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I live reasonably close to Columbia University. Over the years, on my daily walks, I've often wandered through the gates of its striking campus on 116th Street, crossing from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue, passing students, admiring the enormous Low Library and the scene generally. About noon on a recent day (but before students there occupied Hamilton Hall and were violently cleared out of it by the police), with Columbia Professor Helen Benedict's piece in mind, I decided to walk to that now embroiled, embattled campus.
Everything looked normal as I headed up Broadway until I hit 110th Street and noticed that there were police officers on every corner. As I went farther uptown, the sidewalk suddenly narrowed because part of each block now had metal police barricades with plastic white police tape on them, clearly meant to hold possible protesters outside the school later in the day. The smaller (but still huge) gate I often enter at 114th Street was bolted shut with a giant "kryptonite evolution" lock on it and a security guard standing behind it. I could at least peer in and see a few of the on-campus tents that Columbia students protesting the nightmare in Gaza were now living in. Another block up and it was just police, police, police, plus a few orthodox anti-Zionist Jews with strange protest signs and a man waving an Israeli flag and shouting at them. And then there were all the TV cameras waiting for something, anything, to happen.
As I stood there, with police everywhere and not a demonstrating student in sight, I thought: how strange that all of this had happened on the very campus where, in 1968, amid the Vietnam War and after the killing of Martin Luther King, the cops had similarly been called in on demonstrators in a way that would prove historically memorable. Live and learn? Not a chance. The present Columbia president, Minouche Shafik, despite (as Benedict told me) the advice of her faculty, did it again and, in the process, not surprisingly created a nationwide movement against the nightmare in Gaza that's already spread to more than 40 campuses and is still growing.
Sometimes, it seems as if no one ever learns anything. A striking but solitary protest over Gaza and then throw in the modern version of McCarthyite Republicans, a cowed university president, and the decision to call in the police on a peaceful set of demonstrators. The next thing you know, you have a national movement embroiling campus after campus. But let Benedict, author most recently of the novel The Good Deed, in her second TomDispatch piece, explain the madness of it all in a distinctly up close and personal fashion. Tom
The Distortion of Campus Protests over Gaza
How the Right Has Weaponized Antisemitism to Distract from Israel's War
Helicopters have been throbbing overhead for days now. Nights, too. Police are swarming the streets of Broadway, many in riot gear. Police vans, some as big as a city bus, are lined up along side streets and Broadway.
Outside the gates of the Columbia University campus, a penned-in group of pro-Israel demonstrators has faced off against a penned-in group of anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protesters. These groups are usually small, often vastly outnumbered by the police around them, but they are loud and they are not Columbia students. They've been coming every day this April to shout, chant, and hold up signs, some of which are filled with hateful speech directed at the other side, equating protests against the slaughter in Gaza with being pro-Hamas, and calls to bring home the hostages with being pro-genocide.
Inside the locked gates of the campus, the atmosphere is entirely different. Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, "Nerds for Palestine," "Passover is for Liberation," and "Stop the Genocide." The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it's so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.
The Real Story on Campus
Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside -- the same kinds of students Columbia University's president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th -- are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don't know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody's way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)
As a tenured professor at Columbia's Journalism School, I've been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I've been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.
Given how horrific this war is, it's not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been "Bring back our hostages" on the Israeli side and "Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians" on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent.
Unfortunately, instead of allowing students to have their say and disciplining those who overstep boundaries, Columbia President Shafik and her administration suspended two of the most vocal groups protesting Israel's war on Gaza: the student chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. This only enraged and galvanized students and some faculty more.
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