In a move called for by pro-Israel students at Columbia University, the school announced on Friday that disciplinary action and rules surrounding student protests would be moved out of the purview of the faculty-run University Senate and into the provost’s office.

“This is the most encouraging and commendable action taken by Columbia’s administration to address the systemic problems within the university since [the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks],” Noa Fay, a graduate student entering her last year in Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told Jewish Insider. 

“Revoking the University Senate’s power over disciplinary and rule-making procedures has been top of the institutional reform list for many Columbians who wish to see our university restored to order and excellence.”

Critics of the University Senate say that since Oct. 7 and the ensuing protests that have roiled Columbia’s campus, the 111-elected member body has blocked discipline against anti-Israel protesters and removed protest regulations aimed at protecting Jewish students. 

Earlier this week, when the university released a list of commitments to address antisemitism on campus, several Jewish students expressed concern that structural reform to the University Senate was missing. 

Fay, a student member of the Columbia-SIPA Anti-Hate Task Force, suggested to JI earlier this week that changes to the University Senate are one of the most important measures that could create a safer climate for Jewish students “as it has served most reliably and forcefully to protect those guilty of antisemitic racism at school.” 

Last August, the University Senate passed revised guidelines for the Rules of University Conduct that removed an interim demonstration policy that the university implemented following disruptive — and sometimes violent — Gaza solidarity encampments that spring, put in place to restrict the location and times that protests were allowed.  

Lishi Baker, a rising senior at Columbia studying Middle East history, wrote in a 2024 Columbia Spectator op-ed that the University Senate had refused to let Jewish students share their experiences of antisemitism on campus when the university’s task force on antisemitism presented its second report to the body. 

“I was one of the students asked by the task force to speak,” Baker wrote. “However, when the task force co-chairs informed members of the Senate leadership of their desire to bring students, those Senate leaders dismissed the idea outright.” 

The Senate has been under university review since April. The decision by Columbia’s trustees to diminish the Senate’s power comes as university leadership is in the final stages of talks with the Trump administration to make a deal that would restore some $400 million in federal funding that was cut by the government in March due to the university’s record dealing with antisemitism.