At Columbia University in New York, the energy of spring has been both beautiful and violent. Last week, police helicopters were crawling the sky over the main quad, while down below a sign at the edge of a makeshift encampment read, “Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine.” A week earlier, Columbia students pitched the tent city on Columbia’s east lawn to protest Israel’s assault in Gaza. “The drones were here last night, too,” a student at the gate of the encampment said.
The university had claimed that the students had “disrupted the learning environment” with their tents and were a threat to safety at Columbia. I wanted to see for myself.
To the left as I passed through the gate, there were tables for food and water. The well-organized students had set up a number of services for themselves: There was a first-aid/hospital tent, and there was a space for charging electronics. In the center of the commune was a microphone connected to an amplifier and a schedule board giving notice of upcoming guest lecturers. A tent filled with books was designated the “people’s library.” Another tent was arranged for spiritual care. The day before my visit, students held an interfaith Seder with Jewish students. On a Friday, Muslims gathered to pray on the lawn.
Advertisement
Around me, students were reading, studying and chatting. Some were making art and painting. I saw an environment rich with learning, but I did not see disruption.
Follow this authorKaren Attiah's opinionsA student took up the microphone to announce that materials and belongings on the periphery of the lawn needed to be moved because the pile was a fire hazard. These were the unclaimed possessions of students cleared by force from a previous encampment. The university had called in the police, who had rousted students and thrown their things haphazardly into piles. The New York Police Department is not known for cleaning up the messes that it makes. The listening students repeated the speaker’s message three times to confirm that they heard it accurately and then got to work.
A short distance from the encampment, other students, acting as spokespeople, were handling a gaggle of reporters with ease. I spoke with one of the students, who explained a color-coded system to sort the protesters by the level of risk they were prepared to take. Students from all races and backgrounds from Barnard College and Columbia had been suspended already, which cut many of them off from their housing, food service and campus health care. Incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia had begun to increase. Some professors and politicians were beginning to demand that the National Guard be called in to restore “order.” So the risks were real.
Advertisement
“Red means you’re someone who is willing to be arrested,” she told me. I asked her if she was willing. She paused and said, “Yes, I am.” Another student came by and asked if we wanted masks to hide our faces from the media.
The sophistication and organization of care in the camp were impressive. Gazing on the solidarity in the camp, I forgot about the choppers, the threat of violence in the sky.
Columbia means a great deal to me. I am an alumna and an adjunct professor teaching about race and journalism. The confrontation between school and students left me facing my own internal crisis. What is the point of liberal education in international affairs at a moment like this? What is the point of genocide studies, of history, of courses in social movements and conflict resolution? Am I to believe that atrocity prevention can be done only by midcareer experts in office jobs at nongovernmental organizations and embassies?
Advertisement
The students in the encampment, many of them with organizing experience of their own, have been failed by adults all of their lives. Adults who could not keep them safe and instead made them learn as children to hide from killers in active shooter drills. Adults who turned a pandemic into a political sideshow. Adults who dithered while the climate changed. Adults with the power and experience to stop the mass slaughter of more than 34,000 Palestinians but who have only sent more weapons to the killers. Why should these students — or anyone with a conscience — count on the adults?
Weren’t these encampments a lesson in organized, desperate atrocity prevention?
I returned to campus around the time that students moved to occupy Hamilton Hall, a building that has had a storied history of student protest, from the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War era to the movement against South African apartheid in 1985. Despite her promise not to use the force of the New York police again, Columbia President Minouche Shafik, under rising political pressure, invited police to storm the building. This time, I could see and hear helicopters all the way from Harlem, and as I walked toward the campus gates at 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, I saw the drones.
Advertisement
This escalation of force created yet another type of learning environment: tense, suspicious and sometimes hostile. At some police and campus security checkpoints, students could pass through but not faculty. Even bags and boxes of food and water were searched. When, finally, authorities issued a warning to clear the area, and said that anyone found there could face disciplinary action, I stayed anyway. I would watch as an army of police in riot gear forcibly extracted and arrested occupants from Hamilton Hall last Tuesday, while preventing the media from documenting the assault. As I write this, Columbia has announced that the NYPD, with its history of brutality, will be occupying campus for the rest of the semester.
Talk about a disrupted learning environment.
People of all intentions have called the conflict on campuses a distraction, and indeed, some have exploited the protests to redirect attention away from Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. But school administrators who have called on students to return to classrooms have missed the point. Sidewalks, streets and quads covered with tents are learning spaces, too. Is this not a way to learn of how authoritarian force works? And to learn sympathy with the conditions under which Palestinians and other marginalized groups have suffered for decades?
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLyxtc2ipqerX2d9c4COaWxoaGJksLC41KaZopldqMG2sMSnq2afka%2BubrzRqKueq6SoerG7y6Kanmc%3D