A Columbia University graduate student who praised Hamas for its "inspirational" tactics and appeared on a panel with members of a designated terrorist group has been elected to the university's main policymaking body.
Sean Eren, a master's student at Columbia's graduate school of architecture and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine's (SJP) national steering committee, was banned from campus in March 2024 after he spoke at an unsanctioned event with Samidoun, which raises money for a U.S.-designated terror group and is itself classified as a terrorist organization by Canada and Israel. Two years later, in May 2026, Eren was elected to represent the architecture school on Columbia's University Senate.
Hamas's "communication networks" are "inspirational," Eren said at the 2024 event, titled "Resistance 101." "We have unprecedented unity among what used to be … called a fringe group."
At a separate event with the Democratic Socialists of America, Eren said that SJP's activism "puts a knife to the throat of our boards of trustees."
Columbia describes the Senate as a "policy-making body which may consider all matters of University-wide concern," including academic freedom and the budget. Though it was stripped of disciplinary powers as a part of the Trump administration's settlement with Columbia in 2025, the Senate has continued to propose revisions to the university's code of conduct—including the rules governing student protests—in defiance of the Board of Trustees. Columbia's settlement with the Trump administration placed disciplinary matters in the Office of the Provost, but the University Senate continues to wield influence over university-wide policies.
Columbia did not respond to a request for comment.
Eren's election to the Senate, which has not been previously reported, underscores the degree to which anti-Israel activists have continued to influence Columbia despite the university's deal with the Trump administration. Supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement were among those tapped to lead a Trump-mandated review of Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies Department, and two professors who participated in the Spring 2024 encampment sit on the committee that proposed revising the protest rules. Another BDS supporter, Rosalind Morris, sits on a task force charged with reforming the University Senate.
The "Resistance 101" panel was one of myriad events that spurred calls for reform. It included Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoners Network, and her husband Khaled Barakat, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), to which Samidoun funnels money.
The PFLP was behind a spate of airline hijackings in the 1960s and '70s. During the event, Barakat said the hijackings were "one of the most important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in" and claimed, falsely, that they were done peacefully.
"If it wasn't for these tactics, we would [have] never heard of … Palestinian women who led these kinds of heroic operations that introduced the Palestinian questions to the world," Barakat said. "If you take, for example, the speeches that were given to the people in the airplanes by Palestinian fighters … they're all about what our struggle is about."
For his part, Eren at the 2024 event described Hamas as an "Islamic nationalist party" and praised the group for using "tactics … that some people relate to Maoism."
"I think that that's a really interesting dynamic to observe," a keffiyeh-clad Eren said at the event. "Cellular warfare," he continued, has been "implemented to great success throughout Al-Aqsa Flood," the code name Hamas used for its terrorist rampage on Oct. 7, 2023.
"It's … a combination of guerrilla warfare with protracted people's war, which is a Maoist technique," Eren said of Hamas's tactics. "It's inspirational."
