Columbia Law School Faculty Condemn Administration for Mass Arrests and Suspensions

On Sunday, 54 Columbia Law School professors sent a letter to university leadership condemning the school’s decision to summarily suspend student protesters and to authorize a police raid on campus. The procedural irregularity of the mass suspensions, the lack of transparency about how decisions were made, and the involvement of the New York Police Department threaten the university’s legitimacy internally and in the eyes of the public, the faculty charge. 

“While we as a faculty disagree about the relevant political issues and express no opinion on the merits of the protest, we are writing to urge respect for basic rule-of-law values that ought to govern our University,” reads the letter, whose signatories are permament members of the law school faculty.

A spokesperson for the university declined to comment on the letter, which was sent to Columbia President Nemat Minouche Shafik, the board of trustees, deans, and other administrators. 

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Last week, the GOP-led House Committee on Education and Workforce brought Shafik, former Law School dean and Task Force on Antisemitism co-chair David Schizer, and board of trustees co-chairs Claire Shipman and David Greenwald to testify on campus antisemitism. During the hearing, members of Congress pressed for assurances from the Columbia administrators that they would crack down even harder on pro-Palestinian student protesters.

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The following day, Shafik authorized the NYPD to sweep a protest encampment that had been set up ahead of the congressional hearing, where the police arrested more than 100 students. The school also said it suspended all the students involved in the campus protest, which was meant to “protest Columbia University’s continued financial investment in corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine,” according to organizers, as well as to call for transparency for all of Columbia’s financial investments. The arrests and suspensions impacted students at both Columbia and its women’s school, Barnard College.

In their letter, the law school faculty said that “the University has offered very little public information about the rules invoked, processes used, and facts found to support the blanket suspension of over one hundred students.” In addition to their concerns about the lack of transparency, the faculty noted that the protest encampment was peaceful, according to observers. (“I was there yesterday and these students were literally just singing and chanting and handing out flyers,” a professor who requested anonymity out of concern for workplace reprisal told The Intercept on Thursday.) 

The legal scholars also noted that it was not clear that Columbia had followed its established procedures for rule enforcement, including content-neutral regulations of speech, and harassment and discrimination protections. 

For instance, while the school can issue interim suspensions “‘if it is determined that the student’s behavior may make their presence on campus a danger to the normal operations of the institution, the safety of themselves, others, or to the property of the University or others,’” the faculty note, the use of it to issue mass suspensions “would cast serious doubt on the University’s respect for the rule-of-law values that we teach and cherish.” 

That’s especially true, the faculty argue, because Shafik’s stated justification for involving the NYPD was that the students, based on “unknown standards and procedures … were creating a ‘harassing and intimidating environment.’” 

The law school faculty letter follows mass dissent in other channels. After an emergency faculty meeting last week, for instance, the Barnard and Columbia chapters of the American Association of University Professors circulated a statement condemning the mass arrests. Organizers say they have more than 1,000 signatories on the petition.

The intensity of the response, one organizer told The Intercept, “reflects the deep anger many faculty feel at what has happened here over the last week (and months also, but especially week).”