On behalf of the Sayegh family, I invite you to St. Peter's Catholic Church in DC this Sunday, May 5th, at 5 pm Mass to commemorate my dearly beloved sister, Lara, who I just tragically lost back home in Gaza at the young age of 18.

Address: 313 2nd St SE, Washington, DC 20003

I've covered campus activism since the late 90s. Nothing that's happening on campuses now -- sit ins, building takeovers, encampments -- is at all outside the standard vernacular of student protest.

What's unusual is administrators calling in riot cops on their own students

Friends, please, please amplify. The NYPD are now raiding City College. Reports are hundreds of cops. Please, I know that what happened at Columbia tonight is sickening--but this is Part II. And our @cuny students are largely working class students of color.

To the uni administrators mobilizing police w a history of brutality to silence students: May your alum stop donating. May new students stop enrolling. May rankings drop due to safety. May you gain notoriety for all the wrong reasons.

This is not how you foster academic freedom.

Per E - jelani cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, threatened with arrest if he, or any other journalists, leave the Pulitzer building now. ~10:30pm

Police were quite literally throwing tables and pushing students down the stairs until one passed out. Inviting the NYPD onto campus at Columbia University University has both destroyed more property and endangered more people than the original occupation of the building.

The student journalists and the Deans of journalism at Columbia are being told that they cannot leave Pulitzer (the School of Journalism building) or they're being arrested. (reported by WKCR). Incredible.

A letter from Columbia University President Nemat Shafik showed that she requested NYPD presence on campus until May 17, two days after commencement is scheduled to take place

WKCR is reporting that NYPD will have a PERMANENT presence on columbia’s campus through the remaining school year, including graduation

God protect these students. The amount of force arrayed against their nonviolent protest is obscene.

I am outraged by the level of police presence called upon nonviolent student protestors on Columbia and CCNY’s campuses. As an educator who has first hand experience with the over-policing of our schools, this is personal to me.

Arrests underway on 114th as NYPD clears protesters from the area surrounding campus. They’re shoving people into buildings and blocking the doors. NYPD has kicked all legal observers out of the area.

Faculty Statement on Imminent Police Action at Columbia University
The American Association of University Professors, Columbia University Chapter
For immediate release: April 30, 2024, 8:00pm

At this hour, the NYPD is massing on barricaded streets outside the gates of Columbia

NYPD advances on us and crowd

Never take 'democracy' for granted.

Thinking that this would make a great t-shirt.

Cannot overstate how profoundly ignorant & dangerous this is. Intifada is the Arabic word for uprising. When Egyptians & Tunisians launched intifadas against their dictators the world celebrated. That folks are offended by Palestinian calls for liberation is telling & disturbing.

In case the team of crack philologists working for President Biden and his ever-nuanced comms team left their copies at home, here’s the relevant entry from the 4th edition of Hans Wehr’s “A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic,” which most scholars in the field treat as the standard:

I ask this with utmost sincerity, does the White House have a single Arabic speaking person who saw this before it went out because y’all…that’s an Arabic word. Straight up a word. Like, the American Revolution, translated in Arabic, was an intifada. Here’s more…I just wow.

Hi Columbia University I won a DuPont award in 2022– an accolade from your journalism department that celebrates capturing and reporting historical moments and investigations. But today I’m being denied access to Columbia University’s campus to report on the student movement. Let press in