Students sue Columbia over suspensions for Palestine protest

On Monday three Columbia University students filed a lawsuit against the school for their suspensions over Palestine activism.

“These students should be honored for their bravery, leadership, and moral clarity,” said James Carlson, an attorney for the plaintiffs, in a statement. “Instead, they’ve had their lives and careers unjustly sabotaged. Hopefully, lawsuits like this one will make universities think twice before persecuting students for their viewpoints.” 

Drop Site News reported that Aidan Parisi, Brandon Murphy, and Catherine Curran-Groome are suing Columbia for violating “its own policies during the disciplinary process” and violating “New York’s landlord tenant laws when it evicted the students from university housing.” The 65-page complaint cites more than 30 instances where the school ignored established protocols to target the plaintiffs.

Parisi and Murphy received one-year suspensions and Curran-Groome received a two-year suspension. They were all scheduled to graduate this coming spring.

“They singled out a few of us to try to make an example out of us,” Curran-Groome told Drop Site. “None of us, absolutely none of us, deserved what we’ve experienced this year at Columbia in terms of the targeting and the discrimination and the violence and the repression.”

In the spring of 2024, Columbia students established its Gaza solidarity encampment to protest the genocide, helping to ignite a nationwide movement.

Shortly before the first encampment went up, Curran-Groome and Parisi were suspended on an interim basis for organizing a March 2024 event for Palestine Solidarity Month.

According to the lawsuit, Curran-Groome applied for school approval for the event but was told to either move it online, hold it on another day, or organize it off campus. Drop Site says it was held off campus, but after it took place Columbia issued a statement calling it “unsanctioned.” In the same statement they declared that they had immediately notified law enforcement over the event and hired a law firm to conduct an investigation.

When the suspended students showed up at the encampment protests, the school hit them with another suspension claiming that they had violated the first order by being on campus in any capacity.

Private investigators showed up at the residences of Curran-Groome and Parisi, but they refused to speak to them without an attorney. The next day, the students received emails from Columbia’s Chief Operating Officer saying they would face “immediate disciplinary measures” if they did not meet with the investigators.

The students were ordered to vacate their housing within 24 hours, despite the fact that New York law requires a 30-day notice for eviction. “I was worried about where I was going to live, how I was going to sustain myself. I was worried about losing access to my healthcare, which I rely on for doctor visits and medication that are very essential to living,” Parisi told Drop Site. “I was overwhelmed with emotions. And quite frankly, I was experiencing a lot of fear of the uncertainty of what’s going to happen to my life.”

This sequence of events occurred amid a widespread crackdown on campus activism, pushed in part by U.S. lawmakers. While Columbia students protested the attack on Gaza, then-university president Minouche Shafik was being grilled by GOP House members at a congressional hearing.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce ostensibly launched an investigation over the “antisemitism crisis” on college campuses but were clearly targeting anti-Zionism and criticisms of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people,” declared Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) during her opening remarks at the hearing.

Just months later Shafik resigned from her position.

Campus tension over Gaza has certainly not subsided since then.

Last week, protesters dumped cement into the sewage system in Columbia’s International Affairs Building and sprayed the business school’s Henry R. Kravis Hall with red paint.

An anonymous video shared across social media said the protesters had targeted the buildings on the anniversary of Hind Rajab‘s death. Rajab was a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces while fleeing a Gaza City neighborhood with her family.

“One year ago, the world failed Hind,” the social post reads. “But today and everyday we owe Hind, all our martyrs, and ourselves, action.”

“This incident is deplorable, disruptive and deeply unsettling– as our campus is a space we cherish for learning, teaching, and working– and it will not be tolerated,” wrote Columbia Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo in an email to the School of International and Public Affairs community.

The same day that the students announced their lawsuit against the school, the Trump administration announced that it was opening antisemitism investigations into five U.S. universities, including Columbia. The Justice Department also announced the creation of a new task force to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.”

“Today, the Department is putting universities, colleges, and K-12 schools on notice: this administration will not tolerate continued institutional indifference to the wellbeing of Jewish students on American campuses,” said Trump’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor.

Trump also recently signed an executive order aimed at deporting non-citizen university students for protesting in support of Palestine.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” said Trump in a fact sheet. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

On the campaign trail, the president made it clear that he would target Palestine activists if elected. “If you get me elected, and you should really be doing this, if you get me re-elected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” Trump reportedly told a group of pro-Israel donors last May.

“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” he added.