By now, 23 million American college and university students will mostly be back on campus. Undergraduates have stuffed suitcases and crammed one more thing into already bursting backpacks, and moved into dorm rooms and apartments. Graduate students have scrambled to prepare for seminars and their work in classrooms and laboratories and started the new academic year.
But not our children.
Our children are among the more than 100 students at Columbia University who have been arrested, suspended or expelled for protesting against the most documented genocide in human history. While Israel starves 2.1 million Palestinians to death with US support, Columbia University has worked diligently to suspend dozens of students for pro-Palestine activism.
We were both involved in campus activism in the 1980s and consider the struggle for liberation to be one of our most important family values. We are inspired by the way our children’s generation has taken the lead in fighting against the genocide in Gaza and for full, free lives for all Palestinians.
Our children were both arrested for taking part in a teach-in at Columbia’s largest library on 7 May 2025. Along with dozens of their peers, they unfurled banners, made speeches, and distributed flyers renaming the library the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University”, creating, in their words, “ a living counter institution”, in honor of the Palestinian activist and writer who was assassinated by Israeli police in 2017. The thoughtfully designed teach-in included readings of works by Al- Araj and Ghassan Kanafani, the prominent Palestinian scholar who was assassinated by Mossad in 1972. A comprehensive syllabus was shared with library visitors to extend learning about several subjects including decolonization and Palestinian liberation.
The idea that campus activists would be suspended en masse for protest activity would have been unthinkable back in 1985 when Columbia divested from apartheid South Africa after years of student protest and pressure. But these are very different times, and many universities – Columbia at the head of the line – seem more interested in doing the bidding of ideologically-driven donors and reactionary national political figures than in teaching and learning from history.
During anti-apartheid protests, students took over Hamilton Hall and unofficially renamed it Mandela Hall in honor of the South African leader. In 2024, Hamilton Hall was renamed Hind’s Hall by students to memorialize Hind Rajab, the six-year-old who Israeli terrorists sprayed with bullets after killing her family while she called for help. The renaming of buildings, along with occupations, teach-ins and encampments, are part of Columbia’s long tradition of engaged political activity among its students. However, our children’s disciplinary sanctions will be the most suspensions for a single political protest in Columbia campus history, and far exceed sentencing precedent for teach-ins or non-Palestine-related building occupations. This is one more articulation of what so many of us have come to understand as the Palestine exception to free speech and assembly.
Our children chose to attend Columbia and its women’s college, Barnard, in part because of the histories of activism the schools so proudly flaunt in their admission materials and on campus tours. Even the most cursory search of the university websites finds heartfelt endorsement of this kind of campus activism – as with this article about the 1968 campus unrest. The legacy of protest at Columbia and Barnard is celebrated by the administration of the university, but only years later, after the students have been proven right in their claims and justified in their tactics.
The disciplinary action taken by Columbia against our children and their peers has dramatic impact. It is one more step in a regime of ever-changing rules and protocols, including the dropping of students from the university judicial board. In addition to interrupting their education, the sanctions mean that students are banished from campus – no library visits, no consulting with faculty mentors, no promised paid work, and no healthcare. The sacrifice being made by these activists reveals that the wellbeing of a large number of their students is simply of no concern to the leadership of Columbia University.
We cannot forget that what our children now face stands as a truly minuscule footnote in the context of the livestreamed genocide in Gaza and the worldwide movement to oppose it. As parents, we embrace our role as supporters of the new cohort of campus leaders who are working tirelessly to advance the cause of Palestinian liberation. And we remain mindful of all campus protesters, especially the Arab and Muslim activists who have borne the heaviest burden of discipline from the university, police and federal government.
We have little doubt that this generation’s principled activism will come to be understood as one more case where campus movements led the way for necessary changes in the broader culture. But we fear it will take even longer than usual. At Columbia, the Palestine exception has taken form with particular intensity, as a heavily weaponized and manufactured crisis about antisemitism on campus.
In the past year and a half, there has been a draconian crackdown on campus protest, the changing of rules on the fly about what is and isn’t allowed, and new regulations about how perceived offenses will be adjudicated. The most recent and terrifying change is the adoption by Columbia University of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism, which equates some criticism of Israel with discrimination against Jews, a purposeful conflation which effectively makes many forms of support for Palestine a punishable offense.
Campus activism is messy. The shantytowns and building blockades of the campus anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s were often decried by reactionaries as too disruptive of the “normal” functioning of university life. It turned out that making an omelette required cracking some eggs.
We believe it is time to sound the alarm about Columbia and Barnard. If you are a prospective student and believe in the right to free speech and assembly, have a strong moral compass, or are nonconformist in any substantial way, you may want to look for an alternative. The university has recently announced that it will begin screening applicants for civility: as always the smokescreen of good manners is cloaking a manifestly ideological position on what kinds of speech belong on a college campus.
Our children have no illusions about Columbia, or any university, taking a leadership position in the fight for justice and liberation. Nor do they have any illusions about the university administration taking a righteous position because of the power of moral suasion. But they know, as history has taught them, that refusing to be silenced and speaking in a loud, collective voice, is the only way to effect the changes that justice demands.
The struggle will not end with suspensions and expulsions. Columbia must once again follow the lead of student activists, as it has done in the past. It is time, as our children and their comrades have been consistently saying in this time of horrific genocide in Gaza, to divest from all economic and academic engagements in apartheid Israel.
*Juliette Lamalle is a pseudonym the author is using for safety reasons
