[Salon] The Situation at Columbia XVIII

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15069

The Situation at Columbia XVIII

Posted on July 22, 2025 by woit

When I first started writing here about what was going on at Columbia, part of the motivation was that I didn’t understand myself a lot of what was happening, especially the actions of the trustees. Things are different now, I think I understand pretty well what is going on and why the trustees are doing what they are doing. A new cave-in is in the works and at some point I’ll write about the complicated story of that, perhaps waiting until it’s a done deal, which might be soon.

At the moment though it seems to me important to just focus on a basic point of morality: an appalling genocide is going on in Gaza, and Columbia University’s response to this genocide is an all-out campaign to stop people from protesting it. This is completely disgraceful.

It’s difficult to get reliable information about what is happening in Gaza, partly because the Israelis have killed most journalists there (and are starving to death the few remaining). All indications are that the Israeli government is pursuing a policy of destroying all homes and infrastructure there, to make sure the inhabitants driven out have nothing to return to. Civilians are being killed and starved with the goal of forcing them somehow to leave. Among the most reliable sources of information are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which have detailed stories (see here and here) explaining how starving people seeking food are being killed.

The New York Times has recently published a long article by an Israeli scholar considered a leading authority on genocide entitled I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. that strongly makes the case that what is going on is genocide.

What has been Columbia University’s response to the moral challenge of this ongoing US-supported genocide?

• A new set of policies promulgated last week, including adopting a definition of “antisemitism” that can be used to tar criticism of Israeli genocidal policies as “antisemitic”. For some commentary on this from a Columbia faculty member, see here.
• For the past year the university has been locked-down, with an intensive security apparatus whose main goal appears to be to make sure that no anti-genocide protests take place on the campus.
• As part of the first cave-in back in March, the trustees removed control of the student disciplinary process from the University Senate, with the trustees taking control themselves of the process through the provost’s office. The intent was to make sure that any student guilty of violating university regulations during an anti-genocide protest would be severely punished. One goal is to make sure that students engaged in such protest are removed from the university and can’t do it again. Another is to make sure that anyone else thinking about what they can do to oppose genocide will be properly intimidated. Last week the trustees issued a statement emphasizing that they, not the Senate, are now in control of student discipline.
• The last two actions have been almost completely successful at stopping any anti-genocide protest on campus. The main exception was the short-lived occupation of a library reading room (see here) back in May. Today the university announcedthat a large number of students were being suspended or expelled under this new policy. News stories like this one say that 70 students were involved, with two-thirds of them expelled or suspended for at least two years. The news stories make clear that the motivation for these unusually harsh punishments is the desire of the trustees to appease our Fascist dictator and recover grant funding.

The question of what to do about students who engage in disruptive protests is a complicated one. For a history of how Columbia has dealt with such cases in the past, see here. What the trustees and some administrators have done today appears to be completely unprecedented, and part of a deeply immoral set of policy decisions about how to respond to the problems caused by the genocide in Gaza.