TO: officeofthepresident@columbia.edu

SUBJECT: your alumni are boycotting your reunions

Dear President Shipman,

My name is (Insert name) and I am writing as a concerned alumni.

We, the alumni of Columbia University and Barnard College, will continue to boycott the upcoming Columbia College, SEAS, General Studies, and Barnard alumni reunions. For a second year in a row, we will be hosting alternative, unaffiliated reunion events in solidarity with student and faculty protestors. We will be redirecting the money that would otherwise have gone towards tickets to reunion events, to direct aid in Palestine, legal aid for students who have been harmed by Columbia and Barnard’s disciplinary repression, including those facing deportation or discrimination from DHS and ICE, and Harlem-based emergency and empowerment resources serving Columbia’s immediate neighbors.

We are not opposing the ten-year reunion because we are ungrateful to or hate Columbia. In fact, we are taking a stand to protect the parts we love: the professors who shaped our earnest ideals, principled peers who showed us how to defend the rights of the people with dignity, and a rich history of transformative student activism.

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While we hold a range of ideologies and positions across our diverse community of alumni, we agree that the administration's recent actions are a stain on the values and principles of the Columbia community:

• Suspending, expelling, and revoking the degrees of students for their principled protests of an ongoing genocide.

• Capitulating to the conditions imposed by the Trump administration for the release of $400 million in grants withdrawn on March 7, and that it did so against the warning issued by Constitutional law scholars that this course of action "creates a dangerous precedent for every recipient of federal financial assistance."

• Expelling and firing Grant Miner, president of UAW Local 2710, the union that represents thousands of student workers at Columbia, on March 14, 2025, the eve of contract negotiations.

• Imposing the IHRA definition of antisemitism and a mask ban, specifically intended to target student protestors under the guise of “Advancing Our Work to Combat Discrimination, Harassment, and Antisemitism at Columbia,” dated March 21, 2025, presently available on the Columbia University website.

• The arrest of over 120 students on April 18 by the NYPD, authorized by the President.

• Alma mater’s continued collaboration with ICE and DHS to remove Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, Yunseo Chung, and Ranjani Srinivasan.

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We refuse to cede our rights and free intellectual thought to an authoritarian government and denounce Columbia’ trustees and administration for relinquishing them on our behalf, without regard for our participation or safety. Instead of upholding the first amendment, Columbia’s administration has failed to protect students, faculty, and staff targeted by the U.S. Government and the university administration for their opposition to the genocide in Gaza and support for Palestinian liberation. 

For months, the administration has led a deliberate campaign to distort student calls to divest from war profiteering, falsely framing them as antisemitic rather than as a principled stand against genocide in Gaza. As a journalist who built her career amplifying student dissent in Tiananmen Square, you witnessed firsthand how authoritarian regimes weaponize false narratives to justify the violent suppression of protest. You know exactly where this path can lead.

Today you stand at the helm of our shared alma mater overseeing the repression of peaceful student protests rooted in the same principles of civil liberties and moral conviction. To remain silent—or worse, to endorse these actions—is not just complicity; it is a betrayal of the very journalistic values you once stood for. We urge you to remember the students you once defended and to act in defense of the ones before you now.

As a signatory of Harvard’s Call for Constructive Engagement, you affirmed a commitment to open dialogue and principled dissent. Now, we call on you to honor that commitment by standing with us and engaging in a genuine, constructive conversation on how to address the divisions within our campus and lead our community moving forward with integrity.

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To begin repairing the harm and upholding the values this university claims to represent, we echo the calls of the Columbia Alumni Statement Condemning Columbia’s Collaboration with ICE and DHS and in Defense of Academic Freedom and Student Activism and demand the following actions:

• Call for the immediate release of Yunseo Chung, Leqaa Kordia, Mahmoud Khalil, and other detained affiliates.

• Reverse student group bans and reinstate the Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

• Protect the principles of academic freedom: Reverse all disciplinary punishments against students and faculty for political speech, including suspensions, expulsions, and degree revocations. Halt all disciplinary hearings and investigations, and begin good-faith engagement with the demands of student organizers. Protect academic departments from government interference with academic inquiry.

• Reaffirm its commitment to being a sanctuary campus: Cease disclosing sensitive student information and end all voluntary cooperation with federal immigration agents. Hire deportation defense immigration attorneys to represent non-citizen students and staff, following the lead of American University, Harvard University, New York University, University of California - Los Angeles, and others, noting that law school clinics and international student offices are insufficient to meet this need.

• Keep law enforcement off campus: Recommit to the pledge made to students after the 1968 campus protests to never invite NYPD or other law enforcement agencies onto campus to target student protesters.

• Divest from all companies and institutions that profit from Israel’s decades-long system of apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians; including but not limited to weapons manufacturers and tech companies that do business with Israel’s government.

• Sue Trump administration for demanding sweeping concessions and freezing $650 million in federal funding to Columbia’s research funding, which in itself violates Columbia’s constitutional rights to academic freedom.

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We hope we can count on your support,

Class of [2015]