Franz Kafka’s masterpiece “The Trial” begins when Josef K discovers that “one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”
What follows is the story of his desperate attempt to navigate a nightmarishly opaque bureaucracy — and the bleak results. Like Josef K, Columbia students awoke one morning to find themselves at the mercy of the university’s new Office of Institutional Equity.
In recent weeks, the OIE sent dozens of warnings to students telling them they were under investigation for alleged discriminatory harassment simply for engaging in pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus. Individual acts of protected political expression — social media posts, peaceful demonstrations, and op-eds in the student newspaper — were treated as creating a “hostile environment” for criticizing Israel, with accusations framed in expansive interpretations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
FIRE has since heard from a number of students lost in the maze of Columbia’s cryptic dispatches and confusing accusations, and one thing is clear: the OIE has cast a late-winter chill across campus.
These investigations can take months or even years, and leave students in fear of what they can and cannot do or say while they await the results.
Take the two Columbia seniors who were notified just months before graduation that they were under investigation and subject to expulsion for allegedly writing a student newspaper article signed by a consortium of pro-Palestinian student groups urging divestment from Israel. One student described the situation as “dystopian” and said she is now reluctant to speak out on the issue again. Even worse, the two students were targeted not because there was any evidence they’d actually authored the article, much less created a hostile environment by doing so, but merely because of their involvement with the pro-Palestinian student group consortium.
Another student contacted FIRE to report that they were afraid to return to campus because they feared the administration would retaliate against them for their previous advocacy with Students for Justice in Palestine.
Moreover, Columbia made national headlines this week when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained former student Mahmoud Khalil, who previously tried to fight the OIE. Though he had already successfully appealed the university’s disciplinary charges against him, federal agents showed up on his doorstep and hauled him off to an ICE detention center based on accusations that he led campus protest activities aligned with Hamas.
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Khalil reported that just before he was due to graduate this past December, the OIE buried him in allegations relating to social media posts with which he was uninvolved. Furthermore, when he stood up for himself and refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement, the university put a hold on his transcript and threatened to block his graduation — until he hired counsel, and the OIE seemed to temporarily back off. The timing of the ICE raid and the OIE’s investigation into Khalil leaves students and faculty with more questions than answers, especially as he has still not yet been criminally charged for anything and is facing deportation.
While Columbia’s OIE is charged with addressing claims of unlawful discrimination and harassment, it cannot do so by employing an overly broad definition of harassment that stretches the meaning beyond recognition. Yet the OIE has done exactly that in interpreting Title VI harassment to include protected criticism of Israel, suppressing political activism under the guise of maintaining a “safe” environment by defining speech against another country as possible discriminatory harassment if “directed at or infused with discriminatory comments about persons from, or associated with, that country.”
Is it possible for such speech to be part of a pattern of discriminatory harassment? Yes. It’s also possible for it not to be harassment. The way Columbia is treating such speech, though, makes that impossible to discern.
The OIE’s needlessly murky investigatory process is also deeply troubling. Students report being left in the dark about the specifics of the charges against them, and being required to sign a nondisclosure agreement in order to see the evidence. In other words, they can’t talk to anyone about their case or get help until after it’s too late and the OIE has already decided their case and potentially sealed their fate.
These investigations can take months or even years, and leave students in fear of what they can and cannot do or say while they await the results. When students are forced to endure lengthy investigations that may result in serious sanctions such as suspension and expulsion, it’s obvious that the process, even if it results in a student’s favor, is the punishment.
The original title of “The Trial” was Der Prozess, or literally “The Process,” because the true horror Josef was forced to confront was that of a Byzantine and convoluted process custom-built to crush dissent. If nothing else, we can perhaps thank Columbia, like so many schools before it, for bringing classic literature to life.