As a journalist, you usually go to the front lines to find the news. However, in some cases they can be found on the front lines. This happened to me not once, but twice, on Thursday, as an epic battle for freedom of expression unfolded on college campuses from one end of Manhattan to the other.
The first one happened to be when I was giving a lecture to a class on the Columbia University campus. On my way out of the classroom, I found a tent camp set up on one of the campus's lush lawns. As is often the case with university protests, it was a serious but peaceful event. Dozens of tents were set up and students held up signs reading “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Their tactics were somewhat similar to those of a previous generation of students, who effectively shut down the campus in April 1985 to demand Columbia University's withdrawal from South Africa. The protests were an echo of the student takeover of the university during the 1968 unrest. A widespread cultural revolt against the Vietnam War.
Students marched in a circle on Thursday morning to protest the ongoing massacre in Gaza, where around 34,000 people, more than 1% of Gaza's population, have been massacred, and to demand the Colombian government's withdrawal from Israel. He shouted a phrase. — Most of the dead were women and children. The demonstrators took up a lot of space and were making a lot of noise. According to the university, the students illegally trespassed on the grounds of the school they pay high fees to attend. But they didn't seem to have any intention of targeting, much less harming, their fellow students. The campus was closed to outsiders. It seemed unlikely that the protests would expand. I took in the sights and then took the subway back to my office.
I was stunned to learn that less than an hour later, Columbia University President Nemat Shafik had called on the New York City Police Department to clear the camp, which had been set up less than 48 hours earlier. What followed was the largest arrest of students at Columbia University since 1968.
I thought I would run into those students again. I live a block away from NYPD headquarters, where protesters are frequently booked and processed. Since October 7th, there have been regular demonstrations on my block as a pro-Palestinian activist. Waiting for the release of my friends. When I returned home from work, a large crowd had already gathered.
Most of the students I tried to talk to did not want to be interviewed. Some harshly criticized mainstream media coverage of the war in Gaza. Some feared that their career prospects would be harmed by involvement in the protests. (They are Ivy League students, after all.) But in the end, many of us are determined to continue protesting for a cause that we feel is life's defining moral challenge. I spoke.
A semi-encampment soon sprang up a block from my apartment, where students waited for their friends to be released. It had a festive atmosphere. There were lots of pizza and donut boxes, cases of Gatorade and bottles of water. As dusk approaches in mid-April, people gulp down coffee and use hand warmers to beat the unusually cold air. I didn't see a drop of alcohol or smell the marijuana that pervades the streets of Lower Manhattan. I found a man braiding a woman's hair neatly into pigtails. People slept on towels and blankets and waited for a long time.
Students were particularly upset by the email they received from Shafiq. The email used bureaucratic language from university officials informing them that their classmates were about to be physically dragged off campus by police in riot gear. “The safety of our community is my top priority and I believe we need to maintain an environment where everyone can learn in a supportive setting,” she wrote.
Shafiq sent a letter to the NYPD asking officers to remove the quad and declaring the protests a “clear and imminent danger” to the university. If there was any danger, police seemed to have a hard time finding it. In remarks reported by the Columbia Daily Spectator, John Chell, the police department's chief of patrol, said there were no reports of violence or injuries. “To put this in perspective, the students who were arrested were peaceful, they didn’t offer any resistance, they were peacefully saying what they wanted to say,” he said.
For the students I spoke to, the calls for safety were particularly galling. Because the arrest itself was an act of violence, and the fact that many students reported receiving emails informing them that they had been suspended or temporarily locked out of their dorms, effectively making them homeless. .
“The only violence that happened on campus was the police taking people to jail,” one student told me. “It was a completely peaceful protest. There was a dance circle last night. There was no aggressive or violent behavior.”
Some said they found Shafiq's message clear and chilling.
“Some people can afford to endure the pain,” one of the students at the protest in front of police headquarters told me. “There is no pain for others.” She said Arab and Palestinian students of all faiths, as well as Muslim students, are unfairly targeted on campus, and Palestinian Americans He described an incident in which a private investigator appeared at the door of a student's dorm room.
Another student countered, saying, “There are no public hearings on Islamophobia in Congress.”
The day before, Shafiq had prostrated himself before the brigade of malice, the Republican-led House of Representatives. In testimony before the House Education Committee, Mr. Shafiq seemed determined to avoid the fate of two other Ivy League presidents who were ousted over erratic performance. Insinuating that she would not hesitate to discipline the speech of pro-Palestinian professors and students, she suggested that the use of the contested “River to Sea” chant could itself be cause for her disciplinary action.
Her comments struck a particularly dark note in a world where almost any kind of claim for Palestinian self-determination risks being interpreted as anti-Semitism or a call for Israel's destruction. Her actions Thursday drew immediate condemnation from her professors and other free speech advocates on campus.
Columbia University's president apparently believed that Republican Ivy League opportunists like Elise Stefanik would be satisfied with her attitude of throwing students under the bus. A big chance. On Thursday, the New York Post reported that pro-Israel groups were unimpressed and hired a truck carrying her mobile billboard urging her to resign. Her sign read, “We’re here to help you move.”
I realized that the public conversation was preoccupied with the coddling of college students, their unwillingness to face hard truths, and their desire for a safe space protected from challenging ideas. I'm old enough to remember. For years, many of the voices that have ridiculed the safety concerns of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer students have been conspicuously silenced. as An iron-fisted university leader dispatches officers in riot gear to arrest college students who are politically active and take positions on important moral issues. If our wealthiest university, endowed with tenure and generous endowments, cannot become a citadel of free speech and a forum for grappling with the most difficult ideas, what hope do we have for the rest of our nation? Is there?
The right-wing culture wars on American campuses have been waged for some time. Recently, understandable concerns about the rise of anti-Semitism have helped push these forces into an uneasy alliance that threatens speech of all kinds. University administrators are trembling in the face of powerful trustees and MAGA politicians, and are ready to call in the military at the slightest sign of discord involving politics they deem dangerous in the name of “safety.” We fall into the trap of having to do something. These forces pose an existential threat to America's long tradition of free assembly at universities.
But these students aren't going to sit back and act.
“The more they try to silence us, the louder our voices become,” one graduate student at Columbia University told me.
By late Thursday night, despite the bone-deep cold, a crowd was thick outside police headquarters, cheering and cheering each time the arrested students were released. Back on campus, dozens more students were already taking up residence on the adjacent lawn in Columbia's Quad, and the university tried again.
