Columbia in crisis, again
On April 30, 1968, New York City police officers, acting at the behest of officials at Columbia University, cleared five campus buildings that had been occupied by students protesting various issues linked to the war in Vietnam and the fight for racial justice. Police arrested around seven hundred people, and more than a hundred injuries were reported. The Spectator, the campus newspaper, quickly got an edition out, the front page of which contained photos of police surrounding an academic and a student with a bloodied head, as well as clipped, yet highly vivid, eyewitness dispatches compiled by twenty student journalists.
On Thursday, New York City police officers, acting at the behest of officials at Columbia University, cleared an encampment on a lawn outside the library that had been occupied by students protesting various issues linked to the war in Gaza. Police arrested over a hundred people. The Spectator (which, these days, only prints once a week) quickly got a story up online, which contained photos of officers leading away protesters with zip-tied wrists, as well as a video clipping together scenes of noisy chaos and eyewitness accounts compiled by twenty-one student journalists. The story quoted from an email to the university community written by Minouche Shafik, the president, who said that, “out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus,” she had authorized police to begin clearing the encampment.
Since then, the Spectator has published at least seventeen more stories tracking the escalating fallout. Undeterred, protesters continued camping out into a third day, then a fourth, then a fifth. University administrators began notifying participants that they had been suspended and banned from entering “common areas” on campus, and that they could even lose access to Columbia housing. Various faculty members and students expressed outrage at the arrests. Over the weekend, pro-Israel counterprotesters reported receiving threats and anti-Semitic abuse both on and just outside campus, including shouts of “Go back to Poland, go back to Belarus” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” In a WhatsApp chat, a campus rabbi urged Jewish students to stay at home, adding, “it is not our job as Jews to ensure our own safety on campus.”
as in 1968—the arrests and their aftermath have become a media story in various respects, including on campus. While some journalists from outside news organizations have reported from campus, various others say they have had difficulty getting in. (On Friday, the Columbia Journalism School invited credentialed members of the media who had been denied access to get in touch over social media so that they might facilitate it.) Over the weekend, WKCR, a radio station at Columbia, said that a university public safety officer had asked its personnel to leave the building from which they were broadcasting, as part of a general evacuation. After explaining that WKCR is a “press organization with a duty to the people of NYC to operate a 24/7 FM signal,” and following a number of phone calls, the station’s staff was allowed to stay put. WKCR said that it was told there had been a “misunderstanding.”
The crisis at Columbia has entered into a broader national media climate that has treated campus culture as a huge story in recent years, and particularly since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and Israel responded by bombarding Gaza. As I see it, such coverage has sometimes been over-generalized and has often been disproportionate—even distracting, at times, from the much weightier events in the region, where tens of thousands of Palestinians and over a thousand Israelis have been killed (including at least a hundred or so journalists, most of them in Gaza). The story’s arriving in the media capital of the nation, if not the world, was always likely to supercharge it. And yet this type of story does raise important questions—about the repression of speech, the abuse of it, and the advance of a culture war that, it increasingly seems, has left no American institution untouched. That, of course, includes the media itself—an institution whose lifeblood is speech, and one that has been rocked by sharp differences over the war ever since it began;
This extends, of course, to the Spectator’s coverage. Last week, following the arrests, the paper’s editorial board weighed in with a sharp rebuke of Shafik and nodded back to 1968. “History has made clear who stood on the wrong side then, and it’s clear that this is the side you are aligning yourself with now,” the editorial read, adding “this will be your legacy.” In the immediate aftermath of those violent 1968 arrests, however, the paper left a blank space where its editorial should have been. “All week, we had debated and disagreed about the events unfolding around us,” Friedman later wrote. “But that night there was no disagreement: Exhausted and horrified, we decided to run two columns of white space, surrounded by a thick black border, just below the masthead where the editorial was supposed to appear.” Those running the paper had concluded that sometimes, “silence is more effective than words.”
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