Columbia Hands Out Interim Suspensions, Faculty Group Unhappy

Columbia’s response to the library takeover Wednesday is winning plaudits from the Trump administration. Yesterday the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism issued a statement praising President Shipman and pressing for follow-up disciplinary action.

The Task Force is encouraged by Acting President Shipman’s strong and resolute statement regarding the unlawful, violent and disgraceful takeover of Butler library yesterday. She has stepped in to lead Columbia at a critical juncture and has met the moment with fortitude and conviction…The Task Force is confident that Columbia will take the appropriate disciplinary actions for those involved in this act.

In other words, the arrests were a good start but the school still needs to take action against the activists. This morning there are reports that dozens of students involved have received interim suspensions.

The elite Morningside Heights school has already handed down at least 65 interim suspensions to students who were part of Wednesday’s Butler Library chaos pending further investigation, a school official told The Post.

Another 33 individuals, including those from affiliated institutions, and an unspecified number of alumni were also barred from campus, the official said as Columbia faced pressure to take strong action against the agitators.

But naturally not everyone was pleased with the response. CAIR criticized the school.

“Suppressing peaceful protests, like sit-ins at the library aimed at ending complicity in the ongoing massacres of Palestinians, is immoral and flaunts the erosion of civil liberties in our country,” said Afaf Nasher, the executive director of CAIR-NY, a group that advocates for Muslims.

Disruption of hundreds of students trying to study for exams and vandalism are not peaceful protests. CAIR-NY should know the difference.

CUAD, the group organizing these actions for the past year has been trying to claim that they were victimized by the handful of public safety officers in the building. The posted this video.

But CUAD made no mention of the two public safety officers who were injured while trying to hold them back. They also claimed the demand that they show ID if they wanted to leave the library was a principled stand.

“We refuse to show our IDs under militarized arrest,” they wrote. “We refuse to go down quietly.”

No one would have been arrested if they had showed ID. Public safety made that clear in advance. These students chose arrest instead of the peaceful alternative. Even one of the faculty supporters of this group agreed that showing ID was a reasonable request.

Joseph Howley, a member of the university senate who has been highly critical of Columbia’s response to past protests, said that the clear implementation of a rule already on the books at Columbia requiring protesters to identify themselves when asked seemed a “perfectly reasonable implementation of that policy.”

Speaking of the university senate, one of the changes the school is making to comply with the demands made by the Trump administration involves how discipline is handed out.

Columbia is moving the judicial board that oversees protest discipline from the supervision of the university senate, a faculty-led body, to the provost’s office. This is in part to meet a demand from the Trump administration to tighten control of discipline.

The university took nearly 11 months to expel some of the students involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation, putting it in the cross-hairs of the Trump administration. Whether the judicial process will move more quickly under the provost’s supervision is not clear.

A faculty group at Columbia (the American Association of University Professors) also condemned the arrests and wrote a letter aimed at keeping disciplinary action under the control of the university Senate and taking a resistance approach to the Trump administration.

The tragic events of last night illustrate the countervailing and urgent need for developing consultation protocols and mediation strategies that mitigate harm during protests, facilitate informed and balanced reporting, and ensure due process for all parties…

At this moment of crisis and during a transition in leadership, the Acting President, in tandem with the Board of Trustees, has announced that she will undertake a review and subsequent “reform” of the University Senate. The Columbia Chapter of the AAUP strenuously objects to both the timing and the plan for conducting such a review…

Instead of dismantling the structures of shared governance, the AAUP calls on university leadership to work with faculty and other stakeholders to mount a unified response to the current crisis. In this spirit we urge the senior administration and the Board of Trustees to join the lawsuit initiated by the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers to defend Columbia colleagues (faculty, researchers, postdocs, and grad students) whose research funding has been arbitrarily and unlawfully withdrawn. We urge the Acting President and Board of Trustees to pursue, in concert with other universities, further legal remedies for restoring frozen funding or cancelled grants and to lobby Congress, perhaps with a cadre of Columbia’s most distinguished scientists, for the restoration of science funding in the coming budget negotiations.

Basically, they want to slow-walk accountability and have Columbia join Harvard in suing the Trump administration. That’s unlikely to accomplish anything but it will make some of the lefty professors feel good.

Finally, the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism may want to take a look at this story published a few days about by the Washington Free Beacon. It suggests that suspensions at Columbia may not be as serious as they appear to be.

Columbia University medical students accused the Ivy League school of pushing a double standard after a classmate who was suspended following her arrest for storming a Barnard College building returned to campus. The student, Gabrielle Wimer, appears to be on course to graduate later this month.

Wimer was one of the four anti-Israel Columbia students arrested for storming Barnard’s Milstein Library in March. The Ivy League university promptly suspended the quartet and restricted them from campus, though officials didn’t say how long the punishments would last.

But several sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity told the Free Beacon they’ve seen Wimer attending “Ready 4 Residency Course,” a month-long required class Columbia medical students must pass in March or April of their final year in order to graduate. Others confirmed that they’ve seen her on campus or entering the room where the class is held.

Suspended in March and by early April she’s back on campus for a class. What kind of accountability is that?