In November 2023, four months before any protest encampment, Columbia banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Since then, it has ordered police raids on its own campus, banned professors from campus, and expelled students from Columbia and from its affiliate across the street, Barnard College. It has removed professors and pushed them into retirement, not to mention slandering them before Congress. It has disciplined and suspended many dozens of students, and subjected unknown numbers of students to investigation by a secretive committee that only allows them to see what they are being accused of if they sign an agreement to not disclose to anyone that the investigation is happening. All of this has been done in the name of protecting students from hearing speech against the genocide in Gaza. The most recent previous time we could find when Columbia expelled nonviolent protesters was in 1936 when it expelled a student for protesting Columbia's warm relations with Nazi Germany. Columbia's current president is an interim position holder because its previous president was driven out of office under accusation by U.S. Congress Members of not sufficiently suppressing free speech. She testified before Congress, bowing and scraping, but to no avail. Last week Trump canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university. But Columbia has an endowment of $14.8 billion and raises much of its income from a hospital and from its students' tuition payments. It does not have to obey the dictates of an out-of-control, lawless, right-wing government or culture. It can stand up for its students' rights.
Click here to tell Columbia's president to pursue a wiser course. |
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