Almost a dozen NYU students suspended for demanding divestment from Israel

New York University, the elite university currently being attended by Barron Trump, has announced that it is launching an extreme crackdown on left-wing student agitators.

According to Fox News, "Almost a dozen students have been suspended for a year from New York University (NYU) for demanding divestment from Israel as President Donald Trump's no-nonsense approach to higher education takes hold."

This falls in line with Donald Trump's plan for the next four years, as the 47th president has already floated the idea of deporting student protestors.

The announcement

NYU has decided to suspend the students after they "dropped flyers and hung pro-Palestinian banners throughout the Bobst Library, and others conducted a sit-in on the floor of the library."

Cornell University professor William Jacobson gave his opinion on the one-year suspension:

"I think the key thing, and it seems to be going on at NYU, is not that schools come down hard on particular students, is that they enforce the rules evenly. The problem with the anti-Israel protesters on campuses is they don't want to obey the existing rules. They don't want to have to live by the rules that everybody else lives by. Whether it's disrupting the library, whether it's blocking the campus flow of pedestrians."

It's important to note that the students were NOT suspended for their political beliefs, they were suspended for the disruptions they caused.

"And as soon as you enforce the rules that everybody else needs to live by, they start playing victim," Jacobson added.

Protestors fighting back

In a statement following the university's decision to suspend the student protestors, NYU's Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) group argued that the students should not have been suspended because they were participating in anti-war protests and acted nonviolently.

"In a draconian case of collective punishment, NYU has issued blanket year-long suspensions to students who participated in nonviolent protest on campus on December 11, 2024," the group posted on social media. "As of today, at least eleven students have been suspended until January 2026."

"The sit-in was to demand a meeting with administration officials regarding disclosure of and divestment from institutional investments in Israel," FJP added. "All students identified as participating in these actions were charged with similar violations of NYU’s code of student conduct."

However, NYU spokesperson John Beckman argued that the protests were "not peaceful."

"Rather, it was the intentional disruption of a library, over the course of two days, at a critical academic moment — on the eve of finals. This disruption was accompanied by threats of violence directed at senior members of the university community," Beckman said. "The disciplinary hearings against NYU student participants that followed, and the resulting sanctions were a consequence of the students' disruptive conduct (not their speech): knowingly violating University and Library rules despite repeated warnings and attempts at de-escalation over several hours."

Beckman continued, "It is improper for a small group of people — some not even in our community — to try to prevent or interrupt other students from entering the library or using it to study for finals. Federal law prohibits universities from discussing individual students' disciplinary records, but the University takes these violations of our rules and scholarly norms seriously."

William Jacobson added that the suspensions could be a result of the Trump administration requiring that universities actually enforce their rules equally.

"And those rules mean you cannot create hostile environments for certain religious groups or certain ethnic groups. And what we've seen on many campuses is that, particularly pro-Israel students, Jewish students are being targeted by these groups. They create so-called Zionist-free zones on campus. Well, it's not your right to do that," Jacobson said. "I'm hoping that the Trump administration's Department of Education, to a greater extent than the Biden administration's Department of Education, will look at these things and will treat these students according to the rules and not give them special privileges like they've been used to so far."