Individuals

An increasingly hostile campus environment doesn’t just magically happen. Behind the encampment protests and the sometimes-violent university occupations are people driving the conversation. Activist Tracker maintains a growing database of individual case files documenting the faculty members, students, activists, and public figures shaping campus discourse around radical ideology, hostile activism, terror, and antisemitism.

Each entry lays out what these individuals are actually doing on campus: the petitions they sign, the demonstrations they support, the statements they make, the organizations they lead, and the social media posts they proudly put out into the world.

Janet Steele

📍 Washington, DC

🗺️ Washington

🏫

Janet Steele is a professor at George Washington University whose scholarship in journalism and international affairs has increasingly merged with overt political advocacy. Since October 7, her public activity has aligned closely with anti Israel narratives, including amplification of genocide accusations, contributing to the normalization of extreme rhetoric within academic and media adjacent spaces.

Teresa Sharpe

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Teresa Sharpe is a senior lecturer with administrative authority inside Columbia’s Sociology Department who used her role to support and physically reinforce the 2024 pro Hamas encampment. Her involvement went beyond statements and signatures. She actively participated in blocking Jewish students from entering campus space, raising serious concerns about bias, exclusion, and faculty enabled intimidation.

Jafari Sinclaire Allen

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Jafari Sinclaire Allen is a senior Columbia professor and director whose scholarship in Black radical and queer studies increasingly overlaps with overt political activism on campus. His enthusiastic participation in the 2024 pro Hamas encampment and his public attacks on pro Israel students reveal a pattern of ideological advocacy that repeatedly sides with anti Israel movements while ignoring their impact on campus safety and intimidation.

Mark Hansen

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Mark Henry Hansen is a Columbia journalism professor and director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation who stepped directly into campus activism during the 2024 pro Hamas encampment. By publicly documenting and supporting the encampment through his social media presence, Hansen lent institutional credibility to a protest movement tied to antisemitic hostility, student intimidation, and a campus wide safety crisis.

Jennifer Wenzel

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Jennifer Wenzel is a Columbia professor jointly appointed in English and MESAAS whose academic work on global literature intersects with a long record of political activism. During the 2024 encampment crisis, she became one of the faculty voices legitimizing pro Hamas protest activity. Her op eds, faculty walkout participation, and repeated attacks on Columbia leadership helped reinforce an environment where anti Israel activism flourished while Jewish students reported feeling unsafe and unheard.

Lien-Hang Nguyen

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen is a Columbia historian of the Vietnam War whose academic prestige did not prevent her from aligning with the 2024 pro-Hamas encampment. Her participation in the faculty walkout and her silence in the face of explicit antisemitic rhetoric at a major Columbia event reveal a pattern of selective moral outrage and complicity that contributed to a campus climate already hostile toward Jewish students.

Virginia Page Fortna

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Virginia Page Fortna is a Columbia political scientist whose scholarship on peace and conflict contrasts sharply with her visible alignment with the 2024 pro-Hamas encampment and subsequent anti-administration protests. Her public interventions and on-the-ground activism helped validate a campus movement tied to Title VI complaints, intense unrest, and a documented climate of fear among Jewish students.

Debashree Mukherjee

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Debashree Mukherjee is a Columbia film and media professor whose activism extends far beyond the classroom. With a long record of pro-Palestinian political engagement, from signing anti-Israel petitions to endorsing decolonial frameworks that cast Israel as a colonial oppressor, she became one of the faculty voices legitimizing the 2024 pro-Hamas encampment. Her scholarship and activism consistently blur into each other, reinforcing a campus climate where hostility toward Israel is reframed as intellectual inquiry.

Jonathan Peterson

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Jonathan Peterson is a Columbia MESAAS professor who brought his academic authority into the 2024 pro-Hamas encampment, joining faculty rallies that framed student arrests as political persecution rather than consequences for policy violations and reported antisemitic harassment. His participation helped legitimize a movement that destabilized campus safety and intensified Columbia’s Title VI crisis.

John Pamplin

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

John Richard Pamplin II is a Columbia epidemiologist who used his faculty position to openly endorse and participate in the 2024 pro-Hamas encampment. While studying structural racism and inequity in public health, Pamplin simultaneously amplified a protest movement that generated Title VI complaints, Jewish student intimidation, and the most severe campus breakdown Columbia has seen in decades.

Matthew Engleke

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 # New York

Matthew Engelke is a senior religion scholar at Columbia whose academic authority and departmental leadership gave the 2024 pro-Hamas encampment an unmistakable faculty endorsement. From commissioning pro-Palestinian scholarship to physically joining the encampment, Engelke played a clear role in normalizing radical activism under the banner of religious and cultural inquiry.

Courtney Bender

📍 New York City

🗺️ New York

🏫 Columbia University (Columbia)

Courtney Bender is a Columbia religion professor who aligned herself with the 2024 pro-Hamas encampment and the faculty bloc working to reframe the crisis as a struggle for “academic freedom.” While presenting herself as a scholar of American religious life, Bender used her position to legitimize a protest space that generated Title VI complaints, Jewish student intimidation reports, and campus-wide disruption, yet she publicly defended it as principled dissent under attack by Congress and administrators.

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