The Call is Coming from Inside the House

Prof. Joseph Slaughter on Stand Columbia and the Senate

In addition to news of layoffs, yesterday’s email fusillade brought an announcement of a committee to review the University Senate.

A casual observer of the Columbia political scene may have been puzzled to learn that in the midst of an unprecedented, existential crisis, with massive layoffs and still no prospect for the return of the hundreds of millions of dollars impounded illegally by the Trump administration, Columbia University was taking the time to review its… Senate.

As it happens, comp lit professor and University Senator Joseph Slaughter recently addressed this very question when he spoke during the Q and A period at last Friday’s Senate Plenary. His remarks focused on the puzzle of this Senate review and the role in it of a group called Stand Columbia, which has been sending newsletters to large swaths of the Columbia community for the past year. We invited Prof. Slaughter to publish an edited version of his remarks. They are below.

Acting President Shipman was asked earlier by a fellow Senator if any Trustees or ex-Trustees have delivered demands to the federal government that have been recycled as demands from the government to Columbia. The Acting President responded “no,” and then added that she didn’t know if others in our community are feeding such information to the government.

I want to pick up on that line of thought, because it seems relatively clear that angles and lines of federal attack against our institution are coming from members of our community. The call is coming from inside the house.

I want to discuss one of those locations: Stand Columbia.

Let’s take issue #41 of their newsletter, from April 26, calling for reform of the Senate, supporting the call that Acting President Shipman has made and that seems likely to be one plank in the undisclosed demands currently being “negotiated” by the Trustees with the Trump administration.

Issue #41 calling for Senate reform opens with this proposition: “We are now on our fourth president in less than twenty-four months. The need for fundamental reform is undeniable.”

Translation: We have had four presidents in the past twenty-four months, so we need to reform the Senate.

The logic is impeccable. The Trustees have repeatedly failed to provide the university with a suitable president in three recent attempts. They have even re-appointed as co-chair of the new presidential search committee one of the same co-chairs of the Trustees who presided over the previous search that produced President Shafik. I believe there’s some saying about the state of mind of people who repeat actions expecting a different outcome.

We are now on our fourth, and apparently soon-to-be fifth, president in less than twenty-four months. So, of course, it is clear that the Trustees and the Acting President combined should focus their efforts on reforming the Senate.

I’ll stop being facetious.

The conclusion to Stand Columbia’s opening observation that we have had four presidents in two years would logically be: Perhaps we need to rethink the make-up of the Board of Trustees and re-organize its procedures so that they might make better decisions and actually deliver a president worthy of a great university.

The logical conclusion is that the Trustees and Senior Administrators have failed Columbia.

Stand Columbia’s attack on the Senate—the only university-wide democratic deliberative body—is a distraction and a deflection.

It is an effort to deflect responsibility for failed leadership away from the Trustees and its decision-making to some other body.

Not coincidentally, it is the only arm of shared governance that actually stood up over the past year and a half. The Senate is under review not because it couldn’t meet the moment, but because it was the only governance body that dared to do so.

Among the Trustees, the senior administration, and the University Senate, the Senate is the only one that stayed true to the University Statutes;

the only one that repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to the Mission of the University;

the only one that repeatedly articulated its enduring commitment to principles of shared governance, principles of academic freedom, principles of due process—indeed, to principles of the rule of law and democracy.

So, why would this mysterious publication, Stand Columbia, which somehow seems to have access to most of our email addresses and access to detailed financial information for the university . . .

Why would this publication be constantly issuing targeted attacks on the Senate and shared governance?

Why would this publication be providing fodder and targeting details for the federal government to attack the university, giving those attacks a veneer of respectability?

Why is Stand Columbia so obsessed with the University Senate?

I suggest that it is because Stand Columbia is effectively a propaganda organ of some Trustees and ex-Trustees. It feeds the hardline of Trustee (and aspiring Trustee) thinking into the bloodstream of the community. It launders corporate governance and authoritarian principles in the guise of community commonsense.

We need to recognize the Stand Columbia project for what it is: an effort not just to shape community opinion—to manufacture consent—but to feed lines of attack to the federal government, by people disconnected from the living community of Columbia who need to deflect from their own failures to listen, learn, and lead.