A Senate committee asked Columbia University to provide extensive information about Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that had been at the center of protests on campus over Israel and Gaza.
Information sought by the committee, including “all records in the university’s possession related to SJP and its on-campus activities,” was requested by Wednesday in a letter signed by Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
After a judge directed the university late Wednesday to say what materials it intended to disclose and to wait to produce them until Friday, the school acknowledged that order and said it planned to turn over “policies and guidance,” but that it would not identify individual students.
The Senate committee’s demand was disclosed in a court filing this week connected to a lawsuit filed by seven anonymous students at Columbia and Barnard, its affiliated women’s college, along with Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student whom the Trump administration is trying to deport.
The suit had asked a judge to bar school officials from handing over confidential disciplinary records to lawmakers. On Wednesday, two clinical professors of law at Northwestern University in Illinois filed a similar suit.
Republican lawmakers have said they are investigating an epidemic of antisemitism within higher education, but critics have said the Trump administration and its allies are conducting a broad crackdown on political speech.
The Senate committee’s letter is likely to be seen as intensifying a clash among the Trump administration, Columbia and some of its students that has included questions of free speech, academic freedom, the government’s role in overseeing academic institutions and even due process in deportation efforts.
In an indication, perhaps, of how rapidly events at Columbia have been unfolding, the person to whom the letter was addressed, Katrina Armstrong, is no longer the president of the school; she left her post on March 28 after overseeing a series of concessions to the Trump administration’s demands.
In court papers, lawyers for the students who sued the school had accused the government of chilling speech and association as part of a plan to “punish students for their Palestine advocacy.”
Last week, the judge overseeing the case, Arun Subramanian, directed Columbia to notify the plaintiffs and the court 30 days before giving students’ records or identities to Congress.
In a letter to the court on Tuesday, a lawyer for Columbia wrote that the material the university was planning to hand over would not include that information and thus did not trigger the 30-day requirement. Lawyers for the students who had sued questioned that assertion on Wednesday and asked the judge to intervene.
The Senate letter cited an event in February in which students conducted a sit-in at a Barnard building, which the letter said “included an assault on a school employee.” It went on to say that Students for Justice in Palestine had been supported by another group, American Muslims for Palestine, which it said included “personnel” with “reported ties” to Hamas. American Muslims for Palestine did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The letter said that the Senate committee was “investigating the activities of Hamas-linked groups on college campuses” and asked Columbia for a detailed account of incidents on campus involving Students for Justice in Palestine, and a description of how Columbia has investigated the February incident at Barnard.
The committee also asked whether the university was aware of any connection between Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, and Hamas, adding: “Please explain and provide all related records.”
Columbia suspended its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and another pro-Palestinian group, Jewish Voice for Peace, in the fall of 2023, a decision that sparked protests by students and faculty members. The groups remain suspended, though some of their members continue to organize through another, unrecognized group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
The Northwestern professors are embroiled in their own struggle with lawmakers in Washington.
In a letter last month, the House Committee on Education and Workforce requested documents from the university about the professors’ work. Two Republican committee members took issue in the letter with what they described as “the institutionalization of left-wing political activism” at Northwestern’s law school.
On Wednesday, Representative Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who leads the committee, said in a statement that “nothing in the Constitution requires duly elected members of Congress to sit idly by as a wave of antisemitism sweeps over our nation’s college campuses, leading to discrimination against Jewish students at institutions of higher education receiving billions of dollars in federal funds.”
The professors, Sheila Bedi and Lynn Cohn, said in their suit that the committee’s request violated their First Amendment rights and asked a federal judge to block the university from sharing the documents sought by Congress, including Ms. Bedi’s performance reviews and information on donors to law school programs.
Ms. Bedi’s clinic has represented pro-Palestinian demonstrators, a fact that the congressmen raised in their letter to the university. The professors’ lawsuit argues that the committee’s “goal is to shut down speech and advocacy with which it disagrees.”
A spokeswoman for the university said in a statement that “Northwestern respects the importance of congressional oversight.” The statement added that the university “intends to continue to cooperate with the committee,” but “will adhere to the court’s decision.”
