A group of Columbia University grads tore up their diplomas on campus over the weekend to protest the school and the feds’ detention of former student and anti-Israel demonstration leader Mahmoud Khalil.
The rally, which took place during the Ivy League university’s annual Alumni Day celebration Saturday, included students as well as a few dozen graduates of the Ivy League institution’s School of International and Public Affairs — with the crowd chanting, “Free Palestine!”
“It’s not easy to do this, with none of us doing this lightly. There’s no joy in this,” said Amali Tower, a 2009 SIPA graduate who spoke at the protest and ripped up her diploma, to NBC News.
“I’m not a proud alumni at all, and instead I want to stand with the students, and I want to stand with Palestinians, and I want to stand with immigrants who are being rounded up and harassed, oppressed and deported as we speak,” said Tower, who is herself an immigrant.
The demonstration came amid a period of prolonged turmoil at Columbia, which just saw its board of trustees push interim university President Katrina Armstrong from her post last week during a battle with the Trump administration.
The White House has demanded the school institute a total ban on facial coverings worn by campus protesters or risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid.
While the university acquiesced to a list of demands put forth by the administration’s new Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism last week — under threat of losing the $400 million in funding — Armstrong had privately downplayed the policy changes to faculty.
She was in the job barely seven months after taking the place of former President Minouche Shafik, who resigned in August following months of campus unrest that included disruptive weeks-long encampment protests and the violent takeover of Hamilton Hall, where dozens were arrested.
After Armstrong’s ouster, CU board of trustees co-Chair and SIPA alumni Claire Shipman was named acting president, Columbia said in a statement, adding that she will serve until the board “completes its presidential search.”
But the leadership shakeup did little to quell the Alumni Day protesters’ concerns.
“It’s another figurehead that the board of trustees is going to use to do their bidding. I don’t think [the selection] matters,” said a woman named Hannah, a 2024 alumna who ripped up her diploma, to the outlet at Saturday’s protest.
“I think Minouche Shafik did an awful job. I think the interim President Armstrong did an awful job. I think Shipman is going to do an awful job because they’re not listening to their students. They’re listening to the board of trustees,” she said.
Khalil — a 30-year-old native of Syria of Palestinian descent and a citizen of Algeria — was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at his university-owned apartment March 8 after back-to-back anti-Israel protests at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College earlier this month.
One of the protests, held at Barnard’s Milstein Library, featured violent propaganda fliers that purportedly came directly from the “Hamas Media Office,” including one pamphlet titled, “Our Narrative … Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” which justified the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people.
Khalil, a spokesman for the anti-Israel group Columbia Apartheid United Divest, was brought to an ICE detention center in Louisiana and is waging a court battle against the Trump administration, which is looking to deport the green-card and student-visa holder.
The newest justification behind the push to boot him out of the country is that he allegedly hid ties to the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees — UNRWA — on his green-card application.
UNRWA was infamously stripped of tens of millions of dollars in federal funding after an explosive report that some of its members took part in the Oct. 7 terror attacks.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that Khalil — who was a driving force behind many of the anti-Israel protests, building takeovers and encampments that have plagued Columbia for more than a year — was involved in activities tied to Hamas.
Saturday’s protest saw current and former students chanting and brandishing signs that read “Free Palestine!” and “Free Mahmoud Khalil!”
A current SIPA student named Sarryeh who is friends with Khalil expressed sorrow for his ongoing legal woes.
“Mahmoud is a very loved community member, and the fact that he was taken away from his eight-months-pregnant wife and from all of us here at SIPA is devastating,” she told the outlet.
“It’s hard to go to class, it’s hard to come here and not think of him.”
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