’s general counsel in July alleging that the school was “using illegally obtained evidence” in its interviews with students. Funk, who was advising two students during their investigations, wrote that Torres had included screenshots of criminal charges and court docket entries from their criminal cases in their evidence files. Since, in June, the Manhattan district attorney dropped the charges against Columbia students who allegedly participated in the April 30 occupation of Hamilton Hall, those records are under seal and cannot be accessed by a private entity or used against students in an educational setting, Funk said, citing New York state law and case law.
The following month, a larger group of faculty — including professors Jack Halberstam, Manan Ahmed, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Karl Jacoby, and Franke — sent another letter to the University Senate, decrying long wait times for students who have to be interviewed for their cases, “in some cases more than 100 days after they were formally notified of the Rules violation complaints.” They asked the school to dismiss students’ cases or to bring the investigations to a hearing.
The letter referenced the alleged illegal use of evidence and further issues with the investigation, such as failing to redact students’ personal information from investigatory files — like full names, addresses, university ID numbers, and birthdates — which is in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, faculty members wrote.
The letter said the charges brought against the students are “vague” and lacking evidence, and alleged that the school is attempting to force students to incriminate themselves and would be punished for not doing so.
“What we are witnessing is the filing of unspecified complaints against our students that are unsubstantiated by any material or individualized evidence,” faculty members wrote, “and then the students are forced to attend an investigatory ‘interviews’ with the sole purpose of forcing the students to incriminate themselves, underscored by the threat that they will be denied any right to participate further in the disciplinary process if they refuse to engage in this self-incrimination. This is a gross violation of their due process rights, and one to which we adamantly object.”
After urging from the University Senate, Torres responded by blaming the delays and redaction missteps on a lack of infrastructure “to handle very important administrative needs,” according to an email reviewed by The Intercept, sent by Torres to the University Judicial Board.
“We hope [the University Judicial Board] can understand the unprecedented times we find ourselves in,” Torres wrote.
He went on to blame further delays on the complaints raised by students and their “very active advisors,” including complaints around including sealed documents from students’ criminal cases. Torres said that while he and the school disagree with faculty on the concern, arguing they can use the sealed records, he went ahead and removed them from student files anyway to “respect students’ concerns.”
As protests sprouted on campuses across the U.S. with students calling their schools to divest from companies with connections to Israel, Republican lawmakers have decried the demonstrations as hotbeds of antisemitism. While antisemitic incidents have occurred on campuses since October 7, along with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents, House Republicans such as Foxx have conflated them with any and all protests for divestment from Israel or in opposition to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. High-profile congressional hearings on antisemitism in college campuses by Foxx’s committee have since led to the resignation of presidents of elite schools, including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently, Shafik of Columbia.
Earlier this week, New York University updated its student code of conduct to make speaking out against Zionism a potential violation of the school’s nondiscrimination policies.
Franke worried that this political climate is allowing Columbia’s existing policies to be used by pro-Israel students against those suspected of supporting Palestine.
Over the summer, one student that Franke had advised was accused by another student of letting a non-student into a campus building, a violation of recent campus security measures amid protests. While awaiting their hearing, their academic record was frozen. The student, an international student from Lebanon, insisted that they were not on campus during the day of the alleged incident but was instead visiting family in Lebanon amid bombardments from the Israeli military, Franke said.
“And they put her through this … all the way through threatening expulsion when she’s also dealing with family members in bunkers in southern Lebanon,” Franke said. “That’s the level of insensitivity that we’re seeing. … Some of the more pro-Israeli students are weaponizing the disciplinary process to harass their classmates, and the university at the same time is allowing the system to be used that way, to really intimidate students who were known to be pro-Palestinian.”