Student Editorial Boards Rebuke College Officials for Protest Decisions

As protests over the Israel-Hamas war have erupted at U.S. universities in recent months, student journalists have been reporting daily on campus debates over free speech, university investments and America’s involvement in the conflict.

Some student newspapers’ editorial boards have offered assessments of their campus disputes. They have opined on how administrators are responding to protesters and defended the rights of students to speak out. They have been particularly vocal about the threats of harassment and doxxing, which they have argued were stifling free speech on campus.

Here are a few of the editorials that have been written by student newspapers in the last couple of weeks as tensions have escalated at several campuses.

Columbia University

The editorial board at the Columbia Daily Spectator published an editorial just hours after Nemat Shafik, the university president, called the police onto campus last week to empty an encampment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. More than 100 students were arrested, causing an uproar among the school community.

In the strongly worded editorial, published on April 18 and titled “Is Columbia in crisis?”, the students on the editorial board wrote that the school administration had “failed to genuinely engage with its students, faculty, and staff,” and that the university was slowly becoming a “space of distrust, suppression, and fear.”