"This Is What a University Looks Like"

Extracts from the 25-hour speakout (Part 1)

Faculty and students from many different parts of Columbia stood on Broadway over 25 hours and spoke continuously about their vision of the university and the need to fight for it. As Classics Prof. Joseph Howley pointed out, “This is what a university looks like.” Here are some of their remarks.

Turkuler Isiksel, Political Science

Since 2011, I have had the privilege of teaching in the Core Curriculum here at Columbia. Each year, I take 21 undergraduates through a long journey, reading a long string of great texts in philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the 20^th century. It’s an incredible journey: we get to ask the big questions, think about questions that matter, questions like:

o What does it mean to live an excellent life?

o Where do moral norms come from and why are they binding on us?

o Do citizens need to be virtuous for a society to work well?

o What is the best political regime? What makes for just laws?

o Why should people obey political authority? Is authority compatible with freedom? What is domination, and what are its remedies?

We read Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, St Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Madison, Douglass, Du Bois, MLK, and Arendt – not necessarily because their books are full of right answers to guide our lives, but because they tell us how our civilization got here: its successes and failures, its triumphs and its catastrophes, its failings and wrong turns. We subject these great thinkers to the kind of searching, critical questioning that would make Socrates blush.

Anyone who thinks our job involves indoctrination has never been inside a Columbia classroom.

It is an immense privilege to teach at Columbia, one that I’ve never taken for granted.

One reason I’ve never taken it for granted is that I come from an authoritarian country: one that was never especially democratic but which has decisively slid into the dark abyss of autocracy over the past decade and a half. Much of my scholarship is motivated by its political history and my experience growing up there.

Like other scholars in my discipline, political science, I think a lot about how in recent decades, elections have come to be used for authoritarian ends.

Many countries that hold regular elections, where leaders come to power through a competitive struggle for the people’s vote, are nevertheless authoritarian. But how can that be? Aren’t elections the same thing as democracy?

Well, elections in authoritarian regimes are a kind of window-dressing: authoritarian incumbents win elections because they ensure that they cannot lose: by restricting media freedom, manipulating information, intimidating civil society leaders, jailing dissidents, banning opposition parties, outlawing rallies and demonstrations. Once in power, they typically try to conquer 5 key social institutions:

- The press

- The bureaucracy

- The military

- The judiciary

- Universities

Why these institutions?

First, because they answer to a different authority than whoever happens to be in political power. Their activities are guided not by whoever happens to be in power, but by its own professional ethic.

- journalism is guided by a commitment to informing the public,

- the bureaucracy is guided by an ethic of professionalism and public service,

- the military is guided by respect for the chain of command and political neutrality,

- the judiciary is guided by the ethic of impartially applying the law, and

- universities like ours are guided by the search for truth.

In scholarly inquiry, disciplinary standards have priority over other metrics (profits, power, glory, public opinion). Political non-interference is a precondition for our scholarly and teaching mission.

In short, the third law of thermodynamics does not change because the commander-in-chief doesn’t like it. So these institutions present an obstacle to political and social control.

A second reason authoritarians attack these institutions is because they guarantee the full and effective enjoyment of many individual rights. Many of the rights we hold as individuals are meaningless without a legally protected intermediary organization through which to exercise them.

- What would it mean to participate in the electoral process if there were no parties with the freedom to define their own platforms and choose their own leaders?

- Without media companies’ free speech rights being protected, could we have a sufficiently informed public to participate meaningfully in politics and hold leaders accountable?

- If charities and nonprofits didn’t exist, could we advance the myriad of causes and values we care about?

- Where trade unions don’t exist, don’t exploitative labor practices flourish?

- Can you exercise your faith without a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple that has expressive autonomy over what doctrines to preach, and that has property rights over its premises?

- If law firms lack rock-solid protections, who will stand up for the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, who will provide legal representation politically unpopular clients when the might of the state comes crashing down on them?

And most importantly for us gathered here, if universities lacked the autonomy to make hiring, funding, teaching decisions in accordance with the most advanced expertise in a scholarly field, that offered the resources necessary to pursue costly scientific research and learning – could each of us individually enjoy the right to education, the right to teach and to learn, the freedom to express our ideas and to contest other ideas, the right to access information, and the right to practice our chosen profession?

Attacks on universities, K-12 schools, law firms, media companies, immigration clinics, and myriad civil rights organizations are manifestations of the same authoritarian onslaught on our bedrock freedoms.

So, this “speak out” is not an act of institutional narcissism—frankly, I’d love to stop talking about Columbia. I’m sick of reading headlines about Columbia, you’re sick of reading headlines about Columbia, I bet journalists are tired of writing about Columbia—so let me state clearly, this is not about Columbia. This is about a systematic authoritarian attack on our Constitutional rights for which Columbia is an early and convenient target.

I end on a note of optimism. You know why else authoritarian regimes have a universal pattern of attacking institutions like universities? It is because they provide essential vehicles for organized, democratic action and resistance to tyranny. As many observers of authoritarian regimes have taught us, tyranny thrives on division: it prefers an atomized, squabbling, alienated, anonymous mass; it abhors a vigilant, united, networked, vibrant civil society. The speakers at today’s event disagree on so many substantive issues, sometimes vociferously: but we are allied on this fundamental point, that we must protect the institutional autonomy of our treasured institution and the personal safety and intellectual autonomy of each of its members. I urge the leadership of our university to do the same. YOU HAVE ONE JOB.

Ansley Erickson, Teachers College

Like a lot of people I know, I try to counteract my feeling of dread at the actions of the Trump administration by consciously looking for spots of hope. A public garden in New York City at peak bloom, riotous tulip color and sweet lilac perfume. A federal judge who issues a national injunction. Tesla sales numbers plummetting. Colleague Shayoni Mitra’s beautiful prosedescribing solidarity and love among students supporting Mahmoud Khalil.

I also find great hope in the kinds of questions I hear my colleagues and neighbors asking,: “Trump says he will… [do X or Y.]. Can he really do that? Is it his to make that decision?”

People are asking how things work, not just in our nation but at Columbia. A colleague says, for example, she’s been reading the university’s by-laws. Good.

We want to know who has what power – power to do something, or to stop something that shouldn’t be done. Across contexts and specific examples or fears, we are asking a common question: who decides? As a historian of education and public policy, I think it is one of our most fundamental.

It can seem wonky, but it is urgent. It is the question of our democracy.

It was the central question at the town hall organized by the student senators last week - organized because student leaders see that who decides at Columbia may be changing, even more than it already has in the last months.

The acting president announced reform of the University Senate over the summer (when students are away, when professors’ attention turns to research and, rightly, rest). A faculty member at the Town Hall rightly asked why the rush, especially with an acting president rather than their permanent replacement in office. Shouldn’t the acting president be a quiet custodian rather than a radical reformer? The Board of Trustees member present rushed out of the room rather than answer.

It seems that the Columbia administration (and presumably the Trustees) want less of a role for students, and perhaps for faculty, in who decides. This is all too aligned with the administration’s willingness to serve up some of our area studies departments, MESAAS especially among them, for administrative supervision. They are caving on long-established faculty governance of curriculum and research.

And it is especially ironic given one thing that we learned at the Town Hall: trustees who are key decision-makers know witheringly little about how things work on this campus. About the silence that follows when students make formal complaints of anti-Palestinian racism. About how deeply students care about the safety of their peers who are endangered by ICE. About how much it matters that those most empowered to decide at Columbia right now have, at best, said nothing about the unlawful abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi – as well as of Teachers College alumna Rümeya Öztürk from Tufts.

Whether we are thinking about funding cuts or admissions or discipline or curriculum, we are right to be asking, who decides, both within our university and in our university’s relationship with the federal government.

This university has been made better at the points in time when it answered the question “who decides” in more expansive, more democratic, and more collective ways. That process was not always easy, but it was fundamental.

I served a term on the Senate, as an elected representative from Teachers College. It was my honor to present for approval the resolution that established the doctoral program in African American and African Diaspora Studies. AAADS is one of Columbia’s newest departments, but it results from decades of effort to push the university to do better. Black Studies has been a dynamo of knowledge creation. Like so many scholars in the humanities and social sciences, I have learned a great deal from this work, and hope to continue learning more.

Black Studies – as a field, as departments and programs and tenured faculty – exists in large part because of students pushing to be part of who decides.

Students at Columbia in 1968 advocated for Black life and Black history be recognized as central part of the university and of knowledge production.

The struggle for Black studies is one that links Columbia to campuses across the country in the late 1960s. Students used powerful words to call for a place for themselves in the curriculum and in decisions about their campuses. At CUNY, students said:

We Demand:

1. A school of Black and Puerto Rican studies

This school will be controlled by the community, students and faculty. The courses and programs offered at this school will be totally geared to community needs. For the first time, we will be able to study our true past history in relation to our present condition. We will know our heroes and our culture, which has been denied us by the present racist society. The school will bring about an increased understanding of the political, social and economic forces, which work to exploit us in this society.

Largely thanks to their work, CUNY established departments of Africana and Puerto Rican studies – well before Columbia.

As is often the case, high school students are working in this direction, too. In 1969, a citywide network of HS students demanded:

CREATION OF A STUDENT-FACULTY (EQUAL REPRESENTATION) COUNCIL IN EACH SCHOOL, WHICH WILL MAKE BINDING DECISIONS OF THE FOLLOWING MATTERS: A-CURRICULUM (BLACKS STUDIES, PUERTO RICAN CULTURE) B-SCHOOL STAFF (HIRING AND FIRING) C-DISIPLINE D-OTHER STUDENT PROBLEMS

These students were part of a broader late-1960s struggle for community control – local educational democracy and self-determination – in NYC schools.

As part of that struggle, the poet and professor June Jordan spoke at a junior high school in Brooklyn. She is clear on who should decide.

“The traditional meaning of power is inhuman. It is, at all times, intrinsically opposed at least to some human life— whether it is opposed to human life in Birmingham, or in Ocean Hill, or in Harlem, or in Detroit, or in Watts, or in Memphis, or in Augusta, or in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Cambodia, or in Vietnam. [I think it is fair to say, based on the work that she did later, that Palestine would have been on this list in a later version]

… The old, abusive American Power is opposed to human life. Let us have no more to do with such power. Instead, let us, take control. Let us take responsibility for the freedom and wellbeing of each other.

What we have to do, right now, is to create community machines that will collect our garbage, control our schools, and patrol our streets for our safety and not our persecution. We must no longer wait for somebody to remember us and then, maybe, to send a garbage truck to pick up the garbage. We must no longer wait for somebody to maybe understand our history and then to maybe teach our children the truth. We must no longer simply tremble when we hear the gunfire of police, or state troopers, or the National Guard. We must take control. We must protect our once-only lives, we have to take apart and then replace the whole political life that has proven deadly to our own lives. We have to build a Living structure of our own true human community.

Jordan’s vision was broader and more capacious than most of our conversations today. We are, understandably, defensive, focused on holding on to what we had more than imagining the new. But I want to close with her words because we should be imagining. We should be imagining with each other what we will build together when we do survive.

I have chosen to emphasize the power of student participation in university governance, and in university change, because I was moved by what I saw at the Town Hall. But I want to be clear. We as faculty members cannot pass this fight onto our students. It is ours, like it is theirs. We need to be asking who decides, over and over, finding allies who see our struggle as an opportunity to sustain democracy in and through education.

Member of the Mathematics Department

President Trump's press conference a few weeks ago with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele contains a segment that vividly illustrates what it means to live in a post-truth regime. The response to a question by CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins — "Do you plan to ask President Bukele to help return the man who your administration says was mistakenly deported?" — lasts more than six excruciating minutes, but I encourage everyone to watch it in full, because the successive answers by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as Trump and Bukele themselves, provide a remarkably efficient demonstration of the tactic of the Big Lie.

The finely choreographed comments by Bondi, Miller, and the others confirmed one another so effortlessly that those who do not know better could easily have believed that Kilmar Ábrego García, the man deported to a brutal Salvadoran prison, had in fact been found by a U.S. court — by two courts, in fact — to be a member of the "barbaric" MS-13 gang, thus a terrorist, thus with no right to be in the U.S. at all; and that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agrees with this. CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale, who does know better, demolished Miller's account point by point in a four-minute segment. By itself such a fact-based analysis would have little chance of competing with a coordinated campaign of distortion, such as the one seen during the press conference, but fortunately a popular movement has emerged to protest the illegal abduction, deportation, and imprisonment, and several political leaders — notably Senator Chris van Hollen, from Ábrego García's home state of Maryland — have put their prestige on the line to demand Ábrego García's release.

The Columbia students threatened with deportation — Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, who have been detained, as well as others who are fighting detention or who have gone into hiding — have also been subjected to the Big Lie. Officials of the Trump administration, and its supporters in the press, in Congress, and online, have repeated the charge that Khalil has participated in "antisemitic protests and disruptive activities" and "provided support to Hamas terrorism," while Mahdawi has been accused of engaging "in threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders."

It is easy to find press accounts that point out that these claims are unsubstantiated and that none of the Columbia students has been charged with a crime. But their first line of defense, occupying a role analogous to van Hollen's, should naturally be Columbia's administration, which has remained silent. This silence is easier to understand when we realize that much of the language used to attack the Columbia student activists has been borrowed verbatim from Columbia's leadership. The expression "threatening rhetoric and intimidation" was lifted directly from Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Gerald Rosberg's characterization of demonstrations by Columbia SJP and JVP when he announced their suspension. And when House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg calls on Columbia to combat its "rampant antisemitism" — two words that have been used to discredit Columbia for more than a year — he is doing no more than quoting Acting President Claire Shipman's Congressional testimony:

"We have a specific problem right now on our campus, so I can speak from what I know, and that is rampant antisemitism."

The claim that Columbia suffers from rampant antisemitism, as opposed to scattered incidents of antisemitism alongside intense protest of Israel's actions, doesn't stand up to scrutiny, which is why it hasn't been scrutinized. The best piece of evidence that antisemitism isn't "rampant" is that with three exceptions,¹ no one has been disciplined for explicitly antisemitic actions. (Evidence-based reasoning has no bearing, of course, on post-truth discourse; but for the Natural Sciences hour it feels appropriate.) The second best piece of evidence is that media claims of rampant antisemitism at Columbia have been accompanied by the repeated and exclusive citation of these three incidents, along with a handful of others, most of which took place off campus beyond Columbia's gates. The third best piece of evidence is the absence of any indication whatsoever, either in the antisemitism report or in Congressional hearings or in the media, that antisemitism was rampant or blatant or latent or in any way an issue at Columbia before October 2023. Nevertheless, and in large part thanks to statements by Columbia's top administration, Columbia's reputation as a dangerous place for Jews has been seared into the public image of the university, and of universities generally.

This is bad enough, but it's not the most serious consequence of Columbia's acquiescence to the Big Lie. Some day Khalil and Mahdawi will be freed from their detention and Columbia's students will no longer have to fear the loss of their freedom. We can hope that this will happen soon; we can even hope that Columbia's officials will have at least apologized to them for having devised the rhetoric and created the preconditions for their persecution. But it will take more than apologies to undo the damage to Columbia's credibility, as a center of critical thinking, created by the university's continued commitment to a narrative that is manifestly false. Ideas necessary for a critical understanding of events in the Middle East have been ruled off-limits as ostensibly antisemitic, in the interest of subjecting the field to a post-truth regime. Similar efforts are under way around race, gender, and climate.

In the glossary of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the entry on "dissociation" explains that "…dissociation may allow the individual to maintain allegiance to two contradictory truths while remaining unconscious of the contradiction." "Doublethink," on the other hand, is Orwell's name for the obligation to maintain allegiance to two contradictory truths while remaining conscious of the contradiction. Such an obligation is psychologically uncomfortable in the extreme, especially when the obligation extends to our interactions with students. It is also clearly incompatible with scholarly practice. What, then, does Columbia's leadership think it is preserving by failing to challenge the rampant antisemitism narrative that it did so much to establish?

1. I'm thinking of the January 2024 derecognition of LionLez, the suspension of the student who said "Zionists don't deserve to live," and the distribution of flyers in a class on modern Israel history showing a boot stepping on a star of David.