The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee announced on social media Tuesday that it had been suspended by the university after being placed on an “illegitimate and retroactive probation.”
A university spokesperson confirmed the suspension to The Boston Globe, which described the committee as the leading pro-Palestinian student group on Havard’s campus. MassLive has contacted a Havard spokesperson to confirm the suspension.
In an Instagram post announcing the suspension, the committee said it had faced “unprecedented repression” as it has protested what it dubbed “the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
An email obtained by The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student-run newspaper, shows the school told the committee it must “cease all organizational activities for the remainder of the Spring 2024 term” or risk expulsion.
The committee said suspending the organization would not silence calls for Harvard to divest itself from “apartheid, occupation, and genocide.”
The suspension comes amid increasingly rising pro-Palestinian sentiment on college campuses in Massachusetts and beyond, marked by students at several area universities establishing encampments to show solidarity with protesters arrested at Columbia last week.
Tension and volatility has roiled college campuses since Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. Militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. In response, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry.
Since the war began, colleges and universities have struggled to balance campus safety with free speech rights amid intense student debate and protests. Many schools that tolerated protests and other disruptions for months are now doling out more heavy-handed discipline. A series of recent campus crackdowns on student protesters have included suspensions and, in some cases, expulsions.
The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday called for schools to “show restraint” amid the protests.
“The ACLU urges campus administrators and law enforcement to exercise restraint in interfering with student demonstrations and encampments,” ACLU of Massachusetts Executive Director Carol Rose said in a statement. “Colleges and universities also must resist heavy-handed pressure from Congress and others to clamp down on student protest – even when issues are contentious – and remain firm in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus. The principles on which this country was founded demand no less.”
