2026 Theses Bachelor's

Institutional Reinforcement of Power Across Physical and Digital Domains: A Case Study of Columbia University’s Racialization of Students in Pro-Palestine Student Groups from October 2023 to December 2025

Shami Sher, Emily

This study examines how Columbia University institutionally constructed and responded to pro-Palestinian student organizing from October 2023 to December 2025, arguing that the University's response constitutes a coordinated repertoire operating across three interlocking mechanisms: the racialization of political dissent through institutional rhetoric, the material operationalization of that construction through disciplinary and surveillance infrastructure, and the digital suppression of student organizing. Drawing on racialization theory, surveillance studies, and the scholarship on digital activism, this study employs a mixed-methods design combining qualitative content analysis of 83 presidential and administrative communications with quantitative analysis of 3,327 Instagram posts across 74 CUAD-affiliated organizational accounts. Findings demonstrate that racialization at Columbia operated cumulatively and discursively rather than through explicit targeting: through asymmetric institutional permanence, differential definitional authority, and the progressive conversion of political dissent into a civil rights compliance problem. The digital record reveals a network that mobilized rapidly following October 7, 2023, peaked during the April 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and reorganized under institutional pressure, reducing politically explicit content while increasing inter-organizational collaboration on the posts that remained. The study concludes that the simultaneous dismissal and surveillance of pro-Palestinian digital organizing is not a contradiction but a coherent institutional logic, one in which the appearance of procedural neutrality enables the suppression of racialized political dissent without ever requiring the institution to name what it is targeting.

Keywords: racialization, institutional surveillance, pro-Palestinian student organizing, campus discipline