The easiest way to reach Columbia University is to exit the red line train at 110th and Broadway, walk past Tom’s Diner, the beloved corner cafe decorated with Seinfeld memorabilia in honour of the television show that made it famous, and stroll up to the front gates.
Springtime is usually beautiful on the campus, and the gates are usually open to visitors. Late April means exam time and residents are accustomed to hearing blood-curdling howls on the last Sunday of the term when students open windows around midnight and scream their lungs out to release the academic tension. That’s usually as hysterical as it gets around Morningside Heights. This year, the tension runs along a different string note.
On Wednesday afternoon, the main gates were locked and heavily guarded by police and campus security. Metal crowd barriers were piled along Broadway. In front of the Low library, the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, made an address shortly before 4pm that was designed as a stern rebuke to the pro-Palestine protesters who have been camping out on the main lawn for over a week.
“Today I’m here to proclaim that all those who gnash their teeth and demand to wipe out the state of Israel and attack our innocent Jewish students this simple truth: neither Israel, nor these Jewish students on campus, will ever stand alone. Today Hamas issues an endorsement statement of the protesters on this campus: they called them the future leaders of America. It is detestable.”
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A crowd of several hundred had gathered but the media presence around Johnson was so vast that it was impossible for the students to hear him. He was heckled throughout, with pro-Palestinian chants and, at one stage, a good old “Johnson sucks”.
Undeterred, Johnson castigated the behaviour of protesters, telling the crowd that Jewish students who had been “chased down” and “mocked” and those wearing the Star of David were told to leave the country. “And shamefully some professors have joined the mobs. Things have gotten so far out of control that they have cancelled classes,” he said, warning that “the virus of anti-Semitism has spread across other campuses”.
About 200 campuses across North America have organised similar protests over the past week, leading to widespread arrests: 108 students at Emerson in Boston, 93 at the University of Southern California, scores more at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Columbia protest started on Wednesday, April 17th, the very day that the University’s president, Nemat Shafik, faced a stern Congressional questioning about anti-Semitic incidents within the university.
“It was just over there,” says Jared, a New Englander – who preferred not to give his surname – pointing from where he sits beneath the shadow of the Butler Library across the square to a small patch of grass where the first night of protest took place.
“Last Wednesday night. I showed up and saw what was happening and tried to support them. I brought doughnuts, I helped form a barrier when we heard there were threats of police intimidation. They support divestment, they support Palestine, and free speech. There were maybe 150 people. Nothing like this. By trying to suppress the student voices over there, they created something 10 times bigger over here.”
The arrival of NYPD officers and the move to arrest – an intervention brought about at the behest of Shafik – was, he says, “scary”.
“I think way more people were galvanised after watching friends zip-tied and carried off in a bus.”
Since then, the occupation within the campus grounds has grown. In the sunshine, the encampment looks a bit like the luxury section of a music festival except for the signs – “Blood Is On Columbia Hands”; “Columbia Funds Genocide”. The intent is deadly serious. It is the opposite of a student lark. The patch of grass is bordered by a neat hedge, now lined with Palestine flags.
On Tuesday, a number of Jewish students used a wall in front of the Low Library to place hundreds of posters of the faces of hostages still held by Hamas. “You know, you see a lot of hate on campus right now,” says Itai Dreifuss
“And we want to remind people of what we are fighting for. I think the two sides aren’t as diametrically opposed as a lot of the tensions have presented and I think this may be a way to bridge the gap.”
Dreifuss says that life at Columbia since October 7th has been “a little wild”.
“I’ve been spit on, yelled at. I’ve had friends that were beaten. I was just speaking Hebrew. Two days after October 7th I was walking right up these stairs. We were talking about Ukraine. And some guy just spat on me and said: if it wasn’t here, I’d kill you both.”
Dreifuss can’t say for sure if it was a fellow student, but he was of collegiate age and was on the campus. “I don’t want to assume anything,” he said.
A group of three friends who stood about after the Johnson speech were unclear as to why the speaker of the House had made this impromptu appearance.
“I couldn’t even tell you,” one said.
“What I heard he was doing was speaking with Jewish students about anti-Semitism on campus. And I just feel there is an exemplification of conflation of interests. What everyone wants is for everyone to be safe. Initially, I thought the protests were too disruptive. I wish there were more decorum now. There is a sort of a lack of respect of authority now.”
But Jared, who is himself Jewish, is adamant that the thrust of the protest is not anti-Jewish in motivation or expression.
“I would invite people to the [Passover] seder two nights ago. It was beautiful, it was incredible, and it was a show of Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Nobody is unsafe here because they are Jewish. People who make the decision to continue to support Israel and fly Israeli flags in the face of people who may have had their families killed ... are not very popular, but they are perfectly safe to come here and act like hooligans.”
There are just over 36,000 students in Columbia, which has long been established as one of the jewels of the American educational tradition, with more than 100 Nobel winners and an eye-watering endowment. The number of active protesters is small.
But the atmosphere on the campus is fraught. The events of the past week have brought about a resurrection of the name of Grayson Kirk, president of the college in the spring of 1968 when a protest over links to the US defence industry and, separately, a plan to locate a private gym on public land in Harlem quickly escalated into a campus protest that caught the mood of that fragmenting decade, with the occupation of five buildings, the seizure of the president’s office and the captivity of the dean, Henry Coleman. Kirk retired from his role that summer.
This week, Shafik finds herself under intense pressure with the calls for her resignation led by Johnson as she tries to restore order within a campus where the prevailing mood is one of unease and uncertainty. She is just nine months into the role, having previously worked with the World Bank and the IMF and served as a president of the London School of Economics.
Harvard president Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill stepped down after criticism of their handling of anti-Semitism on the campuses of those institutions left their positions untenable. In Columbia, as the governing body attempts to balance the First Amendment right to free speech with a safe environment for its students, the concluding classes of the term have either moved to online or are working on a hybrid model.
“Most of my friends either left New York or stayed at home,” says Dreifuss. “There’s been a lot of heartbreak. To know you studied for three years with people, you drank with them and ate with them and then they come and call for your entire family to be murdered: it is tough to look those people in the eyes. It is tough to sit in class with them.”
By 5pm, speaker Johnson and his entourage had departed. The sunshine was dwindling and the crowd had thinned out. The fact that there are only a few more weeks of class left may solve the immediate problem for Columbia. But the events of the past week won’t be forgotten. Dreifuss was silent for a moment when asked what he thought the university would be like when everybody comes back in the autumn.
“I don’t know,” he said finally.
“Wow. That’s a great question. What is it going to look like in September?”
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