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campus protests
Students Sue Columbia Over Suspensions for Pro-Palestine Activism
"They singled out a few of us to try to make an example out of us," said one of the student plaintiffs.
Feb 03, 2025
Three Columbia University students on Monday filed a lawsuit against the school administration challenging their suspensions related to pro-Palestine activism, according to an exclusive from the outlet Drop Site.
The students, Aidan Parisi, Brandon Murphy, and Catherine Curran-Groome, were all set to graduate this coming spring prior to their suspensions. After "a monthslong convoluted, and often intimidating, disciplinary process," Parisi and Murphy were given one-year suspensions and Curran-Groome was given a two-year suspension.
According to Drop Site, the complaint alleges that "the university violated its own policies during the disciplinary process, that the university targeted the students for their views, and that it violated New York's landlord tenant laws when it evicted the students from university housing."
"They singled out a few of us to try to make an example out of us," Curran-Groome told Drop Site. "None of us, absolutely none of us, deserved what we've experienced this year at Columbia in terms of the targeting and the discrimination and the violence and the repression."
The university was also sued back in March 2024 by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal, a legal advice and advocacy group, over its suspension of the school's chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Columbia University was the site of vigorous pro-Palestine (and pro-Israel) activism starting in fall 2023, following a deadly Hamas attack on Israel that prompted a devastating Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Pro-Palestine students and student groups at Columbia demanded that the university divest from companies with ties to Israel.
In spring 2024, students launched two successive Gaza solidarity encampments on Colombia's campus. The launch of the first encampment coincided with an appearance by the university's then-president, Minouche Shafik, before Congress. (Shafik resigned in mid-August.)
Curran-Groome and Parisi were first suspended on an interim basis prior the launch of the first encampment for their involvement in a March 2024 event that featured speakers who discussed the history of different strategies for confronting occupation and colonialism, including armed resistance, according to Drop Site. Curran-Groome helped organize the event in her capacity as co-president of the Palestine Working Group, an official student organization.
According to the legal complaint, Curran-Groome sought approval to hold the event on campus. However, after sharing biographies of the speakers with the administration, a university official told her that the group would need approval for the event to be held on campus, per the complaint. The university officials allegedly said that the group could have the event on zoom, hold it on another date, or move it off campus. The Palestine Working Group chose the third option, according to Drop Site.
After the event, Columbia issued a statement calling it "unsanctioned" and "unapproved." Later, the school told Parisi and Curran-Groome they had been interim suspended for violating university policy and compromising the "well-being and safety of the university community," according to Drop Site, quoting the email that the students received.
"After the encampment was established, the students received an additional interim suspension, alleging they violated the first order by being on campus," according to Drop Site.
The school "used that suspension to then levy additional disciplinary actions, alleging that the plaintiffs had violated that first illegitimate interim suspension by then returning to campus," James Carlson, an attorney representing the students, told Drop Site.
The outlet did not give the specific circumstances around Murphy's suspension.
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In the Attack on Pro-Palestinian Campus Speech, More Than Jobs Are at Stake
Students and professors across the country are being witch-hunted for their position on Palestine, in a serious threat to democracy, dissent, and the ability of ordinary people to resist authoritarianism.
Jan 30, 2025
For months before U.S. President Donald Trump took office, nearly daily reports rolled in of students and professors on trial for their activism for Palestinian life.
New York University suspended 11 students who were part of a peaceful flyer distribution and sit-in, including students who simply sat in the library lobby in solidarity. Eleven students at Swarthmore College faced expulsion on assault charges for using a bullhorn. Emerson College laid off 10 staff members, blaming protests for Palestine as a cause for low enrollment, and then using layoffs to target pro-Palestine employees. Emerson also put four students on probation for leafleting on a public sidewalk. Thirteen students at Princeton are being criminalized for “trespassing” on their own campus after they participated in a sit-in. Seven students and faculty at Duke have been called before a University Judicial Board, and without notice or due process are facing termination for participating in nonviolent protest. Tenured professors at Emory are facing similar trials. MIT demoted a tenured professor after he proposed a course entitled Decolonization & Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, & Israel. Professors at Muhlenberg College, Columbia, John Jay College, City University of New York, NYU, and more, have been fired or forced out for advocating for Palestinian rights.
I have spoken with a university librarian fired after teaching a workshop in which they discussed “scholasticide” in Gaza, a K-12 teacher fired for a social media post critical of Israel and the U.S., and scores of K-12 teachers who have been suspended or otherwise disciplined for speaking about the suffering of Palestinians. An avalanche of Title VI Civil Rights Act complaints are being weaponized against educators, many of them filed by individuals or organizations with absolutely no connection to the school in question.
To truly humanize Palestinians is to defy racist empire, which is—in part—why the backlash against the movement for Palestinian life and freedom is so severe.
I am personally facing a Title VI investigation at Gonzaga University, where I was hired as an “activist scholar” to be the lead instructor in a Solidarity and Social Justice program. The allegations against me are over attending a peaceful student “walkout for Palestine,” and forwarding to our faculty listserve an open student letter (signed by hundreds of our students) against Gonzaga’s anti-protest policy. A range of outcomes are possible, including termination. Because I went on a pre-approved medical leave the day after my first interrogation, I have been denied the right to submit further statements or participate in any way until May. In essence, I will be on trial for five months with no representation or ability to advocate for myself.
The number of the similar cases is impossible to know, due in part to near media omission. Many people who have faced or are currently facing investigations are instructed that they must remain silent (and isolated) as to not “compromise” the investigation. Some are quiet because their jobs, prospects for future employment, and safety are at stake. What is clear is that the trials are wide-reaching, extraordinarily punitive, largely coordinated, and were coming down rapidly across the country at educational institutions of all types even before Trump was sworn in.
The witch-hunting of educators and students is combined with related measures, including a nationwide rollout of campus anti-protest policies that appears at least influenced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, advisers to Project 2025. At the start of the school year around 100 campuses issued broad policy changes that essentially ban meaningful protest. Some universities have gone as far as to fortress entire campuses with checkpoints and surveillance drones, block common gathering areas with fences, and station security guards outside of classrooms.
These are political attacks, designed to crush a movement that is standing with and for people at the brutal bottom of violent systems of oppression. They have a chilling effect, not just upon those they are wielded against, but upon the entirety of public thought and discourse. Some experts have warned that we are witnessing a new McCarthyism, and one that may well exceed the repression of the 1950s.
The new McCarthyism began before Trump and has been partly initiated by “liberal” higher-ed institutions, but Trump’s tyrannical regime will strive to take the trend to harrowing new extremes. Less than two weeks in office, Trump has already issued an executive order—pulled directly from Project Esther—to deport pro-Palestine students that are not citizens and take “forceful and unprecedented steps to marshal all federal resources” against what he described as campuses “infested with radicalism” and “pro-jihadist protests.”
The crackdown on students and educators—being swiftly and terrifyingly exploited and extended by Trump—is a major assault on free speech and academic freedom. It is a grim threat to democracy, dissent, and the ability of ordinary people to resist all of the assaults of authoritarianism and oligarchy that we are up against. It is an alarming slippery slope, that began in large part as a bipartisan attack on a movement that is challenging U.S.-led racist empire.
Activism for Palestinian freedom and equality necessarily confronts American and Western capitalist and imperial interests. It upends supremacist, dehumanizing ideologies—in the case of Palestine, Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia—that rationalize and sustain a remarkably violent and hierarchical global order. To truly humanize Palestinians is to defy racist empire, which is—in part—why the backlash against the movement for Palestinian life and freedom is so severe, garnering broad support from the far-right and liberals alike.
The witch hunt across educational institutions plays on longstanding Anti-Palestinian racism to vilify all forms of protest for Palestine as terroristic and antisemitic, issuing sweeping charges of antisemitism against any expression of concern for Palestinian life. In this, there is a largely intentional conflation of criticism of Israeli government apartheid and genocide with antisemitism. This misconstruing is also dangerous and oppressive to Jews. According to History and Jewish Studies Professor Annelise Orleck, it seeks to enforce a right-wing Pro-Israel political stance to which all Jews must adhere, and attempts to eviscerate Jewish identities rooted in a long tradition of standing for the rights of the oppressed, democratic pluralism, and social justice. Both Jews and Palestinians have been disproportionately targeted in the campus crackdowns.
While protection of Jewish life has become the pretext for persecuting those who express concern for Palestinian life, a haunting rise in antisemitism on the far-right and at the top is being ignored; at times even defended by groups whose stated mission is to “combat antisemitism.” British-Israeli author Rachel Shabi recently wrote in the The Guardian, “If antisemitism is so blatantly wielded as a political weapon, it creates the impression of a fundamental unseriousness about the subject.” It also undermines the very humanistic movements that are our hope for a world beyond both antisemitism and Anti-Arab racism. To restate words I spoke to students at the protest for which I am being accused of “discrimination” under the Civil Rights Act:
In a moment of such intensive propaganda and power, the world needs your moral clarity. Your moral clarity that all of our lives are inherently interconnected. That the movement for Palestinian liberation is a movement for human liberation. That liberation for Palestinians forces a reckoning with all interlocking systems of oppression, which is core to—not in competition with—Jewish, Black, Brown, Indigenous, White, Collective liberation. Your moral clarity that human solidarity, mutual safety, and freedom is possible. That love, rather than domination, could be the guiding force of our lives together on this one beautiful planet.
We are going to need to hold firm to the principle and aim of collective liberation in the times ahead, and stand with linked arms against attempts to distort our common humanity. I find tremendous hope in the students and educators who have been brave enough to do so, in spite of intense repression and retaliation. It is the courageous acts of ordinary people that will stop the cruel trajectories we are on.
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As Part of 'Authoritarian Takeover,' Trump Signs Order to Deport Pro-Palestine Students
"Trump and his cronies do not care about Jewish safety—in fact, they and the white nationalists who support them are themselves the greatest threat to American Jews," said one campaigner.
Jan 29, 2025
An executive order signed Wednesday by Republican U.S. President Donald Trump authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students and others who took part in protests against Israel's annihilation of Gaza was condemned by civil rights defenders as an overzealous bid to smear the movement for Palestinian rights under the guise of combating antisemitism.
Before publishing the order—which is titled "Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism"—the White House accused "pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals" of waging "a campaign of intimidation, vandalism, and violence on the campuses and streets of America" and the Biden administration of turning "a blind eye to this coordinated assault on public order."
Trump's office said the new directive "takes forceful and unprecedented steps to marshal all Federal resources to combat the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets since October 7, 2023."
"To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice... we will find you, and we will deport you," the White House said, adding that the Trump administration "will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before."
The White House vowed "immediate action" by federal prosecutors in response to "terroristic threats, arson, vandalism, and violence against American Jews"—without providing any examples of these alleged crimes.
⚠️ “Text groups in NY are urging members to report pro-Palestine foreign students as ‘terrorist supporters’ for deportation under Trump. Other groups are using AI to create lists of names.” Screenshot of one of the texts below. Via Etanetan23 on X Story: www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...
[image or embed]
— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 3:35 PM
While analyses have shown that pro-Palestine student protests have been nearly 100% peaceful, violence by police and pro-Israel counter-demonstrators was reported on numerous campuses.
Trump signed two additional executive orders late Wednesday; one promoting so-called "school choice" policies critics say are meant to destroy public education, and another ending federal funding for public schools accused of "indoctrination... including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned Trump's antisemitism order as "a dishonest, overbroad, and unenforceable attempt to smear college students who protested against the Israeli government's genocidal war on Gaza in overwhelmingly peaceful ways."
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—which led an unprecedented nationwide wave of Jewish-led protests for Palestinian rights—said Trump's order "is pulled directly from the pages of the far-Right Heritage Foundation's 'Project Esther' report, which is a blueprint for using the federal government and private institutions to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement and broader U.S. civil society, under the guise of 'fighting antisemitism.'"
"These tactics are built to disrupt the historic movement for Palestinian liberation across the U.S.—including on college campuses—before then using those same tactics to attack a wide range of progressive social justice movements," JVP added.
JVP executive director Stefanie Fox said in a statement, "We stand with the student protestors who so bravely put their bodies and academic careers on the line to save lives and demand an end to the Israeli military's destruction of Gaza."
"As Jews, we refuse to be pawns in the far-right's authoritarian takeover," Fox added. "Trump and his cronies do not care about Jewish safety—in fact, they and the white nationalists who support them are themselves the greatest threat to American Jews. They are waging a campaign against all those who are brave enough to challenge their power."
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