Students face suspensions, other penalties after arrests
Disciplinary action, which for some includes vacating campus housing, follows crackdown in which at least 108 taken into police custody
NEW YORK — Many of the more than 100 Columbia University and Barnard College students who were arrested after refusing to leave a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus Thursday woke up to a chilly new reality last week: Columbia said their IDs would soon stop working, and some of them would not be able to finish the semester.
The students who were arrested were released with summonses. The university said all of the 100 or so students involved in the protest had been informed that they were suspended.
For some of those students, that means they must vacate their student housing, with just weeks before the semester ends.
Yet whatever the consequences, several of the students said in interviews they were determined to keep protesting Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
They said that after being loaded onto buses with their hands tied, they had sung all the way to police headquarters. Many expressed a renewed belief in their cause and were glad that the eyes of the nation were on Columbia and Barnard, its sister college.
The protests, the arrests and the subsequent disciplinary action came a day after the congressional testimony of Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, at a hearing about antisemitism on campus. Columbia has said there have been a number of antisemitic episodes, including one attack, and many Jewish students have seen the protests as antisemitic.
Responding to aggressive questioning from the House committee, Columbia officials said some of the protesters on campus had used antisemitic language that might warrant discipline.
But on campus, fury was building. The administration called in the police department to quell the protests. Arrests — at least 108 — soon followed.
The aggressive response left students shaken — but also, they say, energized.
Among the protesters, whose demands included that Columbia divest from companies connected to Israel, was one particularly high-profile name: Isra Hirsi, a Barnard student who is the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.
At the congressional hearing Wednesday, Omar had questioned Columbia administrators about their treatment of Palestinian and Muslim students. As Omar spoke in Washington, her daughter was in New York helping to organize the campus encampment of about 50 tents.
Hirsi, a junior, said in an interview that while she had been “mentally preparing” for being arrested, she was “shocked” at what actually unfolded. She left a precinct house around 9:30 p.m. “So I was in zip ties for over seven hours,” she said.
The next several weeks will be an uncertain period for those who were arrested, as well as for the university’s leaders. Many student protesters remained defiant after the arrests and vowed to continue their demonstrations.
For the unknown number of students who were suspended, a major shake-up looms as the semester ends.
Police officials said the students had received summonses for trespassing. The students said they expected to make initial court appearances next month. All of the students who were at the encampment have been suspended, university officials said, although it was not clear if every student at the encampment had been arrested.
The suspensions prohibit students from attending university events or getting into campus spaces, including dining halls, classrooms and libraries, the university said. It was not clear how long those prohibitions would last.
Some students, including Hirsi, said they were now bouncing among friends’ apartments. She said that she would fight her interim suspension. She said she had not yet returned to her room because doing so would require going with a chaperone from Barnard’s public safety team.
“I don’t really like the idea of that,” Hirsi said. “It makes me feel like more of a criminal than I think that I am.”