Columbia Expelled Student Protesters For the First Time in Over 50 Years. But Activists Won't Back Down.

Barnard College of Columbia University has now expelled three students in 
less than two weeks. On February 21, the school expelled two protesters 
for allegedly disrupting a course on the History of Modern Israel taught 
by Avi Shilon, a former IDF soldier. The latest expulsion, issued on 
February 28, is the first directed at a participant of the Hamilton Hall 
occupation, which took place on April 30 last year.

This is the first time in 57 years that the university has expelled anyone 
for protest, and the only official expulsions associated with Israel’s war 
on Gaza. Columbia University Apartheid Divest notes that this string of 
harsh punishments is “completely unprecedented,” noting that the last 
expulsion for nonviolent political protest was in 1936 when Robert Burke 
was expelled for rallying against Columbia’s ties to Nazism.

The last recorded expulsions for non-peaceful demonstrations were in 1968, 
when students fought against the Vietnam War and Columbia’s gentrification 
of Harlem by occupying buildings and taking a dean hostage. Even then, 
acting Columbia President Andrew W. Cordier advocated “maximum leniency” 
in the cases of the nearly 400 arrested and reinstated more than half of 
the suspended students.

In following years, 1972, 1985, 1987, 1996, and 2016, students have 
engaged in sit-ins, multi-building takeovers, and blockades over issues of 
public concern—including American foreign policy, South African apartheid, 
on-campus racism, and the university’s associations with the fossil fuel 
industry—without suffering the same disciplinary outcomes as those 
opposing Israel’s war on Gaza. Indeed, the punishment of these earlier 
activists, who engaged in similar forms of protest as pro-Palestine 
demonstrators, included disciplinary warnings or being forced to write 
apology letters, or led to dropped charges. No repercussions approached 
the severity of expulsion facing protesters today.

“Students have a right to protest in all settings, including academic 
ones, particularly when those protests center liberation movements and 
call for universities to divest from genocide and warmongers,” a CUAD 
spokesperson told The Nation. Columbia University did not respond to a 
request for comment.

At Barnard, “I was told countless times the value of voicing my opinions 
and standing up for what I know to be true and good,” one of the students 
facing expulsion said. “The fact that my removal has taken place so 
baselessly, simply because I believe that a holocaust of the Palestinian 
people is unequivocally wrong has completely shattered the illusion of 
what I thought Barnard stood for.”

In response to Columbia’s historic expulsions, a national petition to 
reinstate the expelled Barnard students has garnered more than 120,000 
signatures. Campus actions have also swelled accordingly. CUAD held an 
over-six-hour sit-in on February 26, with roughly 100 Barnard and Columbia 
students demanding that the university reverse the expulsions, provide 
amnesty for those disciplined for their pro-Palestine activism, hold a 
public meeting between activists and Barnard administrators, and abolish 
the college’s opaque disciplinary procedures. During the sit-in, which 
took place outside of Barnard Dean Leslie Grinage’s office, demonstrators 
reported being physically assaulted by “really aggressive” public safety 
officers.

The students left the sit-in “only after Barnard agreed to negotiate over 
expulsions”; however, organizers claim that the school “reneged on these 
terms 25 minutes before negotiations were set to begin the next day.” The 
following afternoon, CUAD assembled a university-wide sick-out protest 
calling, once again, for Barnard to reinstate expelled students.

On March 5, dozens of students staged a sit-in at Milstein Library, 
rechristening it “Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya Liberated Zone” in honor of a 
Gazan hospital director who the Israeli military arbitrarily detained in 
December of 2024. The disruption was a continuation of the February 26 
action, which called for the reinstatement of expelled pro-Palestine 
students. Before the sit-in hit the one-hour mark, Barnard 
administrators—including executive vice president for strategy and chief 
administrative officer Kelli A. Murray, and vice president of community 
engagement and lifelong success A-J Aronstein—passed out “final” 
disciplinary notices informing participants that they were “in violation 
of College rules and policies.”

Activists proceeded to rip up the flyers and tossed the shreds into a 
recycling bin. “The university has never pursued expulsion…for Zionist 
students. Even when hundreds of reports have been made with undeniable 
evidence,” said one activist with a bullhorn.

In January of 2024, two Israeli students sprayed a chemical agent at a 
Gaza solidarity rally resulting in several hospitalizations. Neither was 
expelled. Instead, they were both suspended for 18 months and, in April, 
one of the two perpetrators sued Columbia leading to a reduction in 
discipline to probation and a $395,000 settlement payout.

Around 4:50 pm, amid a suspicious bomb threat and torrential downpour, the 
New York Police Department streamed onto Barnard’s campus, pushing out 
members of the press and arresting nine sit-in participants.

CUAD attributes the recent acceleration of such punitive measures against 
pro-Palestine activists to the US Department of Justice’s Friday 
announcement that it will be visiting 10 college campuses that 
“experienced incidents of antisemitism since October 2023.” Columbia was 
informed that, pursuant to a Trump executive order, it would be one of the 
universities on the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism’s docket.

“Columbia and Barnard are cracking down on student protesters to appease 
the Department of Justice and billionaire donors because they are afraid 
of losing their funding,” said the CUAD spokesperson. “Barnard handed down 
an expulsion to one of the students just one day after the Justice 
Department announced it planned to visit campus as part of a sham 
investigation into pro-Palestine protest.”

After the university was briefed about the imminent DOJ visit, The 
Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and 
the General Services Administration announced that the Task Force to 
Combat Antisemitism is also considering Stop Work Orders for $51.4 million 
in contracts between Columbia University and the federal government, while 
putting under review the more than $5 billion in federal grant 
commitments.

Amid mounting student and government pressure, Barnard president Laura Ann 
Rosenbury wrote an op-ed for The Chronicle of Higher Education asserting 
that the sit-in was her “line in the sand” and pledged to remove “from our 
community those who refuse to share our values of respect, inclusion, and 
academic excellence.” The article said that student activists have 
“exploited the conflict in the Middle East to try to tear our campus 
community…apart.”

In response, CUAD said that Rosenbury’s op-ed was “whitewashing the deaths 
of thousands of Palestinians, financially cosigned by our University’s 
refusal to divest from weapons manufacturers and Israeli corporations.”

Additionally, “it is she who evicted dozens of students last spring,” CUAD 
noted—emphasizing the college president’s role in destabilizing the campus 
community by eliminating over 50 Barnard activists’ access to education, 
food, housing, and medical care via interim suspension. “Her willingness 
to demonize protesters whose demands were simple transparency in the 
disciplinary process, which resulted in the unprecedented removal of…their 
classmates…should concern current students and alumni alike.”

The Barnard expulsions have set, according to CUAD, a “dangerous 
precedent” and epitomize the “Palestine exception” to free speech. In 
light of Israel’s continued onslaughts on Gaza, which most recently 
include a fatal blockade of humanitarian aid into the besieged strip and 
violations of the purported ceasefire, CUAD says that “students still feel 
it is their duty to fight for a free Palestine, and have implemented 
various methods to dodge Columbia’s repression,” in order to continue the 
fight.

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/columbia-expels-student-
protesters-milstein-library/