Palestinian students, staff allege discrimination at Columbia

Columbia has spent the last two years getting hammered from every direction for letting its campus become a mess of encampments, harassment complaints, and congressional hearings that ended in a president's resignation. Now here comes a lawsuit arguing the school was actually too tough on the students protesting Israel. That's a hard needle to thread, and we're skeptical it holds up.

Nobody disputes that Columbia handled the fallout from October 7 badly. But "badly" cut in a specific direction: administrators were slow to act on antisemitic harassment, task forces documented real hostility toward Jewish students, and outside pressure from Congress and donors eventually forced a shakeup. If the university was simultaneously running a covert campaign to punish Palestinian students and faculty for the same period, that's going to require more than the general vibe of "hostile climate" to prove in court. Discrimination lawsuits need specifics: who was investigated, for what, compared to whom, and why the disciplinary process was applied unevenly. General grievance about a bad two years on campus isn't a legal theory.

There's also a bigger irony here worth sitting with. Columbia's crisis was born from tolerating disruptive protest activity for months before finally cracking down, largely because it feared exactly this kind of lawsuit. Universities that try to please every side end up satisfying none of them and getting sued by all of them. That's the lesson administrators elsewhere should take from this, not that discipline itself was the problem, but that Columbia waited so long to enforce its own rules that everyone involved now has a grievance.

None of this means the individual plaintiffs have no case. Courts exist to sort out specific claims of unequal treatment, and if Columbia genuinely singled people out unfairly, that deserves scrutiny like any other discrimination claim. But turning a chaotic, poorly managed disciplinary process into a narrative of systemic anti-Palestinian targeting is a stretch dressed up as accountability, and Columbia's actual failure was indecision, not a coordinated campaign against any one group.