NEW YORK: Columbia University has suspended more than 65 students for their role in a pro-Palestinian demonstration that forced the shutdown of the main campus library, a school official said on Friday.

The students were placed on interim suspension and will be prohibited from taking their final exams or entering campus except to access their dormitories, the university official said.

Columbia also barred 33 other people from campus, including students from other colleges and alumni who took part in the protest, according to the official. “When rules are violated and when our academic community is purposefully disrupted, that is a considered choice one with real consequences,” the Columbia official said.

Scores of students were arrested after seizing part of the school’s main library on Wednesday in one of the biggest pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus since last year’s wave of protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Officers of the New York Police Department were called to campus to quell the protest at the request of university officials.

The demonstration came amid negotiations between Columbia’s board of trustees and the Trump administration, which announced in March it was penalising the university over previous pro-Palestinian protests by canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. There was no immediate reaction to news of the suspensions from student activists representing the protesters.

Organisers of Wednesday’s demonstration repeated their long-standing demands that the university cease investing any of its $14.8 billion endowment in weapons makers and other companies that support Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories.

Tufts student released

A Tufts University student from Turkiye who was held for over six weeks in an immigration detention centre in Louisiana after co-writing an opinion piece criticising her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza was released from custody on Friday after a federal judge granted her bail.

US District Judge William Sessions during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont, ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the center of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.

The judge said Ozturk, whose arrest in Massachusetts in March was captured in a viral video, had raised a substantial claim that the sole reason she was being detained was “simply and purely the expression that she made or shared in the op-ed in violation of her First Amendment rights.” “Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens,” Sessions said. “Any one of them may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center.”

Ozturk, who appeared before the judge virtually from the Louisiana detention facility, could be seen hugging one of her attorneys after the judge ordered her release from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody.

She was released hours later, her legal team said. The judge will take up arguments in her underlying lawsuit at a later hearing.

Published in Dawn, May 11th, 2025