In facilitating the arrest of its student and alumni on its own campus, Columbia has abdicated its mission as a university, writes Rebecca Ruth Gould [photo credit: Getty Images]
Few campuses on earth rival the diversity of Columbia University’s academic community, from tenured professors to first-year freshmen. With that diversity comes a heightened awareness of global imperialism and the harms the US empire inflicts on the world, including especially in Palestine. It’s part of the territory, literally and figuratively.
My years as a PhD student at Columbia University from 2007 to 2013 were a period of political as well as intellectual awakening. So when I learned that on March 7 2025 Columbia opened its doors to ICE and became the site of the first attempted deportation of a pro-Palestine student on explicitly speech-related grounds, I could not look away. I began to think about ways to mobilise the Columbia community to take action against the university’s complicity in suppressing protest against genocide.
I logged onto Columbia University’s alumni portal and searched the archives for posts about Mahmoud Khalil. All I could find was a query from a student asking if any action was being taken to oppose the deportation and shine a light on Columbia’s complicity. Considering that the alumni portal has over 400,000 users, the silence was deafening.
Hoping to break through the silence, I drafted a post myself. When I selected tags for the post, the terms that popped up were revealing. I typed “protest” and up popped “1968 protest,” as if the only protests worth referring to, the only ones that the Columbia administration was ready to acknowledge, had happened half a century ago.
Since then, Columbia and Barnard alumni have become more vocal, and an activist alumni network is being formed. Yet the tenured professors who shaped my world at Columbia have by and large remained silent. Where are my teachers? Why are they not speaking out against Khalil’s detention? Where is my Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS)?
During my time at MESAAS, the department was outspoken on political issues. A few years before I arrived, partly due to political tensions, it had been put into “receivership”: a technical term for what happens when the university administration threatens to dissolve a department. That spectre was revived again in a letter from the Trump administration demanding that Columbia put MESAAS into receivership again, a demand to which the Columbia administration has indicated it plans to assent.
Palestine was always at the centre of controversies within the department, and faculty during my time rarely hesitated to make clear their views. In part, I understand why things are different now: MESAAS is silent because they are under attack. Unfortunately, I doubt that their silence will save them.
MESAAS is the home of Joseph Massad, who was famously attacked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) during a congressional hearing in April 2024. So far, he has been silent with respect to the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. MESAAS is also the home of Hamid Dabashi who publishes prolifically on Palestine yet apparently has nothing to say about the suppression of pro-Palestine activists on his own campus.
This silence is by no means limited to my alma mater. Equally egregious is the case of Yale’s Law and Political Economy Project, which could not bring itself to condemn the summary dismissal of its own staff member Helyeh Doutaghi, following a slanderous AI-driven campaign against her by a pro-Israel website.
Nor does this silence apply to every tenured faculty member. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Joseph Howley, Marianne Hirsch, and Bruce Robbins have all spoken out. The faculty of Teachers College at Columbia University have issued a statement criticising “attacks by the federal government,” although without unfortunately mentioning Khalil.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnNone of these fill the gap left by the silence of MESAAS faculty, the only department with a dedicated area focus that includes the Middle East, and hence Palestine. How different might our current political predicament be if the majority of tenured faculty spoke out, rather than a small minority?
When I was at MESAAS, students and faculty both took pride in making the legacy of Edward Said, who was a professor at Columbia for forty years, our birthright. Yet the tenured professoriate of that department appears to have collectively lost their ability to speak publicly.
When the Columbia and Barnard chapters of the American Association of University Professors organised an emergency press conference to protest the arrest of Khalil, my own former department — where I was radicalised in the best sense of the term — was nowhere to be found. Equally conspicuous in its silence is the School of International and Public Affairs, from which Khalil graduated in 2024.
No doubt the silence of the professoriate is shaped by the punishment that was meted out to Columbia professors who stood in solidarity with the student encampments of 2024. For a few brief months, these encampments changed the face of university campuses around the world.
Student protests gave hope to survivors of the genocide in Gaza and demonstrated to them that the world stands against Israel’s aggression. Seven months after the encampment was dismantled, renowned Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke was forced to retire after she praised the student movement on Democracy Now!
Mahmoud Khalil: Punished Without a Crime
When asked with what crime Khalil was being charged, a White House official responded: “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.” The arrest of Khalil was a strategic choice. That Khalil was not even suspected of a crime makes his case a precedent-setting test of how far the administration can go in violating a green card holder’s constitutional rights.
Following his arrest, Khalil disappeared to a detention facility in Louisiana. He is now threatened with deportation for speech that, by the admission of the very administration that disappeared him, did not break the law. As Khalil emphasised in his first public statement, dictated to his lawyers from his detention, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.” In other words, Khalil’s “offence” was First Amendment-protected free speech.
Other deportations followed soon after Khalil’s arrest, of Palestinian Leqaa Kordia and the visa revocation of Columbia PhD student Ranjani Srinivasan, on apparently spurious grounds. Some of the issues raised by these targeted revocations pose problems similar to the persecution of Khalil, but the fact that Khalil was a green card holder means that his deportation would set an even bolder precedent in terms of immigrant rights and the scope of free speech.
As if to signal their full complicity with the agenda of the Trump administration, the very same week of these arrests, Columbia expelled, suspended, and revoked the degrees of twenty-two students who were alleged to have participated in the encampment during 2024.
Khalil was the lead negotiator for the student encampments with the Columbia administration. An advocate of peace, he has defended what he calls the “intertwined” rights of the Palestinian and the Jewish people. Married to a US citizen, he awaits the birth of his first son. The benefit for the administration of targeting someone with his profile is that it more effectively instils fear on all university campuses, terrorises immigrants, and coerces everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike, to think twice before speaking out for Palestine.
Historical Precedents
If Khalil is deported, this will enter the history books alongside the deportation of Emma Goldman in 1919, alongside 248 other “aliens” who were deported under the 1918 Alien Act, which allowed for the deportation of any non-citizen deemed to be an anarchist.
Goldman was never allowed to return to the US. She had to pass her last decades in Canada and France, far from her adopted homeland. Yet many Americans still remember Goldman as among their country’s greatest feminist activists and anarchists. Her story is a profoundly American one even though she was permanently banished for political reasons.
If the resistance to Khalil’s attempted deportation succeeds, and he can resume his life in the US, it will show that the administration overplayed its hand, and the courts refused to permit unlawful deportations.
Regardless of the outcome, the fight will continue. The Trump administration has already begun repeating this violation on other university campuses. So far only two university presidents, Michael Roth of Wesleyan University and Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton, have spoken out against these illegal practices and the violation of due process.
In facilitating the arrest of its students and alumni on its own campus, Columbia has abdicated its mission as a university. How many decades will pass before the courage of the students who sparked the protest movement against the Gaza genocide will be recognised like the antiwar protests of 1968?
While much of the tenured professoriate has become accustomed to compromising on their beliefs and looking the other way amid injustice, students will always be there to remind us of the need to speak out. May these students continue to rise up, as they have done since the genocide began. May they show the world that they refuse to allow genocide to be perpetrated in their name. May we learn from their example and someday become worthy of their sacrifice.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of numerous works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including Erasing Palestine (2023), Writers and Rebels (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). Her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, and The Nation and her writing has been translated into eleven languages
Follow Rebecca on Blue Sky @rrgould and subscribe to her Substack.