Police and private security throng every entrance but one. Steel barriers line the streets. Students pack up belongings in their cars and leave for home - classes are cancelled, and exam plans are up in the air.
Everywhere there is gloom, and uncertainty about what happens next at Columbia University.
Students told the BBC that the university’s decision to call in police to clear a Gaza protest late on Tuesday, leading to a raid on the occupied Hamilton Hall and hundreds of arrests, has left the college community shattered.
The university president, Nemat Shafik, said that it was with great regret that she ordered the police raid against students and others she said had infiltrated the protest. It would “take time to heal”, she added in a message in the operation’s aftermath.
For students of this prestigious school in Manhattan, New York, how long is unclear.
Only authoritarian governments crush student protests
Name a government that doesnt do their damndest to crush student protests.
I struggle to think of a more authoritarian structure than the hierarchic state.
Stateless areas, such as Rojava and the Zapatistas are a good example of a “government” that doesn’t crush student protests, but they really don’t have them in the first place, since their bottom up structure makes it such that the students can directly use political power to prevent shit like supporting genocidal ethnic states.
With police, an apparatus of the state.
You have to work harder to come to that conclusion than just going “hey isn’t the police employed by the government?”
They tear gassed students at my old public university. The way they’re being treated is ridiculous and completely out of line with previous protests.
Both universities are gonna have a real fun time explaining themselves in court, because I guarantee they’ll see lawsuits over this. Private universities get a lot of leeway over what they allow, but public universities are bound by the First Amendment. Any who are violating the protestors rights are gonna get fucked six ways to Sunday.
How to radicalize a lot of smart people in a very short period of time
If not, it doesn’t take very long to do so. When people feel they have a personal and vested interest in voting, they do so reliably and vocally.
It’s apathy that makes people not bother. That’s not the case when someone is willing to put out even minimal effort protesting.
You actually have to register to be eligible to vote in the US? Aren’t you automatically getting your voting cards when there is an election and you are over the age of 18?
It would “take time to heal”, she added
That’s some big “I’m sorry you made me do this to you” abuser energy there
It is with great regret that she [did something nobody was forcing her to do].
The President needs to resign.
I had never heard of her before. Wow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minouche_Shafik
Nemat Talaat Shafik, Baroness Shafik, (Arabic: نعمت طلعت شفيق) DBE, HonFBA (born 13 August 1962), commonly known as Minouche Shafik (Arabic: مينوش شفيق), is a British-American academic and economist.[2] She has been serving as the 20th president of Columbia University since July 2023. She previously served as president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023.
From 2014 to 2017, Shafik served as deputy governor of the Bank of England and also previously as permanent secretary of the United Kingdom Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011.[3] She has also served as a vice president at the World Bank[4] and as deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund.[5] She was created a life peeress by Elizabeth II in 2020.
She’s taking a “World Bank” approach to this situation, that’s for sure. This quote by her is hilarious:
“The point of university is to be intellectually challenged and confronted with difference.” She argued that universities needed to ‘teach people to have difficult conversations’, adding: “It’s through that process of listening that you learn, you build consensus, and you move forward as a community."
Columbia University’s Shafik, the Neoliberal https://www.salon.com/2024/04/28/columbia-crisis-another-massive-failure-of-liberalism/
“If you wanted to choose one individual as the face of “neoliberalism” for an encyclopedia entry, you could do a lot worse. Shafik holds an economics PhD from Oxford and a résumé of high-ranking positions at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England, three institutions that have been instrumental in driving developing nations into unsustainable debt in pursuit of a disastrously failed model of progress. She came to Columbia after six years of pushing fiscal austerity as director of the London School of Economics, where just last spring she helped defeat a student/faculty strike, reportedly by slashing salary payments and lowering graduation requirements to hustle student protesters out the door.”
Imagine if the Columbia administration decided they could swim in regular water instead of a moneybin like Scrooge McDuck and divested the university from Israel. Maybe all of this could have been avoided.
Yes, anti-BDS laws. These were passed years ago (not reactionary to now). There are state and federal rules but in general, a university can’t boycott or divest from Israeli (or many other nations) in political protest or it loses funding.
I think this is why we see most universities have their hands tied.
Columbia’s dean was on NPR and said that political investments and divestments are illegal.
What the protestors aren’t saying is that by divestment they are asking the school to divest from the S&P 500. If Columbia agrees, they need a non politically motivated reason to do so.
