Columbia University Threatens To Suspend Students Who Don't Leave Protest Encampment

Columbia University issued a notice Monday morning to students protesting the war in Gaza that they had until 2 p.m. to leave the encampment or they would be suspended.

The notice, which was obtained by HuffPost, said that students will face suspension — including restriction from campus and its facilities and ineligibility to go to class or participate in extracurricular activities — if they do not leave the encampment. Protesters also must sign a form committing to following university policies in order to finish the semester in good standing. Columbia told HuffPost they have no additional comment.

The deadline came and went without students dispersing or suspensions handed out. Shortly after 2 p.m. passed, student negotiators spoke at a news conference, where they reiterated their demands for Columbia to divest from Israel’s activities in Gaza and denounced university president Minouche Shafik’s statements about the negotiations.

Sudea Polat, one of the organizers who spoke, said Shafik has “claimed that we had had constructive dialogue regarding the student encampment and made insincere statements regarding the university’s actions. The university’s negotiations evidenced an elementary understanding of the words boycott and divest, which have been at the heart of the student movement and at the heart of our encampment.”

The university refused to make any commitments that their divestment proposals would be binding, Polat said.

The suspension warnings “are attempts to stifle the student movement,” she added.

The suspension warning came just a few hours after Shafik said in a statement that the university won’t divest from Israel and that the school has failed to come to an agreement with students protesting Israel’s