"This Is What a University Looks Like" (Part 2)
More texts from the 25-hour Columbia speakout
Organized by the School of Social Work, Columbia community members spoke on Broadway and 117th for 25 straight hours from Monday at noon to Tuesday at 1pm. Here are some more of the texts. Part 1 is here.
Sarah Borden, clinical research coordinator, Dept. of Medicine, CUIMC
My name is Sarah and I began working at Columbia University Medical Center in the year 2000. My first study was looking at people who were newly homeless, with the aim to identify what factors led people into becoming unhoused and preventing it. I was proud to be working at a school that cared about its neighbors.
My coworkers and I saw the Twin Towers fall from our office in the public health building; and then we watched as various Mailman School of Public Health departments leapt into action afterward. For example, the Environmental Health department put the government’s claims that the burning pit at ground zero was safe for humans to the test with systematic monitoring. I was proud to be working for a school that wanted to find the truth, in order to help first responders and local residents.
My next job was setting up the first brain bank in the country for a specific neurological disorder, in order to see if there were any predictable brain changes associated with this disorder. I was proud to be working for such a large institution that we had the specialized knowledge and facilities to carry out this multi departmental research.
I’ve worked on drug studies showing that aspirin is as effective as warfarin for some cardiac patients. Imagine taking an over-the-counter baby aspirin instead of having to go into a clinic every week to have your finger pricked?! I’ve worked on device studies showing that a transcatheter valve can be at least as good as open heart surgery for some cardiac patients. Imagine leaving the hospital after one night with a new heart valve and a bandaid covered incision instead of having your chest cracked open?! These jobs allowed me to get my master’s in public health at Mailman and my goodness was I proud to get an Ivy League degree without student debt.
So now imagine my shock, confusion, and disgust as I saw Columbia fail to immediately support their own students, fail to rally for all of our freedom of speech, and give up academic freedom to an increasingly authoritarian government. Of course I care about research funding, it’s my entire salary, but we cannot assume it comes at this cost. Just as the U.S. government feels like our checks and balances are collapsing, we hear that “quote some people are saying unquote” that the University Senate should be reconsidered. This is the first time I’ve been deeply ashamed of Columbia. The story isn’t over and we can all take inspiration from the growing collaboration between universities including Columbia to preserve academic freedom, and hope that this shameful capitulation ends now.
James Schamus, School of the Arts
I’ve been asked to speak briefly today as part of a specifically Jewish cohort of Columbia faculty. And the request as always surfaces in me two contradictory immediate reactions. The first reaction is simple: Who cares what Jews think? A genocide is a genocide is a genocide; ethno-state fascism is ethno-state fascism. The false and dangerous conflation of criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism as a cover for Israel’s crimes and the fascist repression of our universities here in the states is obvious now to all: Jews have no privileged perspective from which to add to those obvious facts.
My second reaction is also simple: This genocide in Gaza is being enacted in my name, supposedly on my behalf; the destruction of American universities is being enacted in my name, supposedly on my behalf. So I am indeed called to speak out, to fight back, and to work to create alternative forms of community and identity to counter the false claim that Israel’s depredations and Trump’s destruction of my university are somehow in my interest.
Often, Jews like me invoke the age-old concept of tikkun olam, repair of the world, to articulate the ethical stance that instills our activism. But, honestly, whether there is a specifically Jewish injunction to refrain from mass murder and ethnic cleansing and fascism and stuff like that, is also kind of beside the point. Standard-issue human beingness should suffice.
And yet… None of us are generic, standard-issue human beings. We all come from and exist in a web of history, community, specificity: our identities are always a combination of what is given, what is enacted by and in relation to others, and, finally, what we make of what is given and enacted. So we have not only the right to assert identity, but an obligation. So, yes, Tikkun Olam. So, yes, we must speak “as” Jews. Let me give an example:
This past October, the head rabbi of a large and influential Jewish congregation here in New York, someone who also happens to be a former Israeli army tank commander, gave a High Holidays Yom Kippur sermon, clips of which went viral online, in which he decided to scold the many young Jews who are now, in his words, “turning your backs on our people.”
“We wanted you to be Zionists. We did not intend that our emphasis on tikkun olam — social repair — would lead some Jews to join anti-Israel demonstrations. We did not intend for Jews to lead Passover Seders in so-called ‘liberated zones’.”
In short, as the tank commander/rabbi made clear, he and his fellow Zionist leaders do not want thousands of years of Jewish teaching actually to be practiced and applied (as it was by so many of our students here at Columbia who famously held shabbat gatherings in the encampments), but rather simply and hypocritically mouthed and recited amidst the roar of ceaseless bombing. But young American Jews have learned their lessons all too well, as the opinion polls attest, and are increasingly coming to their own conclusions. And they have every right – indeed, every obligation – as I do now, to speak “as Jews.”
And it turns out that “as Jews” we find ourselves guided by and in community with others who speak “as” themselves – for in specificity we find the bridge to commonality. So I’ll end my remarks with the words of Mahmoud Khalil, our former Columbia student and current political prisoner, who spoke, and I quote, "as a Palestinian student.” He said: “I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined, and go hand by hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other."
To think: None of our current University leaders, not Board of Trustees chair David Greenwald, emeritus chair Jonathan Lavine, so-called “acting president” Claire Shipman—none of them have seen fit to even utter the name Mahmoud Khalil, or the names of any of the other Columbia students hunted, kidnapped, and disappeared, all in the name of Jewish safety, all in the name of the big lie that we Jews are somehow endangered by our students’ passionate commitment to Tikun Olam. And maybe that’s for the best: it tells us exactly what we are fighting for and who we must now fight against.
Free Mahmoud Khalil and all political prisoners. Thank you.
Helen Benedict, School of Journalism
We are living in dangerous times, on campus and off. Trump and his administration are tearing the country to shreds. Our right to free speech. Our right to due process. Our right to clean air, water, and food. Our efforts to help the poor, sick and hungry. Our scientific and medical research. Our efforts at reaching equal rights for women and for LGBTQ people. Our attempts at compensating for slavery and racism. Our right to education. Our right not to be deported for no reason. Our welcome of immigrants. Many of these rights and efforts are already gone. Others are being destroyed as I speak.
Meanwhile, Trump, Musk and their cohorts are looting the country's coffers, breaking laws, spreading corruption, defying the democratic and constitutional balance of power, and covering it all up with big lie after big lie.
The biggest of their lies that affects our campus is, of course, the accusation that Columbia is rife with antisemitism. It is absurd to believe for one moment that this administration, riddled with self-proclaimed Christian white supremacists, genuinely seeks to protect Jewish students at all. Take Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who has trafficked in white nationalist conspiracy theories. Or Representative Rick Allen, a Republican from Georgia, who quoted Bible verses as a source for dictating policy at a religiously diverse, secular university. Or Elon Musk throwing his Nazi salute and courting far right, antisemitic parties in Germany and France. Or Steve Bannon, who also throws around Nazi salutes and has said in public that the greatest threat to democracy is a leftist Jew. I could go on.
No, this regime is not interested in protecting Jews at all. Rather, its purpose is to suppress all protest -- whether against the war on Gaza or against Trump himself -- by destroying higher education because it is on campuses like ours that students learn the kind of critical thinking and historical knowledge that leads to dissent. All autocrats and dictators know this, which is why China persecuted its academics and intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution, Hitler did the same in Germany, Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbòn in Hungary, Assad in Syria, Putin in Russia, and so on.
Meanwhile, Columbia's administration has done nothing to defy this big lie but cravenly capitulate, and even preemptively cooperate.
SHAME
Students, Jewish and otherwise, are being suspended, expelled and, worst of all arrested, kidnapped and imprisoned for simply exercising their first amendment rights to protest Israel's war on Gaza.
Columbia, when your students are attacked, what do you do?
STAND UP FIGHT BACK
You don't give lists of students to the administration to persecute, as Columbia did. SHAME
Faculty are being threatened, harassed, doxed and silenced by extremists, with the help of our own administration. SHAME
Columbia, what do you do when your own faculty is being persecuted?
STAND UP AND FIGHT BACK
This means supporting us publicly, not silencing or punishing us.
Research is being defunded, courses canceled, the freedom to speak, read, debate curtailed.
Columbia, what do you do when your research and teaching are undermined?
STAND UP AND FIGHT BACK
You don't bow down and comply with a bully who will only demand more and more without giving anything back.
Immigrants and students are being kidnapped off the streets and out of their homes and whisked to far away prisons without due process or, in many cases, even having been accused of a crime. This is what happened to Mahmoud Khalil on the eve of his first child's birth, even though our same administration asked him to negotiate between student protesters and themselves. This is what happened Mohsen Mahdawi, who is widely known to be an advocate for peace and understanding. Yet our administration has yet to even utter their names, let alone issue declarations in their support. SHAME.
Columbia, what do you do for your students who are kidnapped?
STAND UP AND FIGHT BACK
International students are having their visas revoked, their research grants canceled. Yet again, our administration remains silent -- not only silent, it is disenrolling students when it doesn't even have to. SHAME
Columbia, what do you do when your students are barred from coming here to study?
STAND UP AND FIGHT BACK.
Columbia, you must re-enroll students who have had their visas revoked.
Columbia, you must publicly commit to ensuring that no other students will ever be disenrolled as a result of improper visa terminations until due process has been followed.
Columbia, you must declare unequivocally that you will defy and fight any and deportation of a student in retribution for protected political speech.
Stand up, Columbia, protect academic freedom, protect your students, and protect your faculty. Stand up and fight back.