A Conversation With a Columbia University Undergraduate

When the subway riders boarded the 1 train at 116th Street on Manhattan’s West Side, it was apparent that many riders on this Labor Day were students. The subway car wasn’t particularly crowded and one of the people I guessed was a student sat down next to me.

We began talking about the difference in the campus environment between last spring (New York Times, August 19, 2024) and now with the new fall semester. The student, a finance major, told of the presence of security personnel over the campus and it seemed strange to him in the context of a university where openness, free movement, and freedom of expression were the highest values. He talked about what I interpreted as a daunting situation moving on and off campus and around the interior of the campus.

I asked him if there was any evidence of any level of protest, given the large protests of the spring 2024 semester, faculty support of those protests, and the near-shutdown of the university when police entered the university with the blessings of the then-university president and brought the school to a near-standstill as the semester ended. He told me that protest was absent on the campus, an observation that is contradicted in this writing.

While we spoke, I thought of getting off of the same subway train in May 2024 to see for myself just how stringent security measures were in the wake of student protest against the Gaza war, the encampment in support of the Palestinian cause for freedom, and the faculty members who both supported and protected the student encampment. I thought about visiting the campus a few years after the 1968 protests on the Columbia University campus  against the Vietnam War and the violent police response to those protests of over a half-century ago. Those protests also involved student and community pushback against the expansion of the university into a neighborhood that bordered the campus. The NYPD’s violent response to the 1968 students protests was repeated in the spring 2024 repression of student protests at Columbia. In 2024, however, the police were militarized and appeared as an military occupying force on the Columbia campus. It is of interest that Columbia was conducting military-related research in the 1960s. Similar protests took place at the Greenwich Village campus of New York University during that time frame while I was a graduate student there.

At NYU, the university’s computer center was picketed by students who were swept up in a police action in an effort to keep the school’s computer system running that had ties to the military.

In 1970, NYU students occupied buildings around Washington Square to protest Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the massacre of student protesters at Kent State University.  200 students occupied the Loeb Student Union and later Kimball Hall and the Courant Institute of Mathematics in Warren Weaver Hall. Their demands included: withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and Cambodia, end of political repression in the U.S., and the destruction of a 3.5 million dollar computer that was called the  “war machine” leased by NYU from the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission (NYU.edu).

I recalled attending the graduation of a relative over a decade ago in the exact same area where the student encampment was located last spring at Columbia University. The area where the encampment and graduation took place is an iconic part of the university with its large open space and easily recognizable Low Library. Although of only tangential interest, the commencement speaker at that graduation seemed content with the fact that as a CEO he had reduced the workforce of his business as a cost-cutting measure.

It seems that the student with whom I briefly spoke may have missed the recent protest of pro-Palestinian demonstrators outside the gates of Columbia University where their chants could be heard at the fall semester’s convocation (Reuters, August 30, 2024). The Reuters’ article notes, besides the police presence at the demonstration, the presence of a drone that flew over the heads of protesters. Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, Columbia University’s new president (New York Times, August 15, 2024), said she would listen to both sides regarding Columbia University protests, but Columbia’s history vis-a-vis protecting protest and protesters is not good. “Will the College Protests Matter in November?” concludes that pro-Palestinian protests are not that important in potential presidential voting of younger voters (New York Times, September 3, 2024). Here is the strange new world of protest: draconian penalties for protesting students and faculty, police everywhere and often dressed in military assault garb, and drones. The military and war analogies in a domestic setting are hard to miss!

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