(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Columbia Is Waging War on Dissent [1]

['Katherine Franke', 'Joshua A. Cohen', 'Dave Zirin', 'Jeet Heer', 'James Bamford', 'Sasha Abramsky', 'Burton Silverman', 'Anna Oakes', 'Indy Scholtens', 'Emily Byrski']

Date: 2024-04-01 09:00:00+00:00

Activism / Columbia Is Waging War on Dissent The university is under pressure to root out any students or faculty critical of Israel—and it’s already caved.

A protester is arrested at a Columbia University demonstration. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld / Getty)

Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t say to me, “What the heck is going on at Columbia?” I’ve been part of the community at Columbia University and Barnard College for more than 45 years—as an undergrad at Barnard in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and as a professor at the law school since 1999. But since October 7, this institution has become unrecognizable to me. I can only conclude that it has lost its way.

I chose Barnard for my undergraduate education in significant part because of its reputation for having a politically engaged student body and university leadership that allowed, if not welcomed, student engagement with the political events of the day. As a student I learned almost as much from the teach-ins and protests on campus as I did in the classroom with my professors. Student-led political actions on the campus, often on the steps of Low Library, the building holding the president’s and provost’s offices, exposed me to new ideas and information about US military intervention in Central America, the movement to end apartheid in South Africa, disputes between feminists on the role of pornography in women’s sexual oppression, and so much more.

Columbia’s campus has a history of radical student protests: Buildings were occupied for weeks as part of a demand to create an ethnic studies department in the 1996, and to force the university to divest from companies in the fossil fuel business in 2016. Students built shantytowns on the steps Low Library to protest the university’s ties to apartheid South Africa in 1986. An undergraduate student protested the university’s failure to adequately address sexual assault and violence on campus by carrying a 50-pound mattress with her to class and to all activities on campus, including her graduation, in 2015. Yet, in recent months, Columbia has tried to sanitize student engagement with Israel/Palestine—claiming that student protests make (some) Jewish students feel uncomfortable.

It has reached a point where our students who stand in solidarity with Palestinians find themselves so fully constrained by a web of rules regulating their speech and expressive conduct—and a bureaucracy determined to enforce those rules abusively—that they have lost any faith that the university is truly committed to the principles of academic freedom and the robust debate of ideas. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid drawing the conclusion that the university now sees its primary constituency, to whom it owes a duty of loyalty, as outside institutional actors, such as congressional committees, foreign governments, and the NGOs and funders supporting those entities, not its students and faculty.

A few recent examples will make this breach of loyalty to our students clear. In the weeks after the October attacks, a number of students hung flags outside their dorm rooms; some hung Palestinian flags and others Israeli flags, to signal their support for the people in Gaza or Israel. Barnard College filed disciplinary charges against three students for hanging Palestinian flags outside their windows, citing a city ordinance that prohibited the hanging of anything outside of a residential window. As I helped them prepare a defense to these charges, I tried to find this ordinance, yet it turned out that not only did the city have no such ordinance; it had a law that specifically protected the hanging of a flag outside of a window, including a dormitory window. When we raised this concern with Barnard, it admitted that it was mistaken, wrote a new rule prohibiting the hanging of flags outside dorm windows, then applied it retroactively to these students and disciplined them under the new rule.

Another student attended a pro-Palestinian demonstration on campus (the one where protesters were sprayed with skunk water—a horrendous, noxious liquid that causes upper respiratory problems, headache, and hair loss), and draped the statute of Alma Mater on the steps of Low Library with a Palestinian flag, moving a metal barrier around the statue to do so. The university found her guilty of serious violations of school’s the Rules of Conduct, for which they gave her the sanction of two years of academic probation, 50 hours of community service, and a required essay about what can go wrong at a protest. This sanction was miles outside the norm for how the university has handled similar actions in the past. Graduate student union organizers and students protesting lax enforcement of sexual assault laws, for example, had often “decorated” Alma Mater as part of their campus protests. None of them had been disciplined for doing so.

In fact, Black Lives Matter activists on campus also adorned the statue in support of their protests—and Columbia used this photo in Columbia Magazine to highlight how the Columbia/Barnard community was engaging this important racial justice movement.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/columbia-lawsuit-israel-antisemitism/

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/