Columbia University
Updated 2024-07-16
2024-05-02 Columbia’s President Sold Out Students and Faculty to Far-Right McCarthyism The right is weaponizing antisemitism as a way of furthering its campaign to suppress the kind of freedom of thought and speech on campus that threatens its authoritarian goals of turning this country Christian, conservative, straight, and white. Not only is the slaughter in Gaza getting lost in the growing fog of hysterical speech about antisemitism on American college campuses, but so is the fact that Arab and Muslim students are being targeted, too.
Shafik’s craven performance in front of Republican lawmakers opened a Pandora’s box of troubles. The student protesters swelled in numbers and erected their encampment. Faculty members wrote outraged opinion pieces condemning Shafik’s behavior. And when she called in the police to arrest students, more students than ever joined the protests all over the country. Then, on April 24, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson visited Columbia with Republicans Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, and Anthony D’Esposito (and even Foxx from North Carolina), acting as if some kind of terrible riot had gone on here.
I looked behind me at the encampment on the other side of campus. In front of the tents on the grass, the students had erected a sign listing what they called “Gaza Encampment Community Guidelines.” These included: “No desecration of the land. No drug/alcohol consumption. Respect personal boundaries.” And most significantly, “We commit to assuming the best intentions, granting ourselves and others grace when mistakes are made, and approaching conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.” Designated faculty and students stood at the entrance to make sure no outsiders got in, and that nobody entered the encampment unless they had read and agreed to that list of commitments. The noisiest people on campus were the thronging media. But nobody and nothing was out of control. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/columbia-sold-out-far-right
2024-05-02 Professors, Speakers Cut Ties With Universities Over Police Crackdowns on Protests “What President Shafik did at Columbia moved the whole world a step closer to universally criminalizing direct action, and direct action is the ONLY thing that is going to help the world halt global heating,” said one climate scientist as she canceled a planned speech at the school.
Repercussions of American universities’ crackdowns on student protesters are becoming increasingly evident this week as faculty members, public speakers, and others who collaborate with higher education institutions announced they would cut ties with schools that have repressed students’ constitutional right to protest against Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on Gaza.
Last week, more than 2,100 academics from across the globe signed a statement expressing solidarity with student and faculty protesters and supporting an “academic and cultural boycott” of the school. https://www.commondreams.org/news/speakers-cut-ties-universities
2024-04-22 Columbia Faculty Walk Out Over Student Suspensions, Arrests for Gaza Protests The Guardian reported that “hundreds of members of the teaching cohort at Columbia walked out in solidarity with the students who were arrested” while “students put protest tents back up in the middle of campus on Monday after they were torn down last week when more than 100 arrests were made.”
While expressing gratitude for solidarity actions, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar—whose daughter was suspended—said that “this about the genocide in Gaza and the attention has to remain on that.”
Over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by U.S.-backed Israeli troops, and Columbia University students have been suspended and arrested by New York Police Department officers in recent days for protesting the slaughter—which led to a walkout by the Ivy League institution’s faculty on Monday.
Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of IfNotNow, a Jewish-led U.S. group that organizes against Israel’s apartheid, declared: “Solidarity with these faculty members. Shame on establishment politicians and agitators who are smearing the anti-war protest at Columbia as anything other than what it is: a courageous stand for freedom and peace.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/columbia-university-protests
2024-04-21 Edward Said Warned Against Anti-Palestinian McCarthyism Said’s legacy reads today as a scathing condemnation of the hypocrisy of U.S. liberal institutions, their moral corruption, and the hollowness of the very values that they profess to teach.
Students across the United States are rising up against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, bringing to memory the student movements of the 1960s. From Columbia to Brown, from Yale to Harvard, students are staging sit-ins, hunger strikes, class walkouts, and interfaith prayers, demanding an end to U.S. support for Israel and the complicity of their academic institutions in the ongoing genocide.
While some U.S. institutions are treading a delicate path, the Columbia University administration, led by President Minouche Shafik, has violently cracked down on its own students, summoning the NYPD to mass arrest over 100 students, and suspending others with a 15-minute notice. In an unprecedented brutal crackdown on free speech on campus, the police destroyed solidarity encampments and student belongings, while charging arrested students with “trespassing” on the campus that they are charged a whopping tuition of more than $60,000 a year to attend!
In its attempt to appease far-right extremists in Congress, and to save Columbia from “being cursed by God,” as a Republican Congressman warned Shafik, Columbia has sided with genocide, thus undermining its own legacy of safeguarding free speech and peaceful protest on campus https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/edward-said-anti-palestinian-mccarthyism
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