BY ISAAC KAMOLA

In February I gave a talk at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought, alongside colleagues discussing the question “Where is the University?” The panel was planned prior to Columbia’s then-shocking ban on Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace. In January, we inquired about the status of the boycott against Columbia and debated amongst ourselves whether to go through with the talk. It seemed distasteful to talk at Columbia. However, in conversation with Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP-CBT)—a collective of faculty, staff, and graduate workers at Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers College—we decided to move forward, agreeing to tailor our talks to center Palestine and the violence taking place in Gaza.

© Spectator Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Apparently, Columbia president Minouche Shafik saw a poster of the event while walking across campus. And prior to the event we learned that she had decided not only to attend but also to introduce the panel. I remember her introduction was a word salad of platitudes about the need for “viewpoint diversity” and to respect the speech of those we disagree with. What the university needed was free speech. I remember it as an entirely banal caricature of what inquiry and scholarly speech actually entails. In fact, tonight, as the New York Police Department stormed Columbia’s campus, I went back to my notes from that day—I am a copious note taker—and was not entirely surprised to find that I had not written down a single word from President Shafik’s introduction. Nothing original or interesting, nothing creative or compelling. This by the president of Columbia at an academic panel on the university in what we would soon learn were the early days of the most significant campus protests since 1968. Not a single insight. Not an original thought.

Instead, Shafik basically parroted the right-wing talking points that have become so baked into public discourse about higher education. Over the past few years, well-funded right-wing think tanks, media outlets, and partisan activists have spent considerable effort replacing one understanding of the university, as a place of critical thought and contestation, with an anodyne notion of “free speech.” In this notion, the “marketplace of ideas” resembles some idealized libertarian exchange. Supposedly individuals—free from all social constraint, hierarchy, or power—engage in jaunty discussions, including those concerning ideas over which they vehemently disagree. There is no understanding of power or how violence is used to silence. No attention to the very real need to create conditions in which the unheard can be heard. No appreciation of the fact that dropping bombs on schools, and killing faculty in Gaza, fundamentally changes which ideas live and which ones perish from the earth.

Tonight, as we watch footage of an armored tank carry phalanxes of police into the window of Hind’s Hall, we see in naked clarity the full banality and violence that lies behind such understandings of “campus free speech.” Tonight, students are being clobbered by police, invited on campus by President Shafik, a supposed defender of viewpoint diversity. What view did these students articulate? In speech and action, they simply suggested a desire to live in a world where Palestinians are free from indiscriminate slaughter.

It is long past time to reject the banalities about “free speech” being parroted by college administrators, by right-wing pundits, and the New York Times editorial page. The university is too valuable—human life is too valuable—to be held hostage to such an emaciated understanding what it means to speak freely and to speak boldly in the name of justice.

Isaac Kamola is associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Connecticut and the director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.