Shutting Down Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests Will Hurt the Cause of Learning

The Gaza conflict has divided students, including Jewish ones, and they deserve a space safe from authorities to sort it out

The Low Memorial Library at Columbia University (Wikimedia).

Unable to attend last December’s explosive congressional hearing probing antisemitism on college campuses along with Harvard’s Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth due to prior arrangements to attend a climate conference, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik came before Congress on April 17 and was questioned for over three hours. Shafik insisted throughout the hearing that Columbia had been taking antisemitism seriously, at one point even listing the various ways the university has meaningfully addressed this issue under her watch:

Our actions included support for students, enhanced reporting channels for incidents, hiring additional staff to investigate complaints, developing new policies on demonstrations, holding listening forums to model respectful behaviors, launching educational programs, and forming a task force of our senior leaders to propose solutions to antisemitism.

The day after she testified before Congress, Shafik, Columbia’s first woman and first Arab president, called the police to campus to break up a student encampment set up to protest Israeli actions in Gaza. Over 100 students participating in the encampment were arrested, in addition to being suspended by the university.

“The president’s decision to send riot police to pick up peaceful protesters on our campus was unprecedented, unjustified, disproportionate, divisive, and dangerous,” Christopher Brown, a professor in the history department at Columbia University, told the crowd during a faculty demonstration. “I’m here because I am so concerned with what has happened at this university, with where we are now, and with where we are going,” said Brown, who indicated that this was the first time he’d spoken into a microphone at a protest of any kind. Congress wants to dictate disciplinary and educational decisions to Columbia; this is not the job of Congress, he said. Other faculty I interviewed after the hearing felt similarly.

All of this—the testimony, the protests, the call to the police, the endurance of the protests—is national news. The students are demanding that Columbia divest (that is, that Columbia withdraw from investments that students say are profiting from Israel’s military actions) and there are chants on campus—and off campus by people who are not students—that have made some Jewish students uncomfortable. Some—notably Rabbi Elie Buechler, who directs Columbia University’s Orthodox Union-Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus—have even said it is not safe for Jews at Columbia.

Shafik’s handling of the situation has managed to enrage faculty and students and those on the left who find it shocking that Shafik called police to campus while also enraging those who want the encampment gone. As of this writing, it remains, still standing even after Shafik imposed a removal deadline of 2 p.m. on Monday under threat of suspension. Faculty created a protective rim around their students. Early Tuesday morning, some students took over Hamilton Hall, a building on campus.

Some of the discourse about the campus protests, at Columbia specifically and throughout the country more generally, has made it sound as though the protests are motivated by antisemitism and seek to endanger Jewish students. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went as far as to liken the protests to Nazi Germany. Leaving aside that it is grossly ahistorical to conflate student protests against a war carried out by the Jewish state to a historical episode in which the state carried out violence and discrimination against Jews, this narrative is simplistic and, more than that, wrong. The protests are an opportunity to remind ourselves of the function of universities; that no identity is a monolith; and why students are moved to protest in the first place.

Columbia’s Only Jurisdiction Is Its Campus

Some have conflated action outside Columbia’s gates with action inside the campus. To the students who have to hear “go back to Poland” or “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you!” outside their campus, this may well be a distinction without a difference. And the truth is that Columbia, as an urban campus, bumps up against the real world and real people (including, yes, antisemites) who are not bound by the student code of conduct and are not in community with their fellow students in the same way. This is true not only of pro-Palestine protests, but also pro-Israel protests: Some in the crowd yelled “Go back to Gaza!” from outside the gates on April 26. That’s why members of Columbia’s Policy and Planning Committee of the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences noted in a letter to the media: “It is because of this respect for all Columbians that we have been so distressed by reports that conflate on-campus protests with the actions of bad actors from outside our community.”

To the extent that there are specific threats made against or harm done to Jewish students at Columbia by their fellow students, those students should be specifically disciplined. This, in fact, is what the university eventually did in the case of the student who said in a January video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and that people should “be glad, be grateful that I am not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

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Taking Antisemitism Seriously Doesn’t Require Downplaying Islamophobia

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It is true that, while student protesters are protected by the First Amendment, universities are within their rights to regulate demonstrations on their campuses. It is also true that, as these particular demonstrations are happening on university grounds, student and faculty safety should be paramount. The university has both a higher obligation to academic freedom and a higher obligation to protect the safety of all students. There are moments, however, when it may be hard to distinguish between protests and veiled violence: for example, people within the encampment at Columbia formed a human chain to stop the movement of alleged “Zionists” to protect the privacy of the encampment. That wasn’t violence, exactly, but arguably did contain within it a threat (what happens if you try to go past the chain?). Still, balancing the two, expression and safety, should be the point of a university’s disciplinary policies—not silencing a movement or chilling speech because some disagree with or are upset by its aims, or to privilege one preferred foreign policy outcome over another.

Some Jewish students, for example, may not like or even feel uncomfortable because of calls like “from the river to the sea” or calls for the elimination of the Jewish state and establishment of one binational state. However, the current policy of the Israeli government is that there will not be a Palestinian state between those two bodies of water, and that, in the West Bank, Palestinians should live under military rule while Jews live under civil rule; this, too, is surely upsetting to some students. As the ACLU put it:

Viewpoint neutrality is essential. Harassment directed at individuals because of their race, ethnicity, or religion is not, of course, permissible. But general calls for a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea,” or defenses of Israel’s assault on Gaza, even if many listeners find these messages deeply offensive, cannot be prohibited or punished by a university that respects free speech principles.

Jewish Faculty and Students Are Not a Monolith

There is also the reality that Jews ourselves, at both an institutional and personal level, do not agree on what is and is not upsetting to Jews, as we do not agree on what is—and isn’t—antisemitic speech. There are thus Jewish faculty at Columbia writing against the weaponization of antisemitism and Jewish faculty asking that the university send in the National Guard to shut down the protests. (For that matter, faculty disagree even over whether it was appropriate to call for classes to go remote.)

This division is reflected not only among faculty, but also among students. There are Jewish students who feel isolated and unsafe because of the protests; Jewish students who support the goals of the protest but worry about antisemitic rhetoric and want to see it more sharply denounced; and Jewish students who are taking part in the protest and indeed held their Passover Seder on the campus lawn. This is to say nothing of the Jewish students covering the protests for campus publication or Jewish students who don’t engage much at all with the issue of Israel. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, may go on television and denounce the left-wing, anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace as an Iranian proxy group. But he cannot make it such that Jewish students all agree on this issue. According to a Pew survey, younger Jews tend be more critical of and feel less connected to Israel and also don’t feel as threatened by antisemitism on campus as their older peers. On the protests specifically, there is a range of opinions: some students are deeply troubled by the protests and their chants and demands, while others are sitting in the heart of the protests objecting to what the Jewish state is doing.

When institutional and political leaders speak of “Jewish students,” they are really only speaking on behalf of a specific subset of Jewish students. This is worth remembering when politicians come to campus or purport to speak out against antisemitism—especially when the politicians themselves have a history of rhetoric that could easily be considered antisemitic. For example, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who grilled Shafik at her hearing, has echoed the great replacement theory, widely understood as antisemitic. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who visited Columbia’s campus last Wednesday as part of a group of Republican lawmakers calling on President Shafik to resign, has in the past expressed that the separation of church and state is a “misnomer.” Both Stefanik and Johnson are supporters of former President Donald Trump, who regularly lectures Jews on what political views we should hold. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has said that the National Guard should be sent in to college campuses to disband the protests, has accused “Soros prosecutors” of bringing charges against Trump to help U.S. President Joe Biden. Cotton would of course deny that depicting a Jewish billionaire philanthropist as secretly trying to control our nation’s democracy is antisemitic; many Jews, including me, would disagree with him. The members of Columbia’s Policy and Planning Committee of the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences, for their part, wrote:

Inflammatory calls for mass arrests, more guns on campus, or the presence of the National Guard are unmoored from real conditions at our university. They must be rejected for what they are: bad faith attempts to exploit disagreements within our community for partisan ends.

To put it very plainly: Mike Johnson speaking at Columbia does not help fight antisemitism—it only helps Mike Johnson score political points.

Protests Fulfill, Rather Than Challenge, the Purpose of Universities

It is important to remember that the population under discussion here—students—is ostensibly on campus in the first place to learn and think and challenge themselves and, most importantly, each other. It matters that they are able to do so safely; but it also matters that they are able to do so at all.

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Gaza, The Day After: A Roundup Of Options

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In that multifaceted educational environment, in which they’re learning and thinking and challenging themselves, they might decide to engage with what is happening in the world around them. They might, for example, go from a history class to reading about the looming famine in Gaza, or from an art history seminar to learning of the physical destruction of Palestinian culture sites, or from a lecture on political science to a report that over 30,000 people have died in Gaza over the course of this war, or from a literature class to seeing that an Israeli strike killed the daughter of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was himself killed by an Israeli airstrike back in December. And perhaps this causes its own kind of discomfort and sense of pain. (On the other hand, some students might leave a history or political science or language class and decide after listening to the protesters that they do not support calls to end study abroad programs with Israeli academic institutions because they decide that that would be counterproductive to getting a full understanding about the conflict or the region.)

I have had some people tell me that they do not think the protests are helping the people in Gaza, and in a sense this is true. The student protesters are not in the White House. They are not in the halls of Congress. They are not setting policy. But those on the lawns of Columbia and other campuses seem to me, more than anything else, to be trying to do what they can with the limited power they have: show solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and push their own university to divest. The protests, then, are also an expression of student pain. And that pain, too, needs to be able to be expressed, not only for the sake of our foreign policy debates, and not only for the sake of academic freedom at Columbia and elsewhere, but also for our democracy.

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