Columbia University in New York City, New York, has seen numerous instances of student protests, particularly beginning in the late 20th century.
The 1811 commencement was cancelled midway through its proceedings after graduating senior John B. Stevenson refused to make edits to a speech that advocated for more direct democracy in Republican governance. [1] Stevenson was refused his diploma, and the students and the audience turned on the stage party, hissing and jeering at the them. Police were called, Master of Arts degrees were not awarded, and the valedictory address was not given.
In 1936, Robert Burke of the Columbia College class of 1938 led a rally outside President Nicholas Murray Butler's mansion to protest Columbia's friendly relationship with the Nazis. [2] Burke was expelled and was never readmitted. As of 2018 [update] , the university has not apologized for expelling him. [3]
Students initiated a major demonstration in 1968 over two main issues. The first was Columbia's proposed gymnasium in neighboring Morningside Park, perceived as a segregated facility, with limited access by the black residents of neighboring Harlem. A second issue was the Columbia administration's failure to resign its institutional membership in the Pentagon's weapons research think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). Students barricaded themselves inside Low Library, Hamilton Hall, and several other university buildings during the protests, and New York City police were called onto the campus to arrest or forcibly remove the students. [4] [5]
The protests achieved two of their stated goals. Columbia disaffiliated from the IDA and scrapped the plans for the controversial gym, building a subterranean physical fitness center under the north end of campus instead. A popular myth states that the gym's plans were eventually used by Princeton University for the expansion of its athletic facilities, but as Jadwin Gymnasium was already 50% complete by 1966 (when the Columbia gym was announced) this was clearly not correct. [6] At least 30 Columbia students were suspended by the administration as a result of the protests. Many of the Class of '68 walked out of their graduation and held a counter-commencement on Low Plaza with a picnic following at Morningside Park, the place where the protests began. [7] The Strawberry Statement , a non-fiction book by a student activist, made a broader audience aware of the protests. The protests hurt Columbia financially as many potential students chose to attend other universities and some alumni refused to donate money to the school.
Further student protests, including hunger strike and more barricades of Hamilton Hall and the Business School during the late 1970s and early 1980s, were aimed at convincing the university trustees to divest all of the university's investments in companies that were seen as active or tacit supporters of the apartheid regime in South Africa. [8] A notable upsurge in the protests occurred in 1978, when following a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the student uprising in 1968, students marched and rallied in protest of university investments in South Africa. The Committee Against Investment in South Africa (CAISA) and numerous student groups including the Socialist Action Committee, the Black Student Organization and the Gay Students group joined together and succeeded in pressing for the first partial divestment of a U.S. university.
The initial (and partial) Columbia divestment focused largely on bonds and financial institutions directly involved with the South African regime. [9] [10] It followed a year-long campaign first initiated by students who had worked together to block the appointment of former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to an endowed chair at the university in 1977. [11]
Broadly backed by student groups and many faculty members the Committee Against Investment in South Africa held teach-ins and demonstrations through the year focused on the trustees ties to the corporations doing business with South Africa. Trustee meetings were picketed and interrupted by demonstrations culminating in May 1978 in the takeover of the Graduate School of Business. [12]
In the early 2000s, professor Joseph Massad, held an elective course called Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies at Columbia. Students felt the views he espoused in the course were anti-Israel and some of them tried to disrupt his class and get him fired. [13] In 2004, students got together with the pro-Israel campus group the David Project and produced a film called Columbia Unbecoming, accusing Massad and two other professors of intimidating or treating unfairly students with pro-Israel views. The film led to a committee being appointed by Bollinger which exonerated the professors in the spring of 2005. [14] However, the committee's report criticized Columbia's inadequate grievance procedures. [15]
The School of International and Public Affairs extends invitations to heads of state and heads of government who come to New York City for the opening of the fall session of the United Nations General Assembly. In 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of those invited to speak on campus. Ahmadinejad accepted his invitation and spoke on September 24, 2007, as part of Columbia University's World Leaders Forum. [16] The invitation proved to be highly controversial. Hundreds of demonstrators swarmed the campus on September 24 and the speech itself was televised worldwide. University President Lee C. Bollinger tried to allay the controversy by letting Ahmadinejad speak, but with a negative introduction (given personally by Bollinger). This did not mollify those who were displeased with the fact that the Iranian leader had been invited onto the campus. [17] Columbia students, though, turned out en masse to listen to the speech on the South Lawn. An estimated 2,500 undergraduates and graduates came out for the historic occasion.
During his speech, Ahmadinejad criticized Israel's policies towards the Palestinians; denied the Holocaust; made claims as to who initiated the 9/11 attacks; defended Iran's nuclear power program, criticizing the UN's policy of sanctions on his country; and attacked U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. In response to a question about Iran's treatment of women and homosexuals, he asserted that women are respected in Iran and that "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country… In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who told you this." [18] The latter statement drew laughter from the audience. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office accused Columbia of accepting grant money from the Alavi Foundation to support faculty "sympathetic" to Iran's Islamic republic. [19]
Beginning in 1969, during the Vietnam War, the university did not allow the U.S. military to have Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) programs on campus, [20] though Columbia students could participate in ROTC programs at other local colleges and universities. [21] [22] [23] [24] At a forum at the university during the 2008 presidential election campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama said that the university should consider reinstating ROTC on campus. [23] [25] [26] After the debate, the president of the university, Lee C. Bollinger, stated that he did not favor reinstating Columbia's ROTC program, because of the military's anti-gay policies. In November 2008, Columbia's undergraduate student body held a referendum on the question of whether or not to invite ROTC back to campus, and the students who voted were almost evenly divided on the issue. ROTC lost the vote (which would not have been binding on the administration, and did not include graduate students, faculty, or alumni) by a fraction of a percentage point.[ citation needed ]
In April 2010 during Admiral Mike Mullen's address at Columbia, President Lee C. Bollinger stated that the ROTC would be readmitted to campus if the admiral's plans for revoking the don't ask, don't tell policy were successful. In February 2011 during one of three town-hall meetings on the ROTC ban, former Army staff sergeant Anthony Maschek, a Purple Heart recipient for injuries sustained during his service in Iraq, was booed and hissed at by some students during his speech promoting the idea of allowing the ROTC on campus. [27] In April 2011 the Columbia University Senate voted to welcome the ROTC program back on campus. [28] Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger signed an agreement to reinstate Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) program at Columbia for the first time in more than 40 years on May 26, 2011. The agreement was signed at a ceremony on board the USS Iwo Jima, docked in New York for the Navy's annual Fleet Week. [29]
In February 2014, after learning that the university had over $10 million invested in the private prison industry, a group of students delivered a letter President Bollinger's office requesting a meeting and officially launching the Columbia Prison Divest (CPD) campaign. [30] As of June 30,2013 [update] , Columbia held investments in Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in the United States, as well as G4S, the largest multinational security firm in the world. Students demanded that the university divest these holdings from the industry and instate a ban on future investments in the private prison industry. [31] Aligning themselves with the growing Black Lives Matter movement and in conversation with the heightened attention on race and the system of mass incarceration, CPD student activists hosted events to raise awareness of the issue and worked to involve large numbers of members of the Columbia and West Harlem community in campaign activities. [31] After eighteen months of student driven organizing, the Board of Trustees of Columbia University voted to support the petition for divestment from private prison companies, which was confirmed to student leaders on June 22, 2015. [32] The Columbia Prison Divest campaign was the first campaign to successfully get a U.S. university to divest from the private prison industry. [32]
In January 2021, more than 1000 Columbia University students initiated a tuition strike, demanding that the university lower its tuition rates by 10% amid financial burdens and the move to online classes prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. [33] [34] [35] Tuition for undergraduates was at the time $58,920 for an academic year, with the total cost eclipsing $80,000 when expenses including fees, room and board, books and travel were factored in. [36] [35] It was the largest tuition strike at an American university in nearly 50 years. [37] Students stated they had won a number of concessions, as the university announced it would freeze tuition, suspend fees on late payments, increase spring financial aid and provide a limited amount of summer grants. [34] [37] A university spokesperson, however, stated that the decisions occurred several months prior to the strike. [37] Students also asked the university to end its expansion into and gentrification of West Harlem, defund its university police force, divest from its investments in oil and gas companies, and bargain in good faith with campus unions. [33] [37] The university in February 2021 announced that the Board of Trustees had finally formalized its commitment to divest from publicly traded oil and gas companies. [37] The strike had been largely organized by the campus chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America, which had partnered with other student groups to support the action. [33]
Starting in March 2021, members of the Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers, a student employee union, began a strike over issues related to securing a labor contract with the university. [38] The strike ended for a first time on May 13, 2021. Following the end of the strike, on July 3, new leaders for the union were elected who promised to continue to push for a labor contract with the university. A second strike began on November 3, 2021, and concluded on January 7, 2022.
The 2024 Columbia University pro-Palestinian campus occupation was a protest at Columbia University in New York City. The protests began on April 17, 2024, when pro-Palestinian students established an encampment of approximately fifty tents on the university's campus, and ended on June 2, 2024. [39] The protests sought to cease Columbia University's financial support of Israel. [40] On April 18, University President Minouche Shafik authorized New York Police Department to enter campus and remove protesting students in the encampment. However, the encampment was reestablished and the police action at Columbia University led to similar protests at other universites. [41] On April 29, Shafik issued a statement saying that despite the protesters' demands, the university would not divest from Israel. [40]
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges, and seven professional institutions. In 1960, John R. Everett became the first chancellor of the Municipal College System of New York City, later known as the City University of New York (CUNY). CUNY, established by New York state legislation in 1961 and signed into law by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, was an amalgamation of existing institutions and a new graduate school. The oldest constituent college of CUNY, City College of New York, was originally founded in 1847 and became the first free public institution of higher learning in the United States.
Lee Carroll Bollinger is an American attorney and educator who served as the 19th president of Columbia University from 2002 to 2023 and as the 12th president of the University of Michigan from 1996 to 2002.
Controversies of the former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad included criticism after his election victory on June 29, 2005. These include charges that he participated in the 1979-1981 Iran Hostage Crisis, assassinations of Kurdish politicians in Austria, torture, interrogation and executions of political prisoners in the Evin prison in Tehran. Ahmadinejad and his political supporters have denied these allegations.
Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian-American professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.
Campus protest or student protest is a form of student activism that takes the form of protest at university campuses. Such protests encompass a wide range of activities that indicate student dissatisfaction with a given political or academics issue and mobilization to communicate this dissatisfaction to the authorities and society in general and hopefully remedy the problem. Protest forms include but are not limited to: sit-ins, occupations of university offices or buildings, strikes etc. More extreme forms include suicide such as the case of Jan Palach's, and Jan Zajíc's protests against the end of the Prague Spring and Kostas Georgakis' protest against the Greek junta of 1967–1974.
Hamilton Hall which may also be referred to as Hind's Hall is an academic building on the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University on College Walk at 1130 Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, New York City, serving as the home of Columbia College. It was built in 1905–1907 and was designed by McKim, Mead & White in the Neoclassical style; the building was part of the firm's original master plan for the campus. The building was the gift of the John Stewart Kennedy, a former trustee of Columbia College, and is named after Alexander Hamilton, who attended King's College, Columbia's original name. A statue of Hamilton by William Ordway Partridge stands outside the building entrance. Hamilton Hall is the location of the Columbia College administrative offices.
Michael Scott Roth is an American academic and university administrator. He became the 16th president of Wesleyan University in 2007. Formerly, he was the 8th president of the California College of the Arts (2000–2007), associate director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and Director of European Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He was also the H.B. Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, where he was the founding director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute.
Disinvestmentfrom South Africa was first advocated in the 1960s in protest against South Africa's system of apartheid, but was not implemented on a significant scale until the mid-1980s. A disinvestment policy the U.S. adopted in 1986 in response to the disinvestment campaign is credited with playing a role in pressuring the South African government to embark on negotiations that ultimately led to the dismantling of the apartheid system.
Nemat Talaat Shafik, Baroness Shafik, commonly known as Minouche Shafik, is a British-American academic and economist. She served as the president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023, and then as the 20th president of Columbia University from July 2023 to August 2024. She was the first woman to serve as Columbia's president.
Students for Justice in Palestine is a pro-Palestinian college student activism organization in the United States, Canada and New Zealand. It has campaigned for boycott and divestment against corporations that deal with Israel and organized events about Israel's human rights violations. In 2011, The New York Times reported that "S.J.P., founded in 2001 at the University of California, Berkeley, has become the leading pro-Palestinian voice on campus."
Isra Hirsi is an American environmental activist. She co-founded and served as the co-executive director of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike. In 2020, she was named in the Fortune's 40 Under 40 Government and Politics list. She is the daughter of U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar.
The 2021–2022 Columbia University strike was a labor strike involving graduate student workers at Columbia University in New York City. The strike began on March 15, 2021, and ended on May 13, 2021. However, additional strike action commenced on November 3 and lasted until January 7, 2022, when a tentative agreement with the university was reached. The strike was organized by the Graduate Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers Local 2110 (SWC–UAW), a labor union representing student workers at the university. The goals of the strike were an increase in wages, increased healthcare and childcare coverage, and third-party arbitration in cases of discrimination and sexual harassment.
A series of occupation protests by pro-Palestinian students occurred at Columbia University in New York City from April to June 2024, in the context of the broader Israel–Hamas war protests in the United States. The protests began on April 17, 2024, when pro-Palestinian students established an encampment of approximately 50 tents on the university campus, calling it the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and demanded the university divest from Israel.
Pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses started in 2023 and escalated in April 2024, spreading in the United States and other countries, as part of wider Israel–Hamas war protests. The escalation began after mass arrests at the Columbia University campus occupation, led by anti-Zionist groups, in which protesters demanded the university's disinvestment from Israel over its alleged genocide of Palestinians. In the U.S. over 3,100 protesters have been arrested, including faculty members and professors, on over 60 campuses. On May 7, protests spread across Europe with mass arrests in the Netherlands. By May 12, twenty encampments had been established in the United Kingdom, and across universities in Australia and Canada. The protests largely ended as universities closed for the summer.
On April 25, 2024, a student protest began at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to protest the administration's investments in Israel. The occupation, self-titled as the 'Palestine Solidarity Encampment', was a part of pro-Palestine protests on university campuses campaigning for divestment from Israel. The encampment was attacked multiple times by counter protestors, leading to clashes. On May 2, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) raided and dismantled the encampment, arresting the protestors and ending the occupation.
On April 29, 2024, approximately 100 University of Oregon students established a camp on the Eugene campus to support Palestinians in Gaza and demanding action from administrators. As part of the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, demonstrators requested for the university to divest from “the state of Israel, Israeli companies, and any weapons or surveillance manufacturing.”
A series of protests at Ohio State University by pro-Palestinian demonstrators occurred on-campus in response to the Israel-Palestine conflict beginning on October 7, 2023. A solidarity encampment was constructed on OSU's South Oval on April 25, 2024, during which there were at least 36 arrests, making for the largest en masse arrests on campus since the 1969–1970 Vietnam War protests.