In recent weeks, the university’s new leadership has embarked on listening sessions aimed at cooling tensions, released a report on campus antisemitism and circulated new protest guidelines meant to limit disruption. But student organizers are undeterred, promising to ramp up their actions — including possible encampments — until the university agrees to cut ties with companies linked to Israel.
“As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist,” said Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student who represented campus protesters in negotiations with the university. “Not only protests and encampments, the limit is the sky.”
The start to the school year comes less than a month after the resignation of Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, who brought police onto campus twice last spring to clear out protest encampments.
Since Shafik’s resignation, the interim president, Katrina Armstrong, has met with students on both sides of the issue, promising to balance students’ rights to free expression and a safe learning environment. While the message has inspired cautious optimism among some faculty, others see the prospect of major disruptions as all but inevitable.
“We are hoping for the best, but we are all wagering how long before we go into total lockdown again,” said Rebecca Korbin, a history professor who served on Columbia’s antisemitism task force. “There haven’t been any monumental changes, so I don’t know why the experience in the fall would look much different than what it did in the spring.”
In a report released Friday, the task force, made up of Columbia faculty, accused the university of allowing “pervasive” antisemitism to fester on campus following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The report recommended that the university revamp its disciplinary process and require additional sensitivity training for students and staff.
Some Jewish students have accused the university of treating the student protesters too leniently, arguing that a lack of clear guidelines would result in further turmoil this semester. Though some of those disciplinary cases remain ongoing, prosecutors have dropped charges against many of the students arrested last semester and the university has allowed them to return to campus.
“They violated every rule in the book and they openly state they’ll continue to do so,” said Elisha Baker, a junior at Columbia who leads an Israeli engagement group, adding: “We need to have a serious reckoning with the disciplinary process to make sure students have a safe learning environment.”
