We were there from the beginning. Ted Schmiedeler, WKCR radio station manager, and I, Lara-Nour Walton, Reporting Deputy of Columbia Daily Spectator’s audio team, appeared at dawn on April 17 to watch as students in solidarity with Gaza made history — methodically pitching 50-some matching green tents on Columbia’s East Butler Lawn.
In the next weeks, we remained in place, documenting the astounding growth of an anti-war movement and the following NYPD crackdown — authorised by the Columbia University administration, Board of Trustees, and non-Columbia affiliated billionaires.
The April 19 mass arrests. The occupation of Hamilton Hall. The brutal NYPD sweeps. We were there for all of it — with WKCR’s staff working 18-hour days to broadcast live.
So, naturally, we returned, ready to report, when we got word that Columbia activists had once again convened on the lawn for the May 31 Revolt4Rafah encampment.
But, by then, it seems that the school had tired of safeguarding First Amendment principles on campus — principles that the ACLU says are intrinsic to “academic freedom and free inquiry.”
Columbia's cowardly investigation
On June 28, Schmiedeler and I received a disturbing email informing us that the university had opened an investigation into our “alleged involvement” in the May 31 demonstration.
“I was initially in disbelief. I thought it was a mistake,” said Schmiedeler whose dogged journalistic efforts garnered mass media attention throughout the student demonstrations. The notice of investigation came from Omar Torres, an employee at the private consulting firm Grand River Solutions, which, in the past, has mishandled a college sexual harassment case.
The third-party contractor has not just been tasked with disciplining pro-Palestine protesters at Columbia. The University of Michigan also hired Torres to pursue disciplinary action against students for participating in a November sit-in. According to one Michigan student, this may have been in “violation of federal privacy laws.”
Schmiedeler and I emailed Torres, providing evidence that we were at the encampment in a strictly newsgathering capacity and acting identically to our colleagues who had not received notice of the investigation.
“I slept outside like in previous encampments. I took meals and edited audio in the area the student demonstrators established as the press area. There was practically no difference [from my conduct at previous encampments], except this time I was investigated,” said Schmiedeler.
For over a month, the school refused to remove us from their investigation, a decision that “surprised” and “troubled” Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, and Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia Journalism School.
“The conflation of protest activities (authorised or not) with journalistic ones has the potential to deter and impede students from engaging in journalistic activities that are not merely legitimate but of substantial value to our community,” they asserted in a private letter to Torres, which was shared with The New Arab and authorised for re-printing.
Then, on Sunday, August 4, at 9:45 pm, just as this piece was being prepared for publication, Torres sent Schmiedeler and I an oddly-timed one-line email informing us that we were no longer needed for the investigation.
No apology or admission of wrongdoing was included. “I am relieved this is behind me but still frustrated it happened. The process was incredibly convoluted, frustrating, and confusing,” said Schmiedeler.
The truth of the matter is that Columbia left two known student journalists under investigation for over a month despite our immediate presentation of exonerating evidence, numerous follow-ups, and a written intervention from First Amendment attorneys and the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School.
These anxiety-inducing investigations carried out in the shadows of Columbia’s summer recess, set a dangerous precedent —potentially chilling the speech of hundreds of student journalists whose stellar reporting has been lauded by advocates of a free press, including the Pulitzer Prize Board.
It also raises serious questions about Columbia’s disciplinary procedure, which is outsourced to consultants with no prior relationship or history with the events on campus and seems to capitulate to the political intimidation animating the US electoral cycle, rather than genuine concern for free speech principles.
“Given [Columbia’s] previous deployment of corporate lawyers from Debevoise & Plimpton for disciplinary meetings, Columbia's hiring of Grand River Solutions is simply the next step in the uneven, fast-and-loose interpretation of the Standards and Discipline process,” commented a faction of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) engaged in implementing a strategy of collective defence amongst students disciplined for pro-Palestine speech and protest on campus.
Such actions have been “uniquely applied to alleged participants in pro-Palestine protest across the past school year, and should be viewed as a logical conclusion of prolonged and targeted repression, rather than an aberration,” said the CUAD group, for whom the “unwavering commitment to Palestinian liberation” is central.
Despite witnessing the repeated violation of my peers’ individual rights post-October 7, being a Columbia student journalist gave me a false sense of safety, an unwarranted aura of invincibility.
The press badge was my calming agent when police in SWAT gear flooded our campus for the first time in 50 years. It felt like apotropaic chain mail when public safety officers patrolled. It was what gave me courage enough to, day after day, tap my school-issued ID at Columbia’s overly securitised wrought iron gates.
Even after Columbia approved campus access to the NYPD so they could violently sweep the Hamilton Hall occupation and manhandle and sequester my journalist colleagues (including Schmiedeler who had not slept for over 35 hours), I still assumed that Columbia would not dare pursue sustained disciplinary action against us. But, the email on June 28 shattered any remaining illusion of protection.
“If journalists and reporters in Gaza were not made exempt from the cruelties of genocide — why would journalists and press workers in the belly of the beast, the arm of the imperial machine that is Columbia, be given any mercy?” CUAD legal defence asks.
The Committee to Protect Journalists revealed in December 2023 that “more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.”
This number continues to grow as the genocide hits its 300th day — just on July 31, Israel struck the car of Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi, killing them and raising the journalist death toll to at least 113, with some estimating over 160 fatalities. “This latest attack on Al Jazeera journalists is part of a systematic targeting campaign against the network’s journalists and their families since October 2023,” the network stated.
The sacrifice of the student journalist
The CUAD Collective Defense team noted that “Columbia’s indiscriminate punishment is indicative of its extreme fear of Palestinian liberation and the exposure of the university's great hypocrisies that come along with it.”
Amidst draconian campus lockdowns — which often precluded outside media from reporting accurately on the encampments — ID-holding student journalists played a key role in uncovering the abuse of pro-Palestine campus activists and the erosion of their free speech rights.
“Student journalists are important because we remain here when the mainstream outlets are gone. And we have to stay to tell the stories,” said Columbia Daily Spectator sports editor, Heather Chen. Despite being at the May 31st encampment as a Spectator photographer, no investigation was opened into Chen — underscoring the ostensibly arbitrary nature of the university’s disciplinary process.
“If [Columbia] is not going to let us tell the stories, if [it’s] going to intimidate us, suspend us, that does a harm not only to the student journalists, but also to the community as a whole, which relies on us to be able to get that information out there,” remarked Chen. “When you come for one student journalist, you really come for all of us.”
Chen also cautioned that investigations into campus journalists may result in a chilling effect that would disproportionately affect lower income student reporters. In the past, Columbia investigations have led to suspensions and threatened expulsions, which have resulted in students losing their campus access, university housing, dining plans, and school-issued health insurance. “Not all student journalists have the privilege to be like, ‘Yeah, I can take the risk of being suspended.’ It's a risk that is really difficult for a lot of people to take and it hurts journalism as a whole.”
Schmiedeler adds that WKCR performs risk assessments for their staff to determine the safety of ground reporting: “Some people only served in the studio because they could not risk losing a visa or financial aid,” he explained. Now that the university has upped the ante by investigating journalists, Scmiedeler fears that more WKCR staff will be discouraged from field reporting.
I recognise that technically journalists at a private institution have no constitutional rights. But, my colleagues and I — like those Columbia reporters who tirelessly covered the anti-war, anti-gentification demonstrations of 1968 — showed up every day believing that we had a duty to cover the student movement accurately and relentlessly. We persevered, trusting that Columbia would remain deferential to First Amendment principles as most spaces of higher education purport to. But, we were wrong to put our trust in Columbia.
The punitive Palestine Exception appears to extend to student journalists — illustrating CUAD Collective Defense group’s point that “the university will stop at nothing to suppress liberation movements, to suppress Palestine. Nobody — no journalist, child, doctor, professor, or dean — is safe from the claws of American imperialism and the Zionist entity no matter their stated or supposed impartiality.”
“Ultimately the sacrifice I make to cover the student demonstrations is nothing compared to the sacrifice protesters make,” said Schmiedeler, who expressed that it is the least he can do to use his platform to tell the story of those “who put their bodies on the line to fight for a cause they believe in” and who stand up “against the powers that be to call for an end to genocide.”
As Columbia hurtles towards a fresh academic year, the students have made it clear: So long as the university is materially complicit in the carnage unfolding in Gaza, they will not tire.
And, so long as the students persist, the student journalists must echo their resolve by refusing to buckle beneath the university’s intimidation tactics and by continuing to generate accurate public interest journalism.
“Columbia Daily Spectator has written pieces for written updates, WKCR has live coverage, Journalism School students are working on comprehensive documentaries, and freelancers are landing pieces in major publications that are making the general public care about Columbia. Taking out a piece of this organically-grown, well-functioning machine jeopardises the collective ability for student journalists to get information to our community and the world,” reflects Schmiedeler. “We stand with each other.”
While Schmiedeler and I were spared this time, other student reporters may not be so lucky in the future.
And for this reason, we must remain vigilant and take universities and their proxies to task for shoddy, inhumane, and anti-free speech retribution.
Lara-Nour Walton is an Egyptian-American journalist and a student at Columbia University. Her reporting focuses on diaspora and social justice
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.