Presidents Shafik and Rosenbury,
We, the undersigned South Asian alumni of Columbia University, stand in complete solidarity with the students holding the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and express our unwavering commitment to a free and liberated Palestine. We unequivocally support the actions, courage, and determination of the brave students who are part of this powerful demonstration. Risking and facing suspension, expulsion, loss of housing, deportation, termination of financial aid, and arrests, these students have liberated a part of the University. For the past three days, they have demonstrated their commitment to rebuking genocide, ending the occupation, and dismantling apartheid with conviction and clarity. As alumni we are incredibly proud of the efforts and tenacity of the student activists; this is the legacy we hoped to be part of.
We condemn, in the harshest possible terms, the administration's use of the New York Police Department to arrest students and disband their protest against Columbia University's investments in entities profiting from Israeli apartheid and occupation. This militarization of the campus, facilitated by the deployment of a police force that has repeatedly demonstrated violent and racist behavior, is repulsive and deeply alarming. We are disgusted by the administration’s shameful use of force, a continuation of its morally bankrupt approach to ‘public safety’ that greenlights the surveillance and brutalization of its own Black and brown students.
President Shafik, through her sanctioning of NYPD involvement, has demonstrated that the university's rhetoric of diversity is merely a smokescreen meant to serve the continued subjugation of oppressed and colonized people. Columbia’s ideological and financial investment in Zionism is consistent with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, both of which are also reflected in the university’s ties with supporters of Hindu Nationalism in India. Both Zionism and Hindutva are violent ideologies that share principles of Islamophobia, ethnocentrism, and ethno-supremacy. They are two sides of the same fascist coin and we, without exception, vehemently reject them both.
Columbia’s complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people is a clear display of its disregard for anti-colonial values and continued allegiance to its imperial and colonial legacy. By refusing to divest from Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide, Columbia has demonstrated that it serves to launder and reinforce ideological and financial interests of the ruling class.
Minouche Shafik's testimony to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, during which she conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, provided an accurate snapshot of how the university eagerly capitulates to forces of white supremacy at the expense of all oppressed people. Deeply embedded in a nexus of corporate and political interests, Columbia constantly finds itself at crossroads with the communities whose inclusion in its 'diverse' student body it repeatedly boasts of. Enough is enough.
We pledge to withhold donations, boycott alumni events, and decline invitations to administration-run events until the university meets all of these demands as articulated by both students and alumni:
Divest all finances, including the endowment, from corporations that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Reverse the unfair suspension of Columbia/Barnard Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace.
Reverse the recent suspension and eviction of all student activists.
Provide amnesty to all encampment participants from legal and institutional disciplinary action.
Protect student activists from faculty members, administrators, and other Columbia affiliates who have harassed anti-genocide student activists and/or incited violence against them.
Until a Liberated Palestine and a Liberated Kashmir! Inquilab Zindabad!
South Asian Alumni
