The university’s oversight board says the president undermined academic freedom by allowing New York police to break up protests in the Gaza Strip.
Columbia University’s embattled president came under renewed pressure as a campus oversight board harshly rebuked her administration for cracking down on a pro-Palestinian protest on the New York campus.
President Nemat Minouche Shafik drew outcry from many students, faculty and outside observers for calling in the New York Police Department to break up a tent camp set up on campus by students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.
After a two-hour meeting Friday, the Columbia University Senate passed a resolution saying Shafik’s administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members by involving police and disrupting the peaceful protest have finished.
“The decision … raised serious concerns about the administration’s respect for shared governance and transparency in the university’s decision-making process,” the Senate said.
The Senate, made up mostly of faculty and other staff members as well as student representatives, did not mention Shafik by name in its resolution and avoided the harsher language of a censure.
The resolution also created a task force to oversee the “corrective measures” the Senate demanded from the university administration in dealing with protests.
There was no immediate reaction to the resolution from Shafik, a member of the Senate.
She did not attend Friday’s meeting and continues to enjoy the support of the university’s Board of Trustees, which has the power to hire or fire the president.
Columbia spokesman Ben Chang said the administration shares the same goal as the Senate — restoring calm to campus — and is committed to “continuous dialogue.”
Nationwide protest
Police arrested more than 100 people on the Columbia campus last week and removed protesters’ tents from the school’s main lawn in Manhattan, but protesters quickly returned and set up tents again.
The mass arrests at Columbia led to similar protests and encampments at several other universities across the United States.
At least 40 protesters were arrested Friday in Denver at the Auraria Campus, a joint facility of the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver, according to a statement from the school.
In Texas, University of Texas at Austin President Jay Hartzell faced a similar backlash from faculty on Friday, two days after he joined Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in calling police to break up a peaceful pro-Palestinian protest .
Dozens of protesters were taken into custody, but charges were dropped because authorities lacked a valid reason – or reasons – for the arrests, the Travis County District Attorney’s Office said.
Nearly 200 university faculty members signed a letter expressing distrust of Hartzell for “unnecessarily endangering students, staff and faculty” as police in riot gear and on horseback moved against the protesters.
Meanwhile, hundreds of protesters remained gathered at George Washington University in Washington, DC for a second day on Friday. The school said students did not follow instructions to leave and several were suspended and temporarily barred from campus.
The White House has defended free speech on campuses, but US President Joe Biden this week condemned what he called “anti-Semitic protests” and stressed that campuses must be safe.
Student-led protests against Israel’s war on Gaza have spread abroad.
At the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris on Friday, pro-Israel demonstrators challenged pro-Palestinian students who occupied a school building. The police kept the two sides apart.
Pro-Palestinian students at the prestigious university later agreed to call off their action in exchange for an “internal debate” over the university’s ties to Israel.