Columbia faculty panel rebukes leadership for police crackdown on protesters

NEW YORK: Columbia University’s embattled president came under renewed pressure as a campus oversight panel sharply criticized her administration for clamping down on a pro-Palestinian protest at the Ivy League school.

President Nemat Minouche Shafik has faced an outcry from many students, faculty and outside observers for summoning New York police to dismantle a tent encampment set up on campus by protesters against Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

After a two-hour meeting on Friday, the Columbia University Senate approved a resolution that Shafik’s administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members by calling in the police and shutting down the protest.

“The decision… has raised serious concerns about the administration’s respect for shared governance and transparency in the university decision-making process,” it said.

The senate, composed mostly of faculty members and other staff plus a few students, did not name Shafik in its resolution and avoided the harsher language of a censure.

The resolution established a task force it said would monitor the “corrective actions” the senate asked the administration to take on dealing with protests.

There was no immediate response to the resolution from Shafik, who is a member of the senate but did not attend Friday’s meeting. Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang said the administration shared the same goal as the senate – to restore calm to the campus – and was committed to “an ongoing dialogue.”

Police arrested more than 100 people on Columbia’s campus last week and removed the tents from the main lawn of the school’s Manhattan campus, but the protesters quickly returned and set up tents again, narrowing Columbia’s options on dismantling the encampment.

Since then, hundreds of protesters have been arrested at schools from California to Boston as students set up camps similar to the one at Columbia, demanding that their schools divest from companies involved with Israel’s military.

On Friday at least 40 protesters were arrested in Denver at the Auraria Campus, an institution shared by the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver, according to a press release from the school.

A few blocks from the White House, about 200 protesters at George Washington University remained gathered for a second day on Friday. The school said students did not follow directions to leave, and several were suspended and temporarily barred from campus.

Some Republicans in Congress have accused Shafik and other university administrators of being too soft on protesters and allowing Jewish students to be harassed on their campuses.