Yesterday’s NYPD storming of Hamilton Hall on the Columbia University campus which had been occupied by student demonstrators protesting Israeli genocide in Gaza has brought the clash between America’s non-academic, pro-Washington narrative university administrators and its more idealistic students to the attention of global media. After taking the building, the police arrested the demonstrators and, before television cameras, paraded them off, wrists bound, to waiting buses for dispatch to jail.
As an alumnus of Columbia who entered graduate school there in the months following similar, shall we say, revolutionary developments in the student body in the spring of 1968, I take special interest in this development. Back then, the hotbed of political action across the nation was on the Berkeley campus in California. Columbia was not in the vanguard, though the campus reeled from internal divisions.
At that time, much of the Columbia faculty sided with the retrograde administration, as I saw in my own department, Russian history. My academic advisor, Leopold Haimson, a leading scholar on the Menshevik movement and closet Marxist himself, was aghast at being in the midst of a real bottom-up revolution and sided with the administrators. It took a long time to heal the wounds to the institution once order was restored.
As a political analyst today, I also follow these developments at Columbia closely for more serious reasons than nostalgia for the past. They hold the promise of a resurrection of student activism and antiwar sentiment among the young that was snuffed out, very cynically but effectively by Richard Nixon and his immediate followers when they put an end to the draft and introduced an all-volunteer professional army.
That Republicans and other political conservatives with their all-in support for Israel whatever it does would uniformly condemn the students as ‘anti-Semites’ is obvious. For their part, Liberals are split on the issue, though many loathe what Israel has been doing in Gaza and the Left Bank, and are sympathetic to the student demonstrators. Liberals are also more concerned with the suppression of free speech, on campus of all places, that the police crackdown at Hamilton Hall signifies. Many are saying out loud that attempts to instill uniformity of thought on the Israeli question destroy the underlying principles of higher education grounded in diversity of views and civilized public debate.
In this regard, I call for a time out to reflect on the destruction of the social sciences and humanities on American campuses that did not start yesterday but goes back in time at least 15 years. This passes unnoticed by our Liberals because it clashes with their own political correctness that acknowledges no other views than their own on the given subject. I have in mind the anti-Putin, anti-Russian doctrine that totally captured university policies on free speech when Washington launched its Information War on Russia.
In the 2010-11 academic year, I was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia and attended a goodly number of Russia-themed public events hosted by its Harriman Institute. The overriding impression was that anti-Russian speakers and the audiences, consisting of students, faculty and outside visitors, were all totally aligned, singing from the same hymn books. If you dared to pose a question in the time allotted for “discussion” that showed some variance from this consensus, you were immediately denounced as a ‘stooge of Putin.’ In effect, this institution of higher learning had descended to the level of a kindergarten.
From following developments on campus ever since from the weekly program announcements of the Harriman, it is crystal clear that the situation with respect to freedom of speech and thought on the subject of Russia has only gotten worse. Moreover, in the past two years of the Moscow’s Special Military Operation the whole discipline of Russian studies at Columbia has been pulled up by the roots and been replaced by Ukrainian studies and studies of the supposedly colonized nationalities of the former Russian Empire. The process is being called ‘de-colonization.’
Until and unless I see a sobering up of our universities from their intoxication with Russophobia, I will not believe that freedom of speech on campus has been restored, whatever the outcome of the present confrontations over Israeli genocide.
But who knows? Perhaps someone among the present day rebels will move beyond outrage over 34,000 murdered Palestinians and consider the possibility of hundreds of millions of dead civilians globally including in the good old U.S. of A. should the present clash in Ukraine be allowed to escalate to WWIII.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024