Columbia University has expelled or suspended some students who took over a campus building during pro-Palestinian protests last spring and temporarily revoked the diplomas of others who have since graduated, officials said Thursday.
The university said in a campus-wide email that a judicial board brought a range of sanctions against students who occupied Hamilton Hall last spring to protest the war in Gaza.
Columbia did not provide a breakdown of how many students were expelled, were suspended or had their degrees revoked, but it said the outcomes were based on an “evaluation of the severity of behaviors.”
The culmination of the monthslong investigative process comes as the university is reeling from the arrest of a well-known Palestinian campus activist, Mahmoud Khalil, by federal immigration authorities last Saturday in what President Donald Trump said would be the “first of many” such detentions.
At the same time, the Trump administration has stripped the university of more than $400 million in federal funds over what it calls a failure to combat campus antisemitism. Congressional Republicans have pointed specifically to a failure to discipline students involved in the Hamilton Hall seizure as proof of inaction by the university.
The building occupation followed a tent encampment that inspired a wave of similar demonstrations at college campuses across the country.
On April 30, 2024, a smaller group of students and their allies barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall with furniture and padlocks in a major escalation of campus protests.
At the request of university leaders, hundreds of New York police stormed onto campus the following night, arresting dozens of people involved in both the occupation and the encampment.
A New York judge is deciding what's next for Mahmoud Khalil, who helped organize pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University in 2024. Protesters gathered outside federal court demanding his release. Khalil was taken to a detention center in Louisiana and will stay there for now, though his attorneys want him returned to New York. NBC New York's Erica Byfield reports.
At a court hearing in June, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said it would not pursue criminal charges for 31 of the 46 people initially arrested on trespassing charges inside the administration building.
But the students still faced disciplinary hearings and possible expulsion from the university. Some faced interim suspensions.
The final sanctions announced Thursday followed a lengthy process that involved hearings for each student led by Columbia's long-running Judicial Board.
New NYPD bodycam video showed officers cut through barricades at Hamilton Hall on the Columbia University campus, as well as what happened once they got inside, confronting dozens of protesters who had broken into the building. There were also new details on who was arrested, with 40% of protesters taken in at City College and Columbia having no affiliation with either school, a source said. NBC New York Andrew Siff reports.
Separately a newly-created disciplinary board has brought a flurry of new cases against students — including Mahmoud Khalil — who have expressed criticism of Israel, triggering alarm among free speech advocates. Khalil was not among the protesters accused of seizing Hamilton Hall.
The expulsion announcement drew praise from some faculty members, including Gil Zussman, chair of the electrical engineering department and member of Columbia's Task Force on Antisemitism.
“Finally demonstrating that breaking university rules has consequences is an important first step towards going back to the core missions of research and teaching,” he said in a post on the social platform X.
