Columbia University is canceling its university-wide commencement next week, citing security concerns after weeks of campus protests over the war in Gaza, officials announced Monday.
Many school-level graduations will continue as scheduled, but ceremonies planned for the main campus lawns — where an antiwar encampment demanding Columbia divest from Israel sparked a nationwide campus protest movement — have been relocated.
“We are determined to give our students the celebration they deserve, and that they want,” read the announcement.
Columbia is “looking a the possibility of a festive event” on May 15 — when university-wide commencement was originally scheduled — to replace the large, formal ceremony, it continued.
University officials had repeatedly said they needed to clear the tent demonstration to set up for graduation before announcing the ceremony’s cancellation.
“These past two weeks have been among the most difficult in Columbia’s history,” University President Minouche Shafik said Friday. “You, our students, have paid an especially high price. You lost your final days in the classroom and residence halls. For those of you who are seniors, you’re finishing college the way you started — online.”
An estimated 15,000 students were expected to earn their diplomas, including many undergraduates whose high school graduations were canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic, Columbia spokesman Ben Chang said last week.
Several seniors who face disciplinary action as a result of their actions during the protests will not be eligible.
“It’s really bizarre to us,” a Columbia graduate student and rep for the pro-Gaza encampment, who declined to give her name, said last week, “to see so much concern over graduation when we’re in the middle of the genocide. I think you have to really look at what’s important here.”
Last week, the Columbia administration called in the NYPD to end the takeover of a campus building, Hamilton Hall, and dismantle a pro-Gaza encampment, leading to more than 100 arrests in and around campus. During the raid, an officer accidentally fired off his gun inside the building.
It was the second time in recent weeks Shafik turned to police to shut down the tent demonstration, which was first erected hours ahead of her appearance at a congressional antisemitism hearing.
Columbia requested the NYPD remain on campus through May 17, once all school-level ceremonies have ended.
The Morningside Heights institution’s decision to cancel its main graduation ceremony comes after the University of Southern California made a similar call following weeks of campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.
This past weekend, protesters interrupted commencement ceremonies at the University of Michigan.
The disruptions to Columbia campus life extend beyond graduation.
Final exams have been shifted to online. On Sunday, undergraduate college officials announced students can avoid letter grades on their transcript and select a pass-fail option for up to two classes this semester. Law school students on the Columbia Law Review and the editors of other academic law journals on campus last week demanded the program cancel exams and give all students passing grades.
After this semester, questions remain about Columbia’s path forward with a student body divided and relationship with the nascent administration ruptured in Shafik’s first school year as president.
Nearly all members of the Columbia community, 96%, disagreed with how Shafik’s administration has handled the demonstrations, according to a joint survey released Saturday of more than 700 students, professors and others by campus newspaper Columbia Spectator and New York Magazine.
Half of those polled said Shafik should resign for reasons that ran the political spectrum, from accusing the administration of stifling free speech to doing too little to combat antisemitism.
