I taught at Columbia University for almost 25 years. Last Wednesday I had office hours as I do every week. I met with students to talk about their classes, their essays on Shakespeare and Milton, how they earned their degrees, and how they felt about graduating.
We also spoke about their views on the protests and their reactions to Columbia President Minouche Shafik's recent congressional testimony and her decision to give New York City police the authority to disperse “Gaza solidarity encampments” on campus.
In each conversation, I was impressed by their thoughtfulness, intelligence, compassion, and ability to evaluate others' use of language. They are English majors, so they should have good reading skills. However, they took the time to evaluate other people's statements from different perspectives depending on the context.
In some ways, Columbia students are now receiving two world-class educations. One we would spend years analyzing, one in class and the other on a campus that had become a center of cultural and political power.
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Everything changed on campus after the president authorized police to clear the encampment and dozens of students were arrested. This was done without proper consultation with the faculty and university council. There was no “clear and present danger,” as the administration claimed.
Columbia's faculty are mostly long-term thinkers, researchers, experimenters, and writers who consider evidence and engage in dialogue, experimentation, and peer review. We can't hear well. At least I don't. I am not interested in social media as a platform for speeches or conversations. But I care passionately about universities as places of teaching, research and debate.
The president's actions have not only undermined our mission as a great university, but have placed our students and all members of this community in an unnecessarily escalating turmoil both inside and outside our gates.
Many students were angry. Many faculty members were angry. And then a complete media circus arrived at our door, with dozens of extremists of all kinds.
Much of our time right now – the time of biologists, language teachers, immunologists, anthropologists, literature, computer science and art teachers – is being spent dealing with the consequences of a seriously mismanaged crisis. That is not a good use of our time.
In some ways, Columbia is still functioning properly. Students are protesting the brutal war by setting up tents on the lawn, going to classes and the library, writing essays, participating in varsity shows, and reporting at a very high level on the unfolding events in the campus publication WKCR. , BWOG and Columbia Spectator.
Students are taught very imperfectly about the history of the Middle East, the history of protests on Columbia's campus and elsewhere, and the rights of protesters and other students.
They are also learning, again imperfectly, about the difference between their own perception of what happens on campus and the perception of others on the same campus, and the difference between suspending a student for hate speech or harassment and suspending him or her. For participating in the protest.
They are learning about the power and opportunism of some members of the U.S. Congress and the consequences of poor decisions on the part of university administration.
Our students also know that administrators can learn from their mistakes after Columbia's president, provincial president and board chairman took a step back Friday night and wrote a letter to the entire Columbia community saying police should be called in to clear the encampment for the second time. I found out later. “It’s counterproductive, it makes what’s happening on campus worse, and it brings thousands to our doorstep who will endanger our community.”
On Monday, they discovered that talks with administrators and student organizers had failed to reach an agreement.
The pressures against nuanced dialogue across vast differences and experiences are enormous. But we need to start having these conversations again. There are established venues on campus for that work to be accomplished: classrooms, representative student governance bodies, representative faculty governance bodies, dialogue between students, faculty, and administrators, and the University Senate. This is the university's shared governance structure. .
The last public Senate meeting Friday drew more than 550 people. After much debate, a majority of senators voted for a resolution requiring Columbia to address reports of administrative actions that, along with violating the principles of shared governance, jeopardize academic freedom and violate student and faculty privacy and due process.
They proposed forming a Senate task force to present findings and recommendations for further action by the Senate. The Senate is controversial and loose, but along with Columbia's Rules of Conduct, it was established 50 years ago to ensure that the university's major decisions are made representatively and not fiatly.
They worked for 50 years. Now is the time to bring them back.
Julie Crawford is the Mark Van Doren Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Humanities at Columbia University.
This opinion article about campus protests was written by: Hechinger ReportA non-profit, independent media outlet focused on inequality and innovation in education.. join Hechinger's Newsletter.