BY ROBERT NEWTON
This post is part of a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that will focus on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read the first post and an introduction to the series here.
Across the country last fall, students took to public spaces on their campuses to protest the violence unfolding in Gaza. There were meetings, teach-ins, rallies, marches, picketing, and eventually encampments. Columbia University, where I teach sustainability science, was an epicenter of media attention but was by no means alone in the vibrance and stridency of its protests. The response was swift and severe from ultraconservative Republicans in Congress who called Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and leaders from Harvard, Penn, Northwestern, Rutgers and other universities before hearings—grilling them aggressively, subpoenaing institutional and individual communications, and establishing a narrative of antisemitism in the nation’s leading universities. That narrative quickly took on a life of its own.
At Columbia, as at many (but far from all) campuses, there followed crackdowns on student activism. Anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian organizations were restricted in their freedoms and then suspended. When students escalated their actions, they faced disciplinary processes. When they escalated again, this time to a peaceful encampment in the small lawn that passes for a commons here, they were charged with trespassing. They escalated again, occupying a building full of classrooms. The NYPD was called onto campus for a second time, and students were arrested—this time in a physically aggressive manner—and disciplined again. At Columbia and across the city, more than five hundred students were arrested, some held In New York prison cells without food or water for many hours. There were numerous injuries, including to a graduate student whose eye socket was broken by a police boot while he lay restrained on the ground.
The aftermath of these disciplinary moves, including the criminalization of students, continues to ripple through the campus and our students’ lives. In much of the media, and in many parts of academe as well, the focus of activists and media alike has shifted to the behavior of students and the disciplinary process. To an extent, this is needed. Lawyers and supportive faculty must be organized for hearings. Students banned from dorms must be housed. Ad hoc disciplinary regulations must be dismantled; fair and legitimate norms of discipline must be reestablished. The rights of students and faculty need to be protected. But in this shift toward the immediate issues of campus behavior and academic rights, the overall context of the events of the past year has been dimmed. In evaluating our students’ actions and our institutions’ reactions to them, we should never lose sight of the fact that they were protesting an ongoing attack on a civilian population that has experienced levels of destruction, dislocation, and death not seen since the carpet bombing of northern Korea in the 1950s and north Vietnam in the 1960s. This context is absolutely critical to any understanding of the events of the past year.
Screenshot of a Columbia University web page for the Task Force on Antisemitism.
At Columbia, the lack of context is nowhere more evident than in the activities of the President’s Task Force on Antisemitism, established in response to pressure from House Republican leaders, wealthy donors, and student lawsuits. On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, the task force dropped its second report. The ninety-page document is based on listening sessions conducted by task force members with about five hundred Columbia students and faculty, the very large majority of them Jewish. The task force, per its stated methodology, did not question or vet the claims of respondents. Rather, it sought to understand the perceptions, feelings, and responses of some of Columbia’s Jewish subcultures to the events of the last year.
After reporting on what they heard, task force members framed the results, settled on its own definition of antisemitism, and addressed the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Through a controversial logic, consistent with the focus on Jewish feelings as determinative, the task force’s definition of antisemitism equates anti-Zionism with animosity to both the State of Israel per se and Jewish people. Thus, they found most anti-Zionist speech to be a violation of the US federal Title VI protections against discrimination based on both national origin and ethnicity. The interim president of Columbia praised the work of the task force and posted its report on the university website. As with the first report, the task force released its second one immediately to a wide array of media. There was no internal dialogue or vetting within the faculty, most of whom found out about it from reading the news. Not everyone was thrilled. A group of twenty-four Jewish faculty members (including me) wrote a detailed and scathing critique of the methods, controversial framing, and erroneous details of the report.
The task force report refers to the violence of October 7 more than twenty times. The word Gaza is mentioned only once as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” The dislocation of virtually all Gazans, the destruction of Gaza’s schools and universities, the reduction to rubble of housing and infrastructure, the deaths of over forty thousand people, and the rising levels of childhood disease and malnutrition are nowhere to be found. Thus, the anti-Zionist animus that the report’s authors document in such detail seems to have sprung spontaneously from an antisemitic culture. Even worse, phrases like, “After October 7, many Jewish and Israeli students began to report multiple instances of harassment, verbal abuse and ostracism” imply that antisemitism was sparked by the violence against Jews in southern Israel. This framing is simply inaccurate. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, there was nearly universal empathy for Israelis and other victims, including the hostages. The surge in membership in pro-Palestinian organizations; the demonstrations, rallies, and speeches of anti-Zionist activists on campus; the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition; and the strident voices calling for a ceasefire were a response to the massive destruction wrought by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.
By writing this critical context out of their report, the authors make it impossible to understand the events of the past year at Columbia. Hundreds of student activists (a sizable number of them Jewish) who bear their Jewish peers no ill have been horrified by the actions of Israel’s government between October 8 and today. To accuse these students (and faculty) of antisemitism is wrong—and because it is inaccurate it is counterproductive. The recommendations of the task force, which flow from its one-sided framing of last year’s events, will not calm the tensions and conflict on campus. They are more likely to inflame divisions because the targets of their criticism will correctly feel that they have been wrongly accused of a bias they do not harbor.
The task force’s reportage of the perceptions and sentiments of Jewish students at Columbia is useful and important. But it is one-sided. And these feelings and narratives have not been validated—appropriate perhaps for “listening sessions” but not for formulating policy recommendations. Student narratives have been shaped into a framework and used as the basis for policy recommendations by a task force that equates opposition to Zionism with opposition to the State of Israel per se and with antisemitism. Such an equation is both false and dismissive of the thousands of students and faculty who feel an urgent need to stop the killing in Gaza, who support equality for all people living in Israel/Palestine, who also feel love for their Jewish friends and colleagues.
At the end of its second report, the task force signals its intention to produce a third report, attending to “inclusion” in classrooms and content in curriculum. Ponder that. Professors on our campus are already being called before Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action inquiries to answer to students who feel that their discomfort at classroom speech is sufficient evidence of bias.
Columbia needs to do better. We owe it to our students to set the recent report aside until a more appropriate, well-rounded process can be constituted. And we must not permit a politically and culturally narrow group—none of whose expertise is in educational norms, academic freedom, or curriculum development—to join the cacophony of interest groups already trying to tell faculty how and what to teach in their own fields.
Robert Newton is a member of the Columbia University AAUP Executive Committee. He retired in 2022 as a senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. Now he teaches in Columbia’s Sustainability Science program.
Here we see more one sided anti-Israel propaganda that denies the open antisemitism and threats against Zionist /Jewish students and which minimizes the disruption of normal university functioning and the vandalism & property damage during the building occupation. It’s starting to look like the AAUP is abandoning its academic freedom traditions and turning into an anti-Israel activist organization that is prepared to defend threats to academic freedom as long as they are in the name of pro-Palestinianism.
Robert Newton is right to minimize the disruption, vandalism, and property damage, for they were, in fact, minimal. The glass panes of the doors of Hamilton Hall were broken, as were some security cameras, but the demonstrators did little other physical damage. The police did far more damage to Hamilton by breaking open many doors. I have spoken to colleagues who taught in Hamilton; they told me that, before the occupation began, the disruption to their classes from the encampment was minimal. Again, the university disrupted classes more than the demonstrators by forcing all classes and exams in the whole university online. Hamilton Hall is a beautiful structure, and I would have been upset if the demonstrators did it significant damage, but to their credit, they did not. Two Tiffany stained glass windows portraying Sophocles and Vergil, which were salvaged from Columbia’s 19th-century site in midtown, were completely unharmed during the occupation, even though they appear prominently in the main lobby where many of the arrests took place. I saw them yesterday, and they remain in excellent condition. Stan Nadel refers to the article as “propaganda,” what the other commenter calls the “defacement and destruction of university property,” but the facts are on the side of Newton’s article, not these comments.
Robert Newton is right to minimize the disruption, vandalism, and property damage caused by the protesters, for they were, in fact, minimal. The protesters broke the glass panes in the doors of Hamilton Hall, as well as some security cameras, but otherwise did little damage to Columbia property. The police did far more damage by breaking open many doors. I have spoken to colleagues who taught in Hamilton last semester; they told me that the encampment caused little disruption to their classes. The occupation, of course, disrupted classes in Hamilton for one day, but the university caused far greater disruption by moving all classes and exams university-wide online for the rest of the semester. Hamilton Hall is a beautiful structure, and I would have been upset if the protesters had done serious damage to it, but to their credit, they did not. Two large Tiffany stained glass panels portraying Sophocles and Vergil, which were salvaged from Columbia’s 19th-century site in midtown, were completely unharmed during the protests, even though they occupy prominent positions in the lobby where much of the action took place. I saw them yesterday; like the rest of the building, they are in excellent condition. Stan Nadel describes Newton’s article as “propaganda” and, like the other commenter, decries the “defacement and destruction of university property,” but the article has a basis in the facts, which these comments do not.
Professor Thaddeus seems to believe that it was a mistake for the administration to ask the police to remove protestors who were illegally occupying Hamilton Hall. His apparent rationale is that the physical damage caused by the protestors was minimal. To bolster his “minimal damage” claim, he noted that two large valuable Tiffany stained glass panels were “unharmed.”
This implicit criticism of the administration’s position is simplistic. By focusing on physical damage, he ignores all the rightful administration’s concerns with Code violations, student harassment, and safety issues. Instead, he seems to offer “property damage” as his sole criterion for when – during the takeover – it is appropriate or inappropriate to call in the police.
And even with this “damage” metric, he offers no useful guidelines. One has to wonder or guess at what point the property damage valuation passes the magic red line that makes a call to the police okay. If the Tiffany glass panels were damaged, then would calling the police pass muster?
Also, one has to ask, when does inaction by the administration become dereliction of duty? Is it a question of timing? Should the administration have waited until the damage got much worse? Should the administration have simply ignored masked individuals – of unknown identity – who overcame university personnel and hijacked university property? Is that what they should have done? Should the administration have just caved to whatever demands these protestors – some of whom were not students – made?
Honest question: How exactly was the administration supposed to act – besides calling the police – in the Hamilton Hall situation?
The “students” you refer to were often not students at Columbia, or “students” at all, but paid instigators of selective violence. Who led the takeover of Hamilton Hall? Who led the defacement and destruction of university property? What was Columbia expected to do? The only way to ferret out outsiders was to arrest them en masse. Doing this at the only school designated an Ivy was just a way of garnering publicity.