Columbia University has decided to suspend students instead of divesting in an ongoing genocide.
According to NBC News, the University will proceed with suspending anti-genocide students who didn’t vacant an encampment by the school’s self-imposed 2 pm ET deadline. Those students continue to demand that Columbia University divest from the State of Israel and continue to orchestrate a genocide in Gaza where over 30K people have died while simultaneously maintaining an apartheid state.
“We have begun suspending students,” Ben Chang, vice president for communications and a spokesperson for the university, said about three hours after the deadline passed.
The university did not say how many students it suspended.
The university had told student demonstrators to vacate by 2 p.m. or else “be suspended pending further investigation” and barred from completing the spring semester.
In addition to vacating the encampment and halting the protest, Columbia University was also requiring students to sign a form stating that the student would commit to university policies through June 30, 2025, or their graduation, if it came first. Failure to sign the form according to the University could make the student ineligible to graduate this semester and/or participate in academic and extracurricular activities. Furthermore, Columbia stated that protests at the University can only happen in “authorized spaces” and only after reading days, final exams, and commencement — an asinine statement in and of itself considering that’s not how protests work.
After protests started in Columbia earlier this month, students at Universities across the United States and around the world began to undertake their own demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza. The University of Southern California canceled its main commencement ceremony, citing safety concerns while the fascist Texas governor Greg Abbott threatened arrests for encampments and protests at the University of Texas-Austin.
