A faculty rights group at Columbia University said that the way the administration dealt with the anti-Israel protest at the school library on Wednesday, when dozens of people were arrested, was wrong.
The executive committee of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at Columbia wrote a letter about the “erosion of shared governance” and said they didn’t agree with acting president Claire Shipman’s choice to call the NYPD for help.
Anti-Israel activists started the protest on Wednesday afternoon when they broke into Butler Library and took over a reading room while breaking through one of the doors to the outside of the building. During the protest, two college police officers were hurt as well.
The NYPD said 80 people were arrested, and Fox News learned that about 50 of those people were college students at Columbia.
In their letter, the AAUP mostly ignored the specifics of the protest, which damaged and messed up a study space for students studying for exams. Instead, they called it “tragic” and focused on the university’s “institutional slide toward executive rule.”
The group said that Columbia’s leaders have made it harder for students to protest and for shared government to thrive in order to “echo the authoritarian ethos now holding sway in Washington.”
“As the Trump administration has demanded ever more draconian crackdowns on student protest, our administration has responded by granting enhanced powers to public security that can as easily escalate as defuse confrontations with students and that last night did not prevent the administration from again summoning the NYPD to campus,” the group wrote.
Before the protest on Wednesday, Shipman said she would be reviewing and changing the University Senate. The University Senate is Columbia’s governing body and is made up of elected representatives from all of the university’s departments. She said this while she was in talks with the federal government about the huge cut in university funding.
Columbia lost more than $400 million in government grants in March because the Trump administration said the school did not do enough to stop the rise in antisemitism on campus.
That the university is in a “moment of crisis,” and the AAUP told her not to go ahead with the review because it “strenuously objects to both the timing and the plan” for it.
“In imposing this review at this time and in this manner, the President and the Board of Trustees are taking aim at shared governance and replacing it with top-down corporate management, indicating a profound misunderstanding of what university leadership and fiduciary obligations require,” the team said.
The group gave each other a list of six suggestions. These suggestions call for a “unified response to the current crisis” instead of taking apart the systems that have been used to make decisions for decades.
The AAUP has also spoken out against Columbia for punishing, suspending, and kicking out students who took part in anti-Israel events on campus.
One of the group’s suggestions is to make “mediation, consultation, and de-escalation protocols for immediate deployment during campus disturbances, especially student protests” much better.