I spent five years at Columbia University and nothing could’ve prepared me to witness a police tank roll down Amsterdam Avenue on April 30, 2024. Campus morale was abysmal after 10 students took their lives during the 2016-2017 academic year. The mood was generally morbid in the months following Tessa Majors’ murder in 2019. Despite these recent tragedies, the evening of the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) raid on Hind’s Hall stands out because Columbia only sanctions that level of state violence against marginalized students who participate in liberation movements.
“Majoring in unafraid” was a popular phrase among Barnard College students because its admissions essays asked applicants to describe fearlessness. As Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, betrayed students in McCarthy-esque congressional hearings to appease conservatives, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) began a campaign to end their school’s material complicity in apartheid and settler colonialism. Through encampments, students demanded divestment from companies and institutions profiting from Israel’s occupation and ongoing genocide.
When I learned that many of the people who were arrested during the NYPD’s first encampment sweep went to Barnard, I knew nothing had changed. Barnard students were still determined to embody the change they wanted to see in the world while Columbia University and Barnard College remained deeply entangled in contradiction. Any other day, Columbia uses antiracist themes in marketing materials to soften its public image as the city’s largest private landlord. On April 30th, the same administration shut down public intersections, a subway station, and forced journalists into Pulitzer Hall to prevent people from seeing its brutal campaign against peaceful student organizers.
Since October 7, Gen Z has used social media to condemn America’s unconditional material support for the Israeli army’s systematic slaughter of Palestinians. Months of scrolling through the genocide of a majority youth population strikes a chord in people who tweet through daily mass shootings. Students mobilized because the same people who allowed gun violence to become the leading cause of death among children in America are normalizing the slaughter and mass disabling of Palestinian youth. Terrifying as it was to learn that the NYPD pushed a protester down the stairs before brutalizing people inside the building and accidentally firing a gun, that violence pales in comparison to what Palestinians are experiencing in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s army.
As fascism censors, bans, and criminalizes liberatory intent, we must support youth when they embody the value shift that we need to survive. Solidarity encampments are peaceful expressions of collective grief to mourn over 45,000 Palestinians martyred by the Israeli Army since last October. They hold space for students to gather, share stories, and learn from other movements. I visited the encampment three times before witnessing the NYPD’s latest sloppy raid. Columbia and the NYPD turned a welcoming, vibrant multi-faith space that affirmed Palestinian rights into a live weapons showroom over grass and broken glass.
Growing up is realizing how much modern universities function like landlords, hedge funds, and war profiteers that run a tax-exempt educational side hustle. My years at Columbia showed me how much of the school’s protest culture arose from its hostile relationship with Harlem and the South Bronx. Proposing a segregated gym, stealing land through eminent domain, and staging the city’s largest raid against NYCHA residents are just a few of the many ways Columbia articulates its disdain for Harlem. Systemic abandonment made burning homes, crumbling buildings, food insecurity, and limited access to healthcare consistent from the South Bronx to Rafah. CUAD applied to organize strategies from the 1960s era Gym Crow protests to protect Palestinians because anti-Blackness is the blueprint power used to oppress all marginalized people.
Rebellion is a key stage of identity development. It’s hard to understate the importance of student organizers as a core part of youth culture, forcing a better world into existence. Student resistance made Columbia the first Ivy to divest from South African apartheid and private prisons. Nearly 40 years before Hamilton was liberated in honor of Hind Rajab, a Palestinian child murdered by Israel’s army, it was renamed after Nelson Mandela. Former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Kwame Ture once sat at a Columbia protest in 1968. Decades earlier, SNCC challenged racial apartheid in America with sit-ins, boycotts, and freedom rides. Due to the cultural influence of student organizers, Columbia co-opts protest narratives in marketing campaigns that directly contradict its business practices and policies.
On April 25, The New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal, a legal defense firm for Palestinian rights in the United States, announced their joint federal Title VI complaint against Columbia for extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment on campus. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was created to withhold federal funding from educational institutions that subjected Black students to hostile campus environments. However, during the 2010s pro-Israel lobby groups misused Title VI by alleging that criticism of Israel and support of Palestinian rights harms Jewish students.
“We filed our own Title VI complaint on behalf of Palestinian students and their allies because it’s important for universities to get the message that they shouldn’t engage in knee-jerk discrimination against Palestinian students and allies speaking up for Palestinian rights because they are so fearful of their donors, trustees, or other groups disingenuously complaining about antisemitism,” explained Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal. In all her years of advising students and professors about censorship and discrimination, Sainath said she’s never seen a federal investigation opened within a week of the complaint being filed. She attributes the government’s swift response to a turning point in Palestinian liberation.
“To see so many people across the country come out in support of Palestinian freedom is like nothing I’ve seen before, and I’ve been active on this issue for over 20 years,” Sainath says. “I think the tide is changing; I think Israel and its supporters are losing the narrative war.” It’s hard to convince the public that demanding ethical and transparent investing practices in response to crimes against humanity is inherently antisemitic, particularly as universities punish significant numbers of anti-zionist Jewish students and suspend Jewish Voice for Peace chapters while claiming to protect Jewish people.
Columbia is not unique in its decision to respond to social justice movements with excessive police force, even if it costs taxpayers millions of dollars in police overtime pay. University administrators are willing to compromise student safety to protect their profits because they know students will succeed. While political leaders and university administrators weaponize language to divide people and turn public opinion against anti-genocide protestors, we must support students who use their talents to free Palestine.
About the Author: Christine Forbes is an award-winning multimedia journalist based in New York City covering culture, education, lifestyle, and beauty.