US Education Secretary Linda McMahon alleges that Columbia ignored the harassment of its Jewish students: 'This is not only immoral, but also unlawful.'
The lengths to which administrators have been willing to go also suggests their actions are not mere capitulation, but rather a strategic alignment with the Trump administration.
On March 5, nine Barnard students were arrested for staging a sit-in to demand the administration reverse the prior expulsions of three student activists. Soon after, Columbia updated its public safety protocols to allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, on campus without a judicial warrant in the case of “exigent circumstances.”
Then, on March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a recent master’s graduate who was a lead negotiator with the Columbia administration during the Gaza solidarity encampment, was detained by ICE.
Columbia never responded to his email pleading the university for protection the day before his detainment.
On March 11, Ranjani Srinivasan, an international graduate student whose visa was revoked by the Department of Homeland Security on the spurious charge of being “involved in activities supporting Hamas,” fled into hiding and eventually to Canada after Columbia withdrew her from her Ph.D. program and the university’s campus security allegedly allowed ICE into her apartment.
Two days later, Columbia allegedly allowed ICE into the dorm room of Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia who was arrested at a pro-Palestine protest.
That same day, 20 more students were expelled, including Grant Miner, the president of the student workers union.
The Trump administration had delivered what Katherine Franke, a Columbia faculty member forced into early retirement for her pro-Palestine views, called a “ransom note.”
It gave the university a week to, among other things, suspend or expel student activists, centralize disciplinary procedures in the Office of the Provost, implement severe restrictions on public assembly, adopt the definition of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and impose administrative oversight of the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department as well as the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the university’s Tel Aviv program.
Columbia not only acquiesced to all the demands of said letter, but exceeded Trump’s dictates by suspending faculty governance of the Center for Palestine Studies
They did that, too.
Cowards & bitches lacking principles & integrity.