Columbia University’s graduation is still a week off, but last Wednesday Suleyman Ahmed donned his cap and gown and walked to the school’s gates with a cardboard sign that read “cops off campus.”
Ahmed hadn’t participated in any of the demonstrations that have rocked the university over the past few weeks. But after the school asked the New York Police Department to clear out pro-Palestinian protesters and keep a steady presence on campus through commencement, he couldn’t concentrate on cramming. He decided to make a statement.
“I don’t really know how to process the fact that, at the bare minimum, there are going to be 100 cops at the celebration,” he told me for an article in The Wall Street Journal. “I doubt whether the potential threat of students is worth having the sustained police presence here.”
The Columbia campus is under lockdown, with dozens of officers at its gates and more standing sentry over lawns in the quad. University administrators at the Ivy League school took the step as colleges around the country struggle with allowing free expression while maintaining order and combating inflammatory and antisemitic rhetoric from some demonstrators
.Activists at Columbia seized Hamilton Hall, a key academic building and home to many classrooms where students take the school’s famed Core Curriculum. (Full disclosure: I graduated from Columbia in 2007.) As Ginia Bellafante pointed out in the New York Times, the same building was occupied during 1968 protests against the Vietnam War and Columbia’s frayed relations with its surrounding neighborhood, then again in the 1980s to protest apartheid in South Africa.
The current crop of demonstrators started with an encampment on a campus lawn, before a subset of people broke into Hamilton. They researched past protests over Columbia’s expansion into Harlem, went to a community meeting on gentrification and development and studied parallels with the fight over land between Palestinians and Israelis. They attended a “teach-in” put on by several former Black Panthers, who told them about the importance of handling internal disputes within their movement, my colleagues reported.
“We took notes from our elders, engaged in dialogue with them and analyzed how the university responded to previous protests,” Sueda Polat, a graduate student and organizer in the pro-Palestinian encampment, told them.
I want to give a shout-out to the student journalists who have done a great job covering all of this. As the raid at Hamilton was happening, I was glued to radio station WKCR. Alyssa Choiniere wrote a profile of the students behind the dial, who were interspersed around campus and doing their best to provide minute-by-minute observations.
And there’s the Columbia Daily Spectator, an undergraduate student newspaper that’s nearly 150 years old. It’s where I learned to be a journalist, and I’m very proud of the current students’ work — even in the face of restrictions by the police. They’ve collaborated with New York Magazine on a special issue, which includes a sharp focus on what this will mean for the future of Columbia’s leadership:
Overseeing it all was a new president, Minouche Shafik, whose inauguration had come just three days before 10/7 and who had scarcely begun to acquaint herself with the Columbia community when the campus was thrown into crisis. With national political figures and billionaires agitating for the removal of other Ivy League presidents, Shafik was charged with resolving standoffs among groups with vastly divergent interests: deep-pocketed donors used to getting their way, faculty with the security of tenure, and students who believe Columbia is betraying its legacy as an engine for progress. As the encampment impasse played out, it became clearer than ever that people were living in two different Columbias. As pro-Palestinian protesters built a community of hope and solidarity around their support for Gaza, many pro-Israel students reported feeling unwelcome and organized their own counterprotests on and around campus. Some of the latter group packed their bags and left, while many of the former were hauled off to jail and suspended.
There were plenty of protests when I was a student, and indeed, many people on campus regard Columbia’s activist culture as a feature — not a bug. That was true of several students I spoke to, including Will Anderson, a junior from Ohio. He hasn’t joined any demonstrations but told me he’s concerned about the police actions and the administrators who called for them.
“I don’t think it’s going to tarnish my Columbia experience as a whole,” he said. “I’ll be old and itching to tell people about the 2024 Columbia protests.”
THE QUESTION: Columbia is one of two Ivy League schools in New York State. What is the other?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Abe Beame was New York City’s first Jewish mayor. Many readers pointed out that Fiorello LaGuardia had a Jewish mother, which under Talmudic law makes him Jewish. But since he was a practicing Episcopalian during his mayoralty, I’m going with Beame.