NEW YORK –
Columbia University’s embattled president came under new pressure Friday when a campus oversight panel sharply criticized her administration for suppressing a pro-Palestinian protest at the Ivy League school.
President Nemat Minouche Shafik has faced outcry from many students, professors and outside observers for calling in the New York police to dismantle a tent camp set up on campus by protesters against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza .
After a two-hour meeting on Friday, the Columbia University Senate passed a resolution that Shafik’s administration had undermined academic freedom and ignored the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty by calling the police and shut down the protest.
“The decision…has raised serious concerns about the administration’s respect for shared governance and transparency in the university decision-making process,” he said.
The Senate, made up mostly of faculty and other staff plus some students, did not name Shafik in its resolution and avoided the harsher language of a censure.
There was no immediate response to the resolution from Shafik, who is a member of the Senate but did not attend Friday’s meeting. Columbia spokesman Ben Chang said the administration shared the same goal as the Senate — restoring calm on campus — and was committed to “continued dialogue.”
Police arrested more than 100 people that day and removed tents from the main lawn of the school’s Manhattan campus, but protesters quickly returned and set up the tents again, reducing Columbia’s options for dismantling the encampment.
Since then, hundreds of protesters have been arrested at schools from California to Boston as students set up camps similar to the one in Columbia, demanding that their schools divest from companies involved with Israel’s military.
Related protests against Israel’s actions have spread abroad. At the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, pro-Israel protesters came to challenge pro-Palestinian students occupying the building on Friday. The police kept the two sides separate.
A few blocks from the White House, about 200 protesters at George Washington University remained gathered for a second day Friday. The school said students did not follow instructions to leave and several were temporarily suspended and excluded from campus.
The White House has defended free speech on campuses, but Democratic President Joe Biden denounced “anti-Semitic protests” this week and stressed that campuses must be safe.
Some Republicans in Congress have accused Shafik and other university administrators of being too soft on protesters and allowing Jewish students to be harassed on their campuses.
State police attempt to break up a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Texas on April 24, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP)
Texas Clash
University of Texas at Austin President Jay Hartzell faced a similar backlash from professors on Friday, two days after joining Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in calling police to break up a pro-Palestinian protest.
Dozens of protesters were detained, but charges were dropped because authorities lacked probable cause (or reasonable grounds) to make the arrests, the Travis County prosecutor’s office said.
Nearly 200 university professors signed a letter expressing their distrust in Hartzell because he “unnecessarily endangered students, staff and faculty” when police in riot gear and on horseback advanced on protesters.
Hartzell said he made the decision because protest organizers intended to “seriously disrupt” the campus over a long period of time.
The confrontation in Texas was one of many this week between protesters and police called by university leaders, who say the protests endanger student safety and sometimes subject Jewish students to anti-Semitism and harassment.
Civil rights groups condemned the arrests and urged authorities to respect the right to freedom of expression.
But a member of the camp in Columbia, Khymani James, apologized Friday for saying in a social media video in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
“What I said was wrong,” James said in a statement. “Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without any qualifications.” A university spokesperson said James had been banned from campus and faced disciplinary action.
Three protesters were arrested for trespassing at an Arizona State University campground, the university said.
(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York, Kia Johnson and Doina Chiacu in Washington, Andrew Hay in NM, Jonathan Allen in New York and Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; Edited by Frank McGurty and Bill Berkrot)