In the spring of 2024, Pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University found one formidable ally in the Senate of the UniversityA body that became authoritative about the protest policy of the campus in the aftermath of violent police interventions decades earlier.
Now the powerful senate is under a microscope. University managers and managers, who would like to recover authority and answer criticism from the Trump government, have ordered an evaluation of the Senate, a movement that could fundamentally change and define control of student protests and disciplinary measures.
Some managers and managers have blamed the Senate for postponing and hindering discipline of Pro-Palestinian demonstrators who violate university rules, and some seem to have accused the 111-person chosen body of anti-Semitism. Senators fiercely refute those charges and say that the Senate stands up for the rules of Columbia and proud tradition of protest against external pressure.
“What this looks like is an attempt to concentrate power,” said Joseph Howley, a Faculty of Senator and Professor in the classics who supported the Pro-Palestinian demonstrations, of the assessment. He added that he thought it was part of “of the decades -long process to make American universities operate more as companies with a profit motive.”
The effort to possibly reduce the authority of the UniversitySsaat represents the latest convulsion in a year of demonstrations and dismissal, and it is amid the targeting of Columbia through the White House that the school has stripped $ 400 million in federal funds. It concerns some of the most important figures at the university: Claire Shipmanthe acting president; Jonathan Lavine, the Emeritus President of the Board of Directors; And Jeanine D’Armiento, a pulmonologist who has essentially run the Senate in the last six years as chairman of her executive committee.
“It’s a 50-year-old institution and there was no viewing in that period,” Dean Dakoliassaid a trustee, said during a Town-Hall meeting in April about the assessment.
This last check follows accusations of a congress committee led by the Republicans that the Senate was “instrumental in the thwarts of discipline against anti-Semitic and pro-terror behavioral perspectors”-the description of Pro-Palestinian demonstrators who were arrested when the police are the occupation of a campus building.
Although a Task Force of the Trump administration has demanded that Columbia makes a series of changes to get the $ 400 million back, the decision to revise and perhaps overhaul, the Senate continues Who demand. It emphasizes the broad ideological gap between the left -wing faculty members who dominate and protect the Senate and the managers, who are usually rich entrepreneurs and lawyers with a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that the university functions.
There also seems to be at least an agreement between the managers of Columbia and those in Washington who feel that support for the student protests was anti -Semitic, a position that senators of Angers University, who feel they are becoming unclear.
In February 2024, for example, Mr Lavine sent an SMS message to David Greenwald, co-chairman of the board, while the managers wanted to strengthen the rules for protests, according to documents obtained by the House Committee on Education and Workforce and published in an October 2024 report. (Mr Lavine is now the co-chairman of the committee who is looking for a permanent president of Columbia.)
The managers wanted to limit strictly when, where and how protests could take place – limitations of “time, place and way” – but were afraid that the Senate, who is responsible for discipling protesters who brought rules, would not maintain it.
Mr Lavine wrote in the report that if managers imposed such restrictions “and then have the anti -Semites about the Senate who is responsible for discipline and enforcement, it will also fail.” He was also worried, he wrote, that the Senate “Jews would discipline disproportionately disproportionate.” Mr. Greenwald replied that the university president insisted on giving the Senate a chance, although some managers had pushed back.
At another point, two deans who had negotiated with the demonstrators on behalf of the administration about how the Senate was almost as pro-Palestijn was in Outlook as the apartheid of the Columbia University Divest, or CUAD, the student movement that a tent camping on campus has established last spring.
“Senate sounds like Cuad,” the dean of Columbia College, Josef Sorett, written In a 5 May 2024, SMS message to Jelani Cobb, the Journalism School Dean, a few days after demonstrators had occupied a campus building, Hamilton Hall. “It’s a spider,” replied Mr. Cobb.
Mr. Cobb said on Tuesday that the lyrics were a joke and did not reflect the Deans’ Look at the Senate.
A spokeswoman for Columbia and Mr. Lavine refused to comment. Mr. Sorett did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Comparative senators’ unrest, the managers and Mrs. Shipman have used vague language to explain why they called the assessment and what it intends to achieve.
“Many express their concern that the Senate is not as representative of the entire community as we need,” wrote Mrs. Shipman in A letter of April 18 Announcing the assessment, although it has not specified the source of those worries.
Several hundred Columbia students, faculty members and alumni have one petition call that the senate is being reformed. They mention numerous factors, including the presence of two members of the Senate Committee who determine the protest rules of the university on the Pro-Palestinian camps. The petition also accuses that the leader of the Senate gave short shrift to one presentation About the school anti -Semitis report Last fall and let students who had experienced anti -Semitism did not speak.
ASSAF ZEEVI, a professor of business who signed the petition, said that he was of the opinion that the Senate was inefficient and possibly biased in handling student discipline and protest rules at a time when clear rules and consequences were needed.
“This large structure – this colossus, in fact – can hardly move,” he said. “It was unable to respond in an agile and fast way.”
But in interviews, members of the Senate rejected the claim that they are anti -Semitic or that they have damaged the university. Instead, they said that their attitude reflects the protest -friendly rules of Columbia and the constituencies that they were chosen to represent.
“The Senate has spent a lot of time asking that the rules are being followed,” said Dr. D’Armiento, chairman of the Executive Committee. “And we don’t see ourselves taking any direction. Maybe people don’t believe us, but it’s all about the statutes for us.”
The current conflict was in the making for years. The Senate was made with broad responsibilities that go much further than those of a typical faculty of Senate. It was given substantial control over the rules that arrange protests to try to prevent a repeat of the crisis that the university endangered in the 1960s, and it includes students, employees, alumni and managers, alongside professors.
While the President of Columbia should chair the Senate, presidents have taken that role in the past decade. The chairman of the Executive Committee of the Senate became her most powerful figure.
Because Columbia was unable to control the protests last year, the relationship between the Senate and the Trustees was increasingly loaded. Instead of working with the administration, the Senate often acted as a voice of opposition to the aloud successions of the school, different senators said.
Dr. D’Armiento, for example, led a team of faculty negotiators during the camps and destructive occupation of Hamilton HallHoping to forge a compromise with the students.
The Senate did not support Police intervention To end the Pro-Palestinian camp last year. It insisted on the discipline of the demonstrator by a judicial council run by the Senate, which gives students the right to lawyers, instead of handing in discipline to managers.
The demonstrators who took over Hamilton Hall were only deported 11 months later, a delay that Columbia placed in the cross-havers of the congress and the Trump government. Dr. D’Armiento said that the main cause of the delay was an administrative delay to get things to the Senate. She noted that the senate one solution To combat “anti -Semitism and all forms of hatred” in February.
Jim Applegate, an astronomical professor and member of the Senate for 28 years, said that the assessment was mentioned because “the high and mighty are pissed off.”
The 21 managers of Columbia probably have the authority to dissolve the Senate. But such an extreme step, warning senators, would be seen as an administrative coup.
Some critics have more subtle reforms in mind, such as term limits, or changing the body composition. Giving more representation to the medical school and other wealth whose subsidies, for example, have been cut by President Trump, would perhaps encourage a more cooperation relationship with Trustees, according to the Stand Columbia SocietyA group of alumni and former faculty members who support reforms. It can also push the Senate to the political center.
The tension about the future of the Senate has been tangible on campus, with students and faculty members who demanded answers from managers in the heated town hall in April. Students’ senators recently wrote a letter to the campus that begged their classmates to stand with them while they fight to retain a voice in the university’s affairs.
“This is our duty to maintain the democratic bodies that were institutionalized five decades ago,” said Bruce Goumain, one of the three leaders of the Student Affairs of the Senate. “It is our responsibility; that’s why we were chosen.”
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