Palestinian students, faculty and alumni are suing Columbia University for discrimination, alleging the school fostered a “hostile campus climate” and unfairly targeted them with disciplinary investigations following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
In the lawsuit, filed Monday in New York County court, four students and one faculty member argue that Columbia deliberately engaged in “discriminatory conduct” — including hiring private investigators to identify pro-Palestine students involved in a “Resistance 101” teach-in.
The group also claims that the university failed to support Palestinian students and staff who reported misconduct, which they said included “unrelenting doxxing” and harassment from other campus community members.
“Columbia has discriminated against its students, faculty, and staff who are of Palestinian origin through its failure to adequately protect its community members from harassment by others, and indeed, actively encouraged such harassment,” the filing reads.
The complaint condemns the university’s treatment of pro-Palestine protesters, including those who established an on-campus encampment on April 17, 2024. A day after demonstrators occupied the lawn, the New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested more than 100 encampment participants at Columbia’s request.
A second encampment emerged in Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, a site previously occupied in protests against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, on April 30, 2024.
The day before, Minouche Shafik, the university’s president at the time, had said in a statement that the demonstrations had “created an unwelcoming environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty.”
NYPD quickly cleared the Hamilton Hall encampment and arrested around 100 more encampment participants. Student protesters were also subject to disciplinary action from the school, which included “multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions.”
The lawsuit details how Palestinian students were “absolutely terrified to come to campus” because of the university’s treatment of protesters, specifically citing Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s March 2025 arrest of encampment leader and negotiator Mahmoud Khalil — a green card-holding graduate student
At the time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the arrest, adding that “we will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
The plaintiffs in Monday’s lawsuit criticized the university for establishing a presence of outside law enforcement on campus, which one plaintiff said caused her “severe and escalating anxiety.”
The complaint highlights Columbia’s compliance with directives from the Trump administration — which called on the university to quash the protests. In 2025, the government canceled $400 million in federal funding toward the school, stating that Columbia had exhibited “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
Columbia later settled with the administration, agreeing to pay the federal government $220 million to restore the lost funding.
The university declined to comment on Monday’s filing.
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