All posts tagged "Columbia University"

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are not allowing detained pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil to meet with his wife and newborn son, his attorneys told Mehdi Hasan's Zateo News.

Khalil missed his son's birth in April after being arrested by the Trump administration in March.

Reporter Prem Thakker posted to social media, "Mahmoud Khalil's legal team says ICE & private prison contractor GEO Group are refusing to let him have a contact visit with his wife & newborn baby. They traveled over 1500 miles—hoping Mahmoud could see and hold them for the first time since his arrest over 10 weeks ago."...

An appeals court judge got into a "heated exchange" with a lawyer for the federal government who couldn't answer whether two detained students with pro-Palestinian views had the right to free speech in the United States, according to NBC News.

Tufts University student Rumeysa Öztürk was plucked off the streets of a Boston suburb and detained by ICE after co-authoring an op-ed criticizing the university for its stance on the war in Gaza, while student Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested during his citizenship naturalization interview because he had organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

Öztürk remains in detention in Louisiana, while Mahdawi was released on bail last week....

New reporting in The New York Times detailed a major "clash" at the Department of Justice over a Columbia University investigation that led to a rebellion on the part of prosecutors in the civil rights division.

Top DOJ official Emil Bove III launched the investigation into students who "barged into" a building at the Columbia-affiliated Barnard College in February, according to The Times. The students were protesting the expulsion of students accused of disrupting a “History of Modern Israel” class, during which a security guard was allegedly attacked.

The primary target was "one particular student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest," the report said. "Prodded by Mr. Bove, prosecutors in the civil rights division were told to obtain a membership list of the group. Investigators, however, pushed back on those instructions because they were skeptical such a list even existed, given the amorphous nature of online forums, and even if it did, scrutinizing people for their membership seemed like a possible violation of their First Amendment rights," according to The Times's sources....

Columbia University could be close to giving in to President Donald Trump's demand that it enact certain measures aimed to combat anti-semitism on campus or lose $400 million in federal funding, according to reporting in The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration canceled funding earlier this month, but granted the university a "review period" and a deadline of Thursday to agree to a list of nine demands.

The demands include "banning masks, empowering campus cops and putting the school’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies under 'academic receivership,' which means it would no longer be controlled by the faculty," wrote reporters Douglas Belkin and Liz Essley Whyte....

Two weeks into the surge of pro-Palestine protests that swept college campuses across the United States, a new, heroic archetype captured the imagination of right-wing media influencers: throngs of casually attired “frat bros” who jeered and laughed at activists, and in one case, a solitary Black woman.

Fraternities — whose reputations have taken repeated hits for sexual assault, hazing deaths, drug dealing and alcohol abuse — are being lionized by prominent conservatives who celebrate them as a cultural counter-force to liberals whose anti-Israel protests and encampments have roiled dozens of American college campuses this spring.

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A study led by the University of Pennsylvania's Katherine Milkman suggests that university professors discriminate against women and minorities when choosing which students to mentor.