Could Columbia Change Who Gets to Set the Rules on Protests?

In the spring of 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University found a formidable ally in the university senate, a body that was given authority over campus protest policy in the aftermath of violent police interventions decades earlier.

Now, the powerful senate finds itself under a microscope. University administrators and trustees, eager to reclaim authority and answer criticism from the Trump administration, have ordered a review of the senate, a move that could fundamentally alter Columbia and redefine control of student protests and disciplinary action.

Some trustees and administrators have blamed the senate for delaying and obstructing discipline of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who broke university rules, and some appear to have accused the 111-member elected body of antisemitism. Senators hotly rebut those charges and say that the senate is standing up for Columbia’s rules and proud tradition of protest against outside pressure.

“What this looks like is an attempt to concentrate power,” Joseph Howley, a faculty senator and classics professor who supported the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, said of the review. He added that he felt it was part “of the decades-long process of trying to make American universities operate more like for-profit corporations.”

The effort to potentially diminish the university senate’s authority represents the latest convulsion in a year of demonstrations and resignations, and it comes amid the targeting of Columbia by the White House, which has stripped the school of $400 million in federal funds. It involves some of the most important figures at the university: Claire Shipman, the acting president; Jonathan Lavine, the emeritus chair of the board of trustees; and Jeanine D’Armiento, a pulmonologist who has essentially run the senate as chair of its executive committee for the last six years.

“It is a 50-year-old institution, and it has not been looked at in that period of time,” Dean Dakolias, a trustee, said at an April town-hall meeting about the review.