Columbia University has suspended more than 65 students and barred at least 33 others from campus, after dozens of anti-Israel protesters took over the Butler Library reading room on Wednesday and were later arrested by the New York City Police Department, a university official told JNS.
Claire Shipman, acting president of Columbia University, stated on Wednesday that the NYPD had to be called in to make arrests after the protest disrupted library operations and left two university public safety officers injured.
“Columbia unequivocally rejects antisemitism and all other forms of harassment and discrimination,” Shipman stated. “We certainly reject a group of students—and we don’t yet know whether there were outsiders involved—closing down a library in the middle of the week before finals and forcing 900 students out of their study spaces, many leaving belongings behind.”
Shoshana Aufzien, 19, a Jewish freshman at Barnard College, told JNS that she was studying for final exams in the library reading room when a group of masked protesters wearing keffiyehs barged in and began to shout “Free Palestine.” (Barnard has a “historic relationship” with Columbia.)
“What happened is not protected speech,” she said. “If you’re walking into the library, disrupting studying, harassing students, vandalizing the premises, assaulting public safety officers—none of that is protected speech or protected conduct.”
Aufzien said that she and many other students had to vacate the reading room, leaving their belongings behind, as protesters took over the building.
“These are college students who are paying $90,000 a year to go to the institution, and they’re leaving their MacBooks in a library, because they are being pushed out by protesters,” she said. “That’s insane.”
The protesters aim to be intentionally disruptive, according to Aufzien.
Their view is that “the entire world has to know about this atrocity, so nobody can live a normal life,” she said. “The problem is that’s fine if you were involved in a political conversation. Not that I believe any of these people are willing to engage in good-faith dialogue. That would be one thing.”
“But there are so many people who just pay tuition at the school so they can go to class and do their work, and keep up their 4.0 GPA,” she said. “I feel terrible for all of them.”
Sam Nahins, 31, a U.S. Air Force veteran and Columbia graduate student, told JNS that the protest at Butler on Wednesday crossed the line into targeted harassment.
“Free speech doesn’t mean freedom to intimidate,” he said. “I’ve seen what real oppression looks like. These students aren’t freedom fighters. They’re bullies in keffiyehs.”
Nahins said that if anyone is on campus, the university has the right to regulate speech. “If I walked across campus shouting hateful rhetoric at any other group, I’d be sanctioned and rightfully so,” he said. “The idea that these students get to keep doing the same things over and over again is absurd.”
“No one should be glorifying terrorism nor calling for globalizing intifada,” he added.
