March 8, 2025 - 4:00pm
Columbia University, New York City
This week, protesters, most masked in keffiyehs, marched on the University of Columbia campus. With music playing, they hung Palestinian flags from the walls of Barnard Collegeâs Milstein Library and raised poster boards with their demands, enraged at the current institutional crackdown on pro-Palestine students.
The tension had been building for weeks, but on 5 March, it reached breaking point. Hours into the demonstration, protesters were informed that a bomb threat had been called in and they had to clear the premises. Moments later, dozens of New York Police officers arrived in full riot gear, helmets in hand and batons dangling from their belts. They swept through the lawn, slamming some protesters onto the ground and detaining others.
This episode is the latest flashpoint in what is becoming an unprecedented First Amendment crisis at Columbia, a place that once prided itself on free expression, but now finds itself at the centre of Americaâs fiercest clampdown on student activism in decades.
For the first time in the countryâs history, students have been expelled for pro-Palestine activism. On 21 February, the school ousted two protesters for disrupting a course on the History of Modern Israel. The latest expulsion, issued on 28 February, was directed at a participant of the Hamilton Hall occupation, which took place last spring.
On paper, these were punishments for âdisrupting university activitiesâ. In practice, Columbiaâs patience with its student activists has run out. The university has also opened investigations into students simply for writing op-eds critical of Israel. For Columbia â one of the nationâs most prestigious institutions â punishing students for political speech on a campus long known for activism is a shocking turn of events, sending alarm bells ringing through civil liberties organisations.
The response on campus has been swift. A national petition to reinstate the expelled Barnard students has amassed more than 125,000 signatures and student protests have been escalating in both size and intensity. Columbia University Apartheid Divest held an over-six-hour sit-in on 26 February, with roughly 100 Barnard and Columbia students demanding that the university reverse the expulsions and grant amnesty to those disciplined for pro-Palestine activism.
The sit-in this Wednesday was the second in just over a week. Less than an hour in, Barnard administrators distributed âfinalâ disciplinary notices, warning that participants were âin violation of College rules and policiesâ.
But Columbiaâs stern measures weren’t enough. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, citing what it claimed was the schoolâs failure to protect Jewish students amid the pro-Palestinian protests. The move sent shockwaves through the university, exacerbating financial anxieties already mounting from donor withdrawals on both sides of the issue. “Columbia kind of made its bed and has to lie in it,” said Nkozi Jones, a senior studying psychology and music. “This framing of [protesters] as antisemitic just leads to more alienation of the student body and distrust increasing.”
The expulsions, the funding freeze, and the tightening grip of disciplinary measures have deepened a climate of uncertainty on campus. Tristan Espinoza, a political science major, called the federal grant cancellation “not just a blow to academic freedom, but a reckless attempt to politicise education and undermine the intellectual diversity that campuses like Columbia are known forâ.
Outside campus, the walls are closing in too. The State Department has unveiled plans to use artificial intelligence to monitor social media for signs of âextremist speechâ related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, a policy that could see student visas revoked for those posting pro-Palestinian views online.
Columbia has once again found itself in a crisis at the heart of one of the most divisive issues in modern American politics. Classics Professor Joseph Howley, a member of the university senate, condemned the federal governmentâs tactics. “Itâs pretty rich that we have to take accusations of antisemitism from an administration staffed by neo-Nazis, segregationists, and âGreat replacementâ theorists.”
Anvee Bhutani is an award-winning British-American journalist currently resident at Columbia Journalism School. She has written for outlets including the New York Times, Telegraph, and Guardian.
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SubscribeCancel culture is alive and well then.
Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss!
Or is it not cancel culture when itâs your preferred side doing it? Then the punishment is richly deserved?
Itâs hardly cancel culture. Theyâve given them enough warnings over the last 18 months. Theyâve had enough. Itâs exasperation!
Somehow the author seems to think the perpetrators are in fact the victims.
Many of the protestor leaders are not even students at Columbia, and many are paid activist agitators. They have no right to even be on Columbia University’s private property campus.
I wonât comment on Trump clawing back federal grants. People should be allowed to protest and say crappy things – and Trumpâs commitment to free speech is wafer thin IMO. Free speech is not a threat to Israeli students. However, Columbia is a private institution and should be allowed to expel students who disrupt class. The hecklerâs veto is not free speech.
The problem is that there has been no free speech on university campuses for at least 15 years. Like cancel culture I am starting to think the excesses of the âleftâ will only end when they realize two can play at that game. I hope Trump absolutely crushes universities and profoundly punishes them for their complete failure to do their duty in the last 2 or 3 decades. I am convinced that raw power is the only thing they understand. Even for private universities he has many tools. Columbia gets $5B in federal funds a year. More importantly he could start taxing university endowments on the grounds that they no longer are institutionally neutral.
It’s a private institution and the government should be allowed to defund it.
An institution that was expecting to receive $400,000,000 in taxpayer money doesn’t match my understanding of ‘private’.
Itâs a private institution so it has no business getting taxpayer funding. Plus itâs a cesspool.
From the authorâs sanitized interpretation:
âWith music playing, they hung Palestinian flags from the walls of Barnard Collegeâs Milstein Library and raised poster boards with their demands, enraged at the current institutional crackdown on pro-Palestine students.â
From a surface view, this seems like some kids engaged in youthful indiscretion and a festive atmosphere! Go easy on the kids!
But wait ⊠hereâs a non-sanitized, detailed description of events:
ââŠa group of protesters entered Barnardâs Milstein Library, where they chanted anti-Israel slogans, waved Palestinian flags, beat a drum and carried an effigy of the college president.
ââShut it down,â the protesters chanted into a megaphone, according to footage shared by the activists, most of whose faces were covered by keffiyehs and masks.
âJewish students at the scene shared photos showing the protesters distributed pamphlets by the âHamas media office,â photos of the late Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah, and wrote âDeath to Americaâ in the library guest book.
âActivists posted stickers around the protest that had the image of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, a mastermind of the October 7, 2023, attack who was killed in Gaza by Israeli forces last year.
âBarnard administrators handed out letters saying the disruption and library blockage was an âunauthorized activityâ and that the protesters had refused to disperse, despite multiple warnings.
âThe letter warned the protesters that campus security would âreview your identification and escort you off of the Barnard campus.â
âFootage showed some protesters scuffling with police, shouting at officers and being detained.â (Times of Israel)
So these âkidsâ were actually rabble-rousers with a premeditated intent to disrupt the college library (aka a safe space) for students – who pay very expensive tuition – to study and learn. And Barnard was very deliberate in their carefully-measured warnings before taking appropriate action to secure the safety of the library and students from these anarchists.
⊠Iâm left scratching my head – what exactly does this have to do with the authorâs purported concerns about free speech?
The answer is that it has nothing to do with free speech. This is an existential battle between Zionism and Islamism. The former’s population in Israel will be exterminated should the latter win. Any independent rule book, were there ever one, has been thrown out the window. In the USA each has marshalled its weight using all at it’s disposal, the latter idealistic wide eyed students, the former the power of the state. Were I young I might have some sympathy for the students, but now having seen the depredations of Islamism, Zionism seems the lesser threat to Western values. Meanwhile I will watch on until I must not.
There may be a global story but the local story is Free Speech. The US Constitution wasn’t set up to litigate value judgments between individuals. The expression of value judgments or method of getting your point across is a different thing. The common sense definition of “protest” has to exclude mob tactics.
Who said anything about Islamism but you. There are plenty of Palestinian Christians who want nothing to do with Hamas. 40000 people have been moved of their land in the West Bank on the last 6 weeks. No Hamas or islamism there. Many of the protestors – and estimated 40% – are Jewish.
Listen to all you apologists for crackdown on free speech. Hypocrites.
This is not a question of free speech itâs a question of radical activism being allowed on campus disrupting and intimidating. Itâs wrong.
Itâs wrong? Was it wrong when the students protested all through the late 60âs and early 70âs about the Vietnam war? Was it too disruptive for you? I know, it was anti- American? Students have always protested. They have phones. They are seeing whatâs going on. Intimidating? Awww, snowflakes
Between Zionism and Islamism? I donât think so. Itâs a battle between Western exceptionalism and Marxism. Israel is a colonizing project obviously â people moved there from elsewhere to set up a new society. This project has yielded unprecedented levels of prosperity for Israelis; meanwhile the neighboring Arabs continue to live in conflict, squalor, and under the thumbs of violent dictators. The story of Israel is a simple one: not all cultures are equal. We should not punish the successful ones because their neighbors are embarrassed by the comparison.
thanks for your post….the pro hamas, pro Oct 7th atrocity students are violent to the rotten core.
I don’t know if this young lady has heard that the “Great Replacement” is what Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon, the leader of the French left, has already openly called the goal of the left, using precisely this term! That is, the forced replacement of the population of the West with entirely new citizens from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Once again, young lady. The “Great Replacement” is not an invention of the right. It is what you and your kind are doing right now!
Melenchon did indeed use this expression last February, to the disgust of just about every leftist in Europe.
The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory has been doing the rounds on the far right for about 15 years now. It was rubbish when Renaud Camus first voiced it, and it’s still rubbish now.
Look around youâŠ.. Especially in Europe! If itâs rubbish, itâs amazingly accurate rubbish!
The EU and the UN admit they want a fully multiethnic/multicultural global society and hate the idea of nation states held together with a shared sense of historical/ethnic/cultural identity. So does Soros. Rockefeller did. Peter Sutherland (UN ambassador to the EU for migration) freely admitted it.
Whatâs so far fetched?
The notion of ‘Great Replacement’ is always a fantastic conspiracy theory, isn’t it?
It could never be pulled off in the real world.
I mean, everyone in the USA is a Native American, right?
Theyâre just grateful they have an excuse to shut it all down.
I was absolutely shocked to see the author who had read the situation 100% incorrectly has previously written for the Guardian and is herself involved in academia⊠shocked I tells ya.
Sounds similar to the campus nonsense happening in Canada and we should be doing the same. It’s a free country so do whatever you want on your own dime but forget getting any taxpayer money. Cancellation of public funds should also extend to student loans. Want to attend Columbia? Feel free, but you won’t be eligible for any government (taxpayer) assistance.
You have to admit that Anvee Bhutani really knows her stuff as an activism journalist reporting on a mostly peaceful protest. It’s really pretty sophisticated.
And she really is as tippy-top as it gets, getting to be student body president while at Oxford, darling.
What I long to read is a 2,000 word piece on “How I Learned to become an Activism Journalist.”
This is great news.
Either go to Uni and learn or protest somewhere else about how much you like a 7th C death cult and that plasticine should be free.
You canât go to uni to virtue signal.
Itâs ironic to see progressives simping for said death cult.
It is. As are fourth wave feminists telling us that hijabs and burkas are symbols of power and freedom.
At some point the cognitive dissonance has to become too much for them surely?
Campus harassment, sit-ins, and such like are not first amendment rights.
“Tristan Espinoza …called the federal grant cancellation … a reckless attempt to … undermine the intellectual diversity that campuses like Columbia are known for”.
Pretty funny.
Because of course, violently disrupting a University course that doesn’t toe the narrative of a certain dominant ideology is THE way to foster intellectual diversity on campus (as it happens, a course on the History of Modern Israel – but that’s just pure happenstance I’m sure).
âprotesters, most masked in keffiyehs,â
Masked protest isnât freedom of expression, itâs thuggery.
You wonder if they were masked in red, white and black swastika flags whether there’d be a different reaction. Both bits of cloth associated with people wanting to kill or expel jews in order to get the lebensraum they feel entitled to.
“dozens of New York Police officers arrived in full riot gear, helmets in hand and batons dangling from their belts”
Oh, no! Not batons dangling from their belts, surely!
Up to a point, students have brought this on themselves by being over aggressive on the Palestinian side since 7/10/23. Iâm a lifelong supporter of the Palestinian cause but I donât feel the need to start a riot about it. That said, Columbia will have to reconsider the expulsions.
This is such a dishonest, article, worthy of The Nation, but not UnHerd. Students aren’t being disciplined for their views, but for their actions: seizing and smashing up buildings, trapping Jewish students so they can’t exit, spitting on and threatening Jewish students, assaulting blue-collar staff – and the list could go on. Expel these bourgeois brats and deport their Hamas-aligned enablers.!
They had better cave if Columbia wants to receive Federal funding. And they will. Just another poorly written pretentious propaganda post.
What a biased article. Iâm really, really disappointed with Unherd, truly awful journalism at times. The article makes it sound like a bastion of free speech is being shut down. When what Columbia is is a place of festering hate for Jews and support for terrorism. The women of Iran and others who are under the boot of these murderers Columbia students support must be pulling out their hair at the stupidity of these brainwashed idiots. Itâs disgusting.
Sometimes you just have to beat people over the head and tell them to grow up.
white washing the racist, fascist, undemocratic and terroristic activities of a group as “pro Palestine” is a form of criminal white washing. Germans at the Bund rally at MSG in the forties were similarly “pro German” activists. It is more accurately anti Jewish and Jewish self determination. Palestinian advocacy is the most ultra ethnoreligious racist movement today. For forty years Jews have been bullied on university campuses and subject to triggering by PLO flags, hamas chants, and so called apartheid walls all meant to demonize Jews and the one state of the Jews. They have been called “oppressors” so not entitled to the right of assembly or “safe spaces” that the hamas contingent in cosplay masks reserves for itself. So I see how even on UNHERD this kind of contorting and twisting of the reality is going on ….so that Jews will always be the one and only victimized group on campus ….and the depraved jvp or if not now are not a cover for this ongoing hate campaign.