Dear President Shafik,

We, the Black alumni of Columbia University, write to you with urgency, concern, and complete solidarity with the students who erected the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. We condemn — in the strongest possible terms — your authorization of NYPD to “begin clearing the encampment” through the mass arrests of students who are rightfully expressing their dissent against the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and the University’s financial and academic involvement with the Israeli apartheid state. Furthermore, we continue to stand in solidarity with all the members of our community who have been subject to months of brutal treatment, neglect, and harassment from your administration, faculty, and their fellow students.

Throughout your presidency, you have often expressed an intention to prioritize student safety, yet we fail to see how subjecting student activists — many of whom are people of color — to NYPD brutality and custody can, in any way, be understood to support the wellbeing of those students. We reject the false propagation that NYPD presence on campus serves to make students safer. Rather than protecting your students, you have made them the targets of state-sanctioned violence. We consider the administration’s actions over the past 48 hours to be wholly in line with the Islamophobic, xenophobic, Anti-Palestinian, and Anti-Black approach to “public safety” that the University continues to implement. Over the past 6 months alone, student activists have been evicted, hospitalized, doxxed, and further traumatized by the conditions you have created on campus. Many of them stand at the intersection of multiple identities and systems of oppression, and their traumas are further compounded by the academic, legal, and violent actions you are taking against them. Nonetheless, in your most recent statement, you made eager mention of Columbia’s “storied history” of on-campus protest. We find it astoundingly hypocritical for you to make reference to the student movements of 1968 while ultimately reanimating this history by echoing the repressive campaigns of those historical administrations and Presidents. Need we remind you, the very events that Columbia so enjoys leveraging as a marketing tool— whether through 50th anniversary remembrances or through the creation of campus spaces such as the Malcolm X Lounge — began with an unsanctioned gathering at the Sundial. We condemn your weaponization of this history to imply that current students are somehow out of bounds. Now, as then, the administration and President refuse to acknowledge the demands of students and leave them no recourse but to make their demands heard through the only means left available to them. This includes encampments and occupations. The University has never been and is not currently responsive to any form of sanctioned dissent. We support the right of students to make their demands heard by any means necessary.

We call for total amnesty from legal and disciplinary action for all encampment participants and recently suspended students as well as the complete financial and academic divestment of the University, including endowment, from all corporations that participate in and profit from the occupation of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. We further refuse to allow the immense courage and commitment of these student organizers, in the face of historical injustice and unfathomable loss of life and land, to be later subsumed into a marketing and propaganda tool for a University that persecutes its students for the same political action it readily co-opts. In condemnation, we commit to withholding all financial and cultural contributions to the University until these demands are met.

From Gaza to Harlem to Khartoum, we reject occupation and oppression.

In solidarity,

Black Alumni of Columbia University