Young people are rejecting Ivy League offers in solidarity with Palestine

For many, university represents a dream – an opportunity for education, self-betterment, and freedom. But for a growing number of young people, American universities are becoming an increasingly hostile environment. In the last few months, over 600 international students have had their visas revoked by the Trump administration, in many cases due to participating in pro-Palestine protests or other forms of activism. There have also been many shocking reports of arrests, detentions and deportations. As a result, the illusion of the liberal academy is in shatters: students have less faith in their institutions than ever before, as the ongoing wave of protests and encampments makes clear. Some young people are even turning down offers from US universities, both in solidarity with the Palestinian cause and out of a well-founded concern for their own safety.

When 22-year-old Khalia* was a teenager, she dreamed of attending Columbia University. “I really romanticised Columbia, and dreamt of living and working in New York City,” she tells Dazed. However, seeing the mistreatment of students by the university rapidly changed that impression. “To threaten the revocation of degrees due to activism on campus not only sets a dangerous precedent in terms of freedom of speech, but tells students that their tuition paid for a product (a degree) which has not been rightfully earned and can be clawed back from you by the powers-that-be – just because they can. Columbia deserves to know that. This is what I told them when I rejected my offer.”

Last month, Columbia expelled, suspended and revoked the degrees of 22 students who took part in the occupation of the university’s Hamilton Hall building during last year’s pro-Palestine protests. This followed the Trump administration’s decision to pull $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia because of its supposed “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”. The school has also reportedly given their security officers increased power to arrest students and appointed a new senior vice provost to “review” courses within the Center for Palestine Studies, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, the Middle East Institute, and other university programmes focused on the Middle East, to ensure the educational offering is “comprehensive and balanced”. It is safe to assume that this “review” will likely omit Palestinian perspectives, with discussions around decolonisation also censored.

Like Khalia, 25-year-old Bell* was accepted into Columbia, but she is hesitant to accept the offer because of the university’s suppression of pro-Palestinian protests and its alignment with the Biden and Trump administrations’ unwavering support of Israel. “I think for anyone paying attention, totems of Western prestige like Ivy degrees have lost all lustre and legitimacy,” she explains. “To remain agnostic in matters like genocide is diabolical enough, let alone to continuously empower its supporters on campus, fund its agents of horror and then collude with government authorities and disclose private student data. Universities are supposed to be proponents of free speech, thought and civil dissent, yet they’re unabashedly quashing it. It makes you think, what’s the point?”

However, rejecting the university of your dreams is not an easy decision. For Bell, the situation feels frustrating because all she wants is the freedom to learn – and her support of Palestine puts that at risk. “I just want to take a course, gain some skills and access great professors. I just like learning,” she says. “I want to advance my career and learn something without risk of expulsion, incarceration or deportation, or having my entire being brought into question with it.” Even with this in mind, Bell is aware of what her complaints sound like in the context of a genocide, where Israel has destroyed every single university in Gaza, and killed over 120 academics. “I don’t want to lose sight of that,” she says.

The last 18 months have been unfathomable. At the time of writing, the Gaza Health Ministry has recorded that at least 50,695 Palestinians have been killed and 115,338 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza, including over 15,000 children, 156 journalists and media workers, and more than 224 humanitarian aid workers. During this period, students and researchers have uncovered the shocking extent to which their universities are entangled with arms companies. Research by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign revealed that UK universities collectively invest nearly £430 million in firms complicit in Israeli violations of international law, while in the US, universities such as Yale have similarly been found to maintain ties with weapons contractors linked to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

This has led to the pro-Palestinian student movement becoming larger and more energised than ever before, as growing numbers of students demand that the institutions they attend cut ties with arms companies. But these simple, morally motivated acts have resulted in the detention and deportation of students. Mahmoud Khalil, Ranjani Srinivasan, Yunseo Chung, Rumeysa Ozturk, Alireza Doroudi, Momodou Taal, and Badar Khan Suri: some of these students have been effectively kidnapped by Ice and are still being held in detention facilities, while others have elected to self-deport, fleeing the US out of fear of abduction.

22-year-old Zainab* rejected her offer from the University of Chicago for multiple reasons, but the ultimate deciding factor was the detention of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University. As a result of this decision, she and her family have had to rethink the way they define success. “They see getting into a prestigious university as a symbol of achievement and were surprised by my actions,” says Zainab, “but I’m lucky to have a family that believes in me and in my convictions.”

Challenging how we view success is important, especially in an academic context, and Palestine is facilitating that change. What does it mean to be a “success” at a prestigious university that holds investments in the arms trade? Another factor in Zainab’s decision to reject her offer from the University of Chicago was how much it cost, and who that cost excludes from the classroom. The astronomical tuition fees effectively exclude the poorest in society, particularly Black Americans (17.9 per cent of whom live below the poverty line), and Indigenous people (one in three of whom do). “I felt so uneasy knowing that all my savings would go to a degree,” she explains. “It made me question my possible peers in the classroom who could just spend that money without any hassle. Who gets to be in that lecture room? Who doesn’t? Are discussions about human rights and oppression in these pristine classrooms worthy or at all impactful?”

There is much to learn from the pro-Palestinian youth movement and the young people involved in it, like Zainab, Bell and Khalia. While all three of them asked to be anonymous for their safety, some have gone public with their decisions and have been subsequently subjected to intense ridicule and harassment for their support of Palestine. And yet they remain steadfast in their beliefs. University can be a site of radicalisation for many young people; many of us are introduced to the works of radical thinkers in that environment, from Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin to Audre Lorde and June Jordan. But do these institutions want you to absorb their teachings in theory alone, or also in practice? While Zainab, Bell and Khalia may have got their political education from school, they got their moral one elsewhere. 

*Names have been changed 

We have reached out to Columbia University for comment