Columbia University is unrecognizable these days. On the early morning of April 30, protesters against the Gaza War took over Hamilton Hall, an iconic classroom building in the heart of the undergraduate campus. This occurred after a months-long tent encampment accompanied by radical hooligans shouting ignorant antisemitic slogans outside the university’s gates targeted Jewish students. Any genuine concern for Gazans was dispelled by a student speaking outside the barricaded building demanded “basic humanitarian assistance” not for Gaza, but for the students who violently and voluntarily took over Hamilton Hall. Shortly after, and after failed negations with students, Columbia’s president called the New York Police Department to clear the protesters in tents and arrest those who took over the building.
One reason Columbia attracted me was its “core” curriculum, which was established after World War I as an antidote to the mass destruction of humanity in Europe. If students engaged in the classical canon of literature and philosophy, the idea went, their faith in the values of humanism would be restored. Indeed, if the protesters looked up over their tents to the library above, they would see Plato, Aristotle and others carved in stone.
I learned the purpose of the “core” from my first professor. He was the consummate teaching professor who loved the texts and students he taught. From Day One, he made clear that he was going to make us college students with critical thinking skills. We plodded our way through the Greek tragedies. He enlivened the Iliad before Brad Pitt played Achilles, and later, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky.
Wallace Gray was also a historian of Columbia having started on the faculty in 1953. He regaled us with stories from the 1968 protests that shut down the campus, but he kept teaching on the lawn outside the barricaded buildings, included the famous Hamilton Hall. He portrayed the mood on campus as meaningful and just in the anti-war and civil rights era. Students were protesting a cause — rights for all Americans, including those forced to serve in what was deemed an unjust war in which their contemporaries were fighting and dying. Ironically, today’s protests contain a strong element of racism and antisemitism whereas 1968 was focused on equality.
My class also experienced conflict emanating from the Middle East. During the fall of my junior year, two planes crashed into the twin towers shocking a generation who barely knew international conflict in the 1990s. I still remember the acrid smell when the winds shifted north. Maybe I was ignorant at the time, but the campus did not represent a home for Islamophobia like other parts of New York where Mosques were attacked, and Muslims were harassed.
The protesters today were not born when 9/11 killed over 3,000 innocent New Yorkers on the other end of Manhattan; instead, they are demanding that the university divest from Israel, a measure that will have no impact on the war or the Palestinian cause they claim to support.
Sept. 11 was a singular moment that impacted the lives of a least a generation. It motivated many to careers in public service, study the Middle East and the origins of terrorism — and why “the adults” messed up so badly. Professional opportunities emerged as the government responded. I pursued that career in and out of government, including on the never-easy issue set of Israel and Palestine, firmly supporting a two-state solution, working with colleagues that have made it their lives’ mission. Not every protester has shouted “go back to Poland” at Jewish students, but a disturbingly large group linked arms to expel “Zionists” (Jewish students) from the tent encampment, an example of outrageous behavior.
Columbia’s protests have now set off a chain reaction with some campuses experiencing harsh police backlashes. That distracts from the issues at stake. Ideas matter. Debates matter. Critical thinking matters. Not anarchic marches and hate speech. The university and the New York Police Department need to conduct an investigation to identify the ringleaders of hate speech and harassment, particularly those who hid their faces and rallied beyond the gates of the university.
For the students themselves, I hope Columbia can recapture the sense of learning, curiosity and civil discourse that I loved about the college. Moving all classes online is exactly the opposite of facilitating the classroom discourse that Wallace Gray treasured.
Columbia also requires a real commitment to reengaging a new generation, attuned to social media, and thus bombarded with graphic imagery from the Gaza war on the one hand or the brutal murders, rapes and hostage taking that instigated the war — both extremely serious issues. Separating truth from disinformation and lies is increasingly difficult. As one step, Columbia can pioneer a core course on values and social media. In the interim, any students found to have violated university policies must be punished accordingly. It may take some time for Columbia to recover from this trauma, but it has the ability to restore itself as a world-class intuition of higher learning.
Ben Fishman is The Levy Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and was a former National Security Council official during the Obama administration.