[Salon] The Situation at Columbia XXXIV, 10/17/25. "The campus remains locked-down, with highest administration priority ensuring that there is no protest of Israeli government policies on the campus

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15309

The Situation at Columbia XXXIV . . . Vichy-0n-Hudson

Posted on October 17, 2025 by woit

I’m trying to not get distracted from finishing writing up notes on some new ideas about Wick rotation, but here’s some news from Vichy-on-Hudson.

Jonathan Cole, who was provost from 1989 to 2003, has written an excellent letter to the president, provost and trustees. It makes specific recommendations about how they could start showing some courage and stand up to the dictatorship.

It is time for Columbia’s acting President Claire Shipman, Provost Angela Olinto, and the board of trustees to demonstrate their courage and empathy. It requires courage to stand up to President Donald Trump’s administration and its efforts to destroy our greatest institutions of higher learning; but courage can also be shown in admitting that you’ve made a mistake. 

I don’t think they’ll take his advice, but would love to be wrong about this.

The campus remains locked-down, with highest administration priority ensuring that there is no protest of Israeli government policies on the campus. While there were two days of memorials on the central campus for Israeli victims of the October 7 massacre, no such memorials for Palestinian victims of the Gaza conflict have been allowed.

On the question of what faculty members are allowed to say about the Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide, we’ve been told that we can attend an in-person only event on Monday, where a university lawyer will tell us what we can say and what we can’t say.

Scott Aaronson was recently on campus, delivering a talk on Computational Complexity and Explanations in Physics, an experience he describes here. I was out of town then, but in any case this sort of approach to fundamental physics doesn’t intersect in any way with my interests in the subject.

Scott was very pleased to see the lockdown and that Columbia now shares his highest priority of putting a stop to pro-Palestinian student protests at any costs. I’m glad to see that he’s now satisfied and, unlike in the past, will no longer tell Jewish students not to come to Columbia.

There are a couple things in Scott’s post that simply are not true:

• About the idea that “the measures seem to be needed, since every time the university has tried to relax them, the “intifada” has returned, with non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching”, this is delusional nonsense with no basis in reality.
• He writes that I have called him “a mentally ill genocidal fascist.” I’d like to make it clear that I think he’s not a Fascist, but a Fascist collaborator. And quite a successful one at that: allying with the destruction of US democracy to get what you want has worked out well for him and others who are intensely disturbed by any support for the Palestinians in their conflict with the Israeli government.

About recent developments in Gaza, I’m very pleased to see that Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire, and the number of people getting killed each day has been reduced dramatically. Such a ceasefire is very welcome now, should have taken place long ago, back when the students were allowed to protest in favor of it. It seems to me that two factors have been responsible for stopping the killing (at least for now):

• The genocidal nature of the Israeli campaign, which was clear to the student protesters early on, has become clear to the rest of the world. Besides the awful facts on the ground, reading things like this from Scott (where he argues that Zionism is now fundamentally about being willing to kill Palestinian children while giving the finger to the rest of the world), has opened most people’s eyes to what has been happening.
• Trump and his administration deserve credit for doing something no other US administration has been willing to do: apply pressure on Netanyahu to stop killing Palestinians. Whatever the motivation for this is, it’s great that it has finally happened.

I have no idea what will happen next in Gaza, and don’t want to host a discussion of what has happened, is happening, or will happen there. Insightful comments about the Columbia aspect of this story are welcome though.