Columbia, Barnard ordered to refrain from turning over student disciplinary records
NEW YORK — A federal judge on Thursday ordered Columbia University and Barnard College to refrain from complying with a Republican-led House committee’s demand for student disciplinary records, at least until he holds a hearing next week on a request by Mahmoud Khalil and other students for a temporary restraining order.
Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student arrested and facing deportation for his role in campus protests against Israel, along with other students identified by pseudonyms, filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking to block the House Committee on Education and the Workforce from obtaining disciplinary records for students involved in demonstrations.
US District Judge Arun Subramanian set a hearing in the case for Tuesday.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan against the schools, the committee and its chairman, Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, seeks a permanent injunction barring Congress from forcing the schools to provide the records and the universities from complying with the demand.
The committee sent a letter last month demanding that Columbia and Barnard provide the records or risk billions of dollars in federal funding.
The judge’s order came as Columbia faces a deadline this week from the Trump administration to comply with demands for sweeping changes in order to receive federal funding, including $400 million already pulled over allegations that it failed to protect students and staff from antisemitism amid the wave of pro-Palestinian protests.
The list includes the school placing its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership for at least five years, adopting a new definition of antisemitism and overhauling its admissions policies.
On Thursday, a group of history professors at Columbia wrote a letter to the school’s leadership urging them to reject what they called “authoritarian” efforts to dominate colleges and universities.
“Should this control be realized, here or elsewhere, it would make any real historical scholarship, teaching and intellectual community impossible,” the professors wrote in the letter, which was shared on social media. They argued the administration’s interventions “jeopardize our ability to think honestly about the past, the present and the future.”
The academics also gave a brief history lesson in the letter, noting past struggles over academic freedom at the school, including the dismissal of faculty during World War I and a student who was expelled in 1936 after leading anti-Nazi protests. However, they warned, this latest battle is “fundamentally different” from these prior conflicts.
When asked to comment on the professors’ letter, Columbia University officials referred to a statement posted Wednesday by Katrina Armstrong, the school’s president.
In it, Armstrong said the school would continue to “engage in constructive dialogue with our federal regulators,” including on efforts to address antisemitism, harassment and discrimination, but it would “not waver from our principles and the values of academic freedom and free expression that have guided this institution for the last 270 years.”
“Legitimate questions about our practices and progress can be asked, and we will answer them. But we will never compromise our values of pedagogical independence, our commitment to academic freedom, or our obligation to follow the law,” she wrote.
