In the spring of 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University found a formidable ally in the university senate, a body that was given authority over campus protest policy in the aftermath of violent police interventions decades earlier.
Now, the powerful senate finds itself under a microscope. University administrators and trustees, eager to reclaim authority and answer criticism from the Trump administration, have ordered a review of the senate, a move that could fundamentally alter Columbia and redefine control of student protests and disciplinary action.
Some trustees and administrators have blamed the senate for delaying and obstructing discipline of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who broke university rules, and some appear to have accused the 111-member elected body of antisemitism. Senators hotly rebut those charges and say that the senate is standing up for Columbia’s rules and proud tradition of protest against outside pressure.
“What this looks like is an attempt to concentrate power,” Joseph Howley, a faculty senator and classics professor who supported the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, said of the review. He added that he felt it was part “of the decades-long process of trying to make American universities operate more like for-profit corporations.”
The effort to potentially diminish the university senate’s authority represents the latest convulsion in a year of demonstrations and resignations, and it comes amid the targeting of Columbia by the White House, which has stripped the school of $400 million in federal funds. It involves some of the most important figures at the university: Claire Shipman, the acting president; Jonathan Lavine, the emeritus chair of the board of trustees; and Jeanine D’Armiento, a pulmonologist who has essentially run the senate as chair of its executive committee for the last six years.
“It is a 50-year-old institution, and it has not been looked at in that period of time,” Dean Dakolias, a trustee, said at an April town-hall meeting about the review.
This latest scrutiny follows accusations from a Republican-led congressional committee last year that the senate was “instrumental in thwarting discipline against antisemitic and pro-terror conduct violators” — its description of pro-Palestinian protesters who were arrested when the police ended the occupation of a campus building.
While a Trump administration task force has demanded that Columbia make a series of changes to get the $400 million back, the decision to review, and perhaps overhaul, the senate goes beyond those demands. It highlights the broad ideological divide between the left-leaning faculty members who dominate the senate and want to protect it and the trustees, who are mostly wealthy businesspeople and lawyers with a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the university functions.
There also appears to be at least some agreement between Columbia’s trustees and those in Washington who feel that support for the student protests was antisemitic, a position that angers university senators, who feel they are being slurred.
In February 2024, for example, Mr. Lavine sent a text message to David Greenwald, the board’s co-chairman, as the trustees sought to strengthen rules on protests, according to documents obtained by the House Committee on Education and Workforce and published in an October 2024 report. (Mr. Lavine is now the co-chair of the committee searching for a permanent Columbia president.)
The trustees wanted to strictly limit when, where and how protests could take place — setting “time, place and manner” restrictions — but were worried that the senate, which is in charge of disciplining protesters who break rules, would not enforce it.
Mr. Lavine wrote in the message that if administrators imposed such restrictions “and then have the antisemites on the Senate in charge of discipline and enforcing it, it will also fail.” He was also worried, he wrote, that the senate would “disproportionately discipline Jews.” Mr. Greenwald replied that the university president had insisted on giving the senate a chance, even though some trustees had pushed back.
At another point, two deans who had negotiated with the demonstrators on behalf of the administration joked about how the senate was almost as pro-Palestinian in outlook as Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, the student movement that established a tent encampment on campus last spring.
“Senate sounds like CUAD,” the dean of Columbia College, Josef Sorett, wrote in a May 5, 2024, text message to Jelani Cobb, the journalism school dean, a few days after protesters occupied a campus building, Hamilton Hall. “It’s a spinoff,” Mr. Cobb replied.
Mr. Cobb said on Tuesday that the texts were a joking exchange and did not reflect the deans’ view of the senate.
A Columbia spokeswoman and Mr. Lavine declined to comment. Mr. Sorett did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Compounding senators’ unease, the trustees and Ms. Shipman have used vague language in explaining why they have called for the review and what it intends to achieve.
“Many express concerns that the Senate is not as representative of the whole community as we need it to be,” Ms. Shipman wrote in an April 18 letter announcing the review, although she did not specify the source of those concerns.
Several hundred Columbia students, faculty members and alumni have signed a petition calling for the senate to be reformed. They cite a host of factors, including the presence of two members of the senate committee that sets the university’s protest rules at the pro-Palestinian encampments. The petition also charges that the leader of the senate gave short shrift to a presentation about the school’s antisemitism report last fall and did not let students who had experienced antisemitism speak.
Assaf Zeevi, a business school professor who signed the petition, said he felt that the senate was inefficient and potentially biased in its handling of student discipline and protest rules at a time when clear rules and consequences were needed.
“This big structure — this colossus, basically — can barely move,” he said. “It wasn’t able to react in an agile and swift way.”
But members of the senate, in interviews, rejected the allegation that they are antisemitic or that they have damaged the university. Instead, they said that their stance reflects the protest-friendly rules of Columbia and the constituencies they were elected to represent.
“The senate has spent a lot of time asking that the rules be followed,” said Dr. D’Armiento, the executive committee chair. “And we do see ourselves as not taking, actually, a side. Maybe people don’t believe us, but it’s all about the statutes for us.”
The current conflict was years in the making. The senate was crafted with broad responsibilities well beyond those of a typical faculty senate. It was given substantial control over the rules governing protests to try to avoid a repeat of the crisis that imperiled the university in the 1960s, and it includes students, staff members, alumni and administrators, in addition to professors.
While Columbia’s president is supposed to preside over the senate, for the past decade, presidents have stepped back from that role. The chair of the senate’s executive committee became its most powerful figure.
As Columbia found itself unable to control the protests last year, the relationship between the senate and the trustees became increasingly fraught. Rather than working with the administration, the senate often acted as a voice of resistance to the school’s crackdowns, several senators said.
Dr. D’Armiento, for example, led a team of faculty negotiators during the encampments and destructive occupation of Hamilton Hall, hoping to forge a compromise with the students.
The senate did not support police intervention to end the pro-Palestinian encampment last year. It pushed to handle protester discipline though a senate-run judicial board, which gives students the right to lawyers, rather than ceding discipline to administrators.
The protesters who took over Hamilton Hall were not expelled until 11 months later, a delay that put Columbia in the cross-hairs of Congress and the Trump administration. Dr. D’Armiento said the main cause of the slowdown was an administrative delay in getting the cases to the senate. She noted that the senate passed a resolution to “combat antisemitism and all forms of hate” in February.
Jim Applegate, an astronomy professor and member of the senate for 28 years, said the review had been called because “the high and mighty are pissed.”
Columbia’s 21 trustees most likely have the authority to dissolve the senate. But such an extreme step, senators warn, would be seen as an administrative coup.
Some critics have subtler reforms in mind, such as term limits, or changing the body’s composition. Giving more representation to the medical school and other faculties whose grants have been cut by President Trump, for example, would perhaps encourage a more collaborative relationship with trustees, according to the Stand Columbia Society, a group of alumni and former faculty members that is backing reforms. It might also nudge the senate toward the political center.
Tension over the future of the senate has been palpable on campus, with students and faculty members demanding answers from trustees at the heated town hall in April. Student senators wrote a letter recently to the campus imploring their classmates to stand with them as they fight to maintain a voice in the university’s affairs.
“This is our duty, to upkeep the democratic bodies that were institutionalized five decades ago,” said Bruce Goumain, one of three leaders of the senate’s student affairs committee. “It’s our responsibility; that’s why we were elected.”
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
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