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Anti-Israel student leaders get tossed at University of Michigan

Even students who backed Chowdhury and Atkinson’s stance thought they’d gone too far.

By Jewish Breaking News

Two University of Michigan student leaders who tried to force the school’s hand on the Israel-Hamas war by freezing campus funding got their walking papers on Tuesday.

President Alifa Chowdhury and Vice President Elias Atkinson were impeached following a marathon hearing that lasted 20 hours and spanned seven days.

The pair, who rode to power last spring on their “Shut It Down” platform, had made good on their promise to freeze $1.3 million in student funding until Michigan cut ties with companies linked to Israel.

Their power play left campus groups scrambling. Ultimate Frisbee players couldn’t make it to games, ballroom dancers lost their practice spaces, and groups like the Black Undergraduate Kinesiology Association watched their outreach programs gather dust.

By October, the university had seen enough. Administrators adopted a hands-off approach to political issues outside campus operations, and the student government restored funding.

But the damage was done. Even students who backed Chowdhury and Atkinson’s stance thought they’d gone too far.

“They look like extremists,” Tiya Berry, an Arab American assembly member who couldn’t stomach their methods, tells the New York Times.

According to Margaret Peterman, a sophomore member of the student assembly who led the impeachment motion, Chowdhury encouraged verbal attacks and threatening language, recalling that one assembly member was spat on by a protester.

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“There is a line between free speech and hate speech, between engaging in your rights as a student and as an American to disagree as vehemently as you might want to, and crossing that line into threatening someone,” Peterman said.

The University of Michigan has been a hotbed for campus antisemitism following the Hamas massacre against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

In June, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched an investigation that revealed the school’s failure to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, identifying 75 harassment complaints against Jewish students that the university largely ignored.

Among the uninvestigated incidents were demonstrations featuring chants about “Nazi liberation” and a particularly egregious case where a 19-year-old male student was thrown to the ground, kicked, and spat on.