BUZZ
Claim wasn’t an ‘occupation’ but ‘a short ‘teach-in demonstration’
Three pro-Palestinian student activists filed a federal class action lawsuit last Friday over Columbia University’s handling of Butler Library’s occupation by demonstrators last year.
As reported by The College Fix, roughly 80 activists occupied Butler shouting slogans such as “Columbia will burn for the martyrs,” and “scuffled” with campus security which led to several officers’ injuries.
They also “renamed” Butler’s second floor “Basel Al-Araj Popular University.”
After five hours of being “repeatedly asked for identification and to leave,” the activists were arrested.
The Columbia Spectator reports the plaintiffs are law student Nisreen Khokhar, ethnomusicology PhD student Jessie Rubin, and urban planning doctoral student Courtland Buchanan. They accuse campus police of “lock[ing] protesters inside a reading room and assault[ing] them due to pressure” from the Trump administration.
Named as defendants are the university, Acting President Claire Shipman, three security officers, and “five Columbia faculty and staff members who sat on the disciplinary panel that later sanctioned the students.”
The suit claims activists did not engage in an “occupation” but instead “a short ‘teach-in demonstration,'” and that protesters “began packing up to leave on their own after about 20 minutes.”
Other allegations accuse officers of “shov[ing] demonstrators so violently that many fell on top of each other” and refusing “repeated requests for medical attention.”
Three of the lawyers hired by the plaintiffs (successfully) represented activists who took over Hamilton Hall in 2024.
The lawsuit frames Columbia’s response as the direct result of pressure from the Trump administration, which froze federal funding to the University two months before the protest. In a March 2025 letter, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia expand its security force’s arrest powers and impose “meaningful discipline”—defined by the federal government as “expulsion or multi-year suspension”—on protesters. The NYPD subsequently deputized at least 36 Columbia employees as “special patrolmen” with arrest powers.
Following Trump’s demands, the University removed student representatives from University Judicial Board panel seats and transferred authority to appoint its members from the University Senate, which includes students, faculty, and staff, to the Office of the Provost.
The Washington Free Beacon reported last year on many of the Butler protesters; Khokhar was “the first signatory” of two anti-Israel letters while an undergrad at the University of Michigan, while Rubin is a member of Student Workers of Columbia, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. She reportedly helped establish Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the group that took credit for the Butler takeover.
Buchanan, who “has a passion for environmental justice, equitable international development, and decolonization,” moved to Lebanon after graduating five years ago and worked for a time at Beirut Urban Labs.
Due to the Butler imbroglio, Khokhar claims Columbia “revoked a $235,332 law school scholarship and a spot in a dual-degree program in France,” Rubin lost “a humanities fellowship and roughly $50,000 in income,” and Buchanan “lost his job and health insurance” and required medical treatment following the library occupation “ordeal.”
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