Lemmy Today

Jonah Valdez

August 29 2024, 4:12 p.m.

In early August, Columbia University told Congress that most of the students arrested in the past year for protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza would be allowed to return to campus for the fall.

Then a congressional inquiry applied pressure. Last week, the Republican chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which has been conducting an inquiry into Columbia’s handling of the protests since this spring, published a letter blasting the school for not punishing students harshly enough and issued a subpoena for internal records.

Now dozens of student protesters have received notices that their cases are being fast-tracked to university disciplinary hearings, short-circuiting Columbia’s own investigation process. Scheduled interviews with students have been canceled, and cases are moving directly to the University Judicial Board, which can expel or otherwise punish students, according to an email reviewed by The Intercept.

“We’ve never seen anything like this, where the students have suffered sanctions before a finding of their responsibility for violations of the rules,” Franke said, “And the sanctions that they received before any finding of guilt are far more stringent than anything we’ve seen with much more disruptive protests.”.

The crackdown on students taking part in pro-Palestine protests began in November, when the school suspended campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace after those groups led an unsanctioned rally. Then in early April, the school suspended four students for hosting an unapproved rally which featured a speaker who is an alleged member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has been designated by the United States as a terrorist organization

As protests sprouted on campuses across the U.S. with students calling their schools to divest from companies with connections to Israel, Republican lawmakers have decried the demonstrations as hotbeds of antisemitism. While antisemitic incidents have occurred on campuses since October 7, along with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents, House Republicans such as Foxx have conflated them with any and all protests for divestment from Israel or in opposition to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. High-profile congressional hearings on antisemitism in college campuses by Foxx’s committee have since led to the resignation of presidents of elite schools, including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently, Shafik of Columbia.