The Crackdown on Student Protesters

You can hear the helicopter circling. This is Asa Chaturvedi. I'm a producer with The Daily.

Swipe your ID please.

Hi, how are you? We're journalists. with the New York Times. You're not going to be able to get in.

Alright, I'm sorry.

Thank you. It's total lockdown here at Columbia.

Please have your IDs out ready to swipe. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Balboro. This is The Daily. Today, the story of how Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators, and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech. I spoke with my colleague, Nick Fandos.

That's right. So the House Education Committee has been watching all these protests on campus. And the Republican chairwoman decides, I'm going to open an investigation, look at how these administrations are handling it, because it doesn't look good from where I sit. And the House last winter invites the leaders of several of these elite schools, Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia, to come and testify in Washington on Capitol Hill before Congress. Now, the president of Columbia has what turns out to be a very well-timed, pre-planned trip to go overseas and speak at an international climate conference.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct, yes or no?

If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.

And two of the presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth McGill of the University of Pennsylvania, they're unwilling to say, in this really kind of intense back and forth, that this speech would constitute a violation of their rules.

It can be depending on the context. What's the context?

Targeted at an individual.

It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?

And it sets off a firestorm.

It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board.

Members of Congress start calling for their resignations. Alumni are really, really ticked off. Trustees of the university start to wonder, I don't know that these leaders really got this under control. And eventually, both of them lose their jobs in a really high-profile way.

And, as you've hinted at, for somewhat peculiar scheduling reasons, Columbia's president escapes this disaster of a hearing in what has to be regarded as the best timing in the history of the American Academy.

Yeah, exactly. And Columbia's watching all this play out. And I think their first response was relief that she was not in that chair, but also recognition that sooner or later, their turn was going to come back around and they were going to have to sit before Congress.

Why were they so certain that they would probably end up before Congress and that this wasn't a case of completely dodging a bullet?

Well, they remain under investigation by the committee. But also, as the winter wears on, all the same intense protests just continue unabated. So, in many ways, Columbia is like these other campuses, but in some ways, it's even more intense. This is a university that has both one of the largest Jewish student populations of any of its peers, but it also has a large Arab and Muslim student population, a big Middle Eastern studies program. It has a dual degree program in Tel Aviv.

In other words, if any campus was going to be a hotbed of protest and debate over this conflict, it was going to be Columbia University.

Exactly. And when the spring rolls around, the stars finally align. And the same congressional committee issues another invitation to Manoush Shafiq, Columbia's president, to come and testify. And this time, she has no excuse to say no.

But presumably, she is well aware of exactly what testifying before this committee entails and is highly prepared.

Columbia knew this moment was coming. They spent months preparing for this hearing. They brought in outside consultants, crisis communicators, experts on anti-Semitism. The weekend before the hearing, she actually travels down to Washington to hole up in a war room where she starts preparing her testimony with mock questioners and testy exchanges to prep her for this. And she's very clear on what she wants to try to do.

Okay. So then the day of her actual testimony arrives. And just walk us through how it goes.

The Committee on Education and Workforce will come to order.

So Wednesday morning rolls around and President Shafiq sits at the witness stand with two of her trustees and the head of Columbia's new anti-Semitism task force.

Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence at best and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people.

And right off the bat, they're put through a pretty humbling litany of some of the worst hits of what's been happening on campus.

For example, just four days after the harrowing October 7 attack, a former Columbia undergraduate beat an Israeli student with a stick.

The Republican chairwoman of the committee, Virginia Fox, starts reminding her that there was a student who was actually hit with a stick on campus. There was another gathering more recently, glorifying Hamas and other terrorist organizations and the kind of chants that have become an everyday chorus on campus, which many Jewish students see as threatening. But when the questioning starts, President Shafiq is ready. One of the first ones she gets is the one that tripped up her colleagues.

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia's code of conduct? Mr. Greenwald.

And she answers unequivocally.

Dr. Shafiq. Yes, it does. And Professor Shafiq.

That would be a violation of Columbia's rules. They would be punished.

As president of Columbia, what is it like when you hear chants like, by any means necessary, or intifada revolution? I find those chants incredibly distressing, and I wish profoundly that people would not use them on our campus.

And in some of the most interesting exchanges of the hearing, President Shafiq actually opens Columbia's disciplinary books.

We have already suspended 15 students from Columbia. We have six on disciplinary probation. These are more disciplinary actions that have been taken, probably in the last decade, at Columbia.

She talks about the number of students that have been suspended, but also the number of faculty that she's had removed from the classroom that are being investigated for comments that either violate some of Columbia's rules or make students uncomfortable. One case in particular really underscores this, and that's of a Middle Eastern studies professor named Joseph Massad. He wrote an essay not long after Hamas invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli government, where he described that attack with adjectives like awesome. Now, he said they've been misinterpreted, but a lot of people have taken offense to those comments.

Ms. Stefanik, you're recognized for five minutes.

Thank you, Chairwoman. I want to follow up on my colleague Rep Wahlberg's question regarding Professor Joseph Massad. So let me be clear.

And so Representative Elise Stefanik, the same Republican who had tripped up Claudine Gay of Harvard and others in the last hearing, really starts digging into President Shafiq about these things at Columbia.

He is still chair on the website. So has he been terminated as chair?

And Shafiq's answers are maybe a little surprising.

I know you confirmed that he was under investigation. Yes, I can confirm that. Did you confirm he was still the chair?

She says that Columbia is taking his case seriously. In fact, he's under investigation right now.

Well, let me ask you this. Will you make the commitment to remove him as chair?

And when Stefanik presses her to commit to removing him from a campus leadership position?

I think that would be. I think I would. Yes. Let me come back with. Yes.

Shafiq seems to kind of pause and think and then agree to it on the spot, almost like he is making administrative decisions with or in front of Congress. Now, we did some reporting after the fact, and it turns out the professor didn't even realize he was under investigation. So he's learning about this from the hearing, too. So what this all adds up to, I think, is a performance so in line with what the lawmakers themselves wanted to hear, that at certain points, these Republicans didn't quite know what to do with it. They were like the dog that caught the car.

So Columbia's president has passed this test before this committee.

Yeah, this big moment that tripped up her predecessors and cost them their jobs. It seems like she has cleared that hurdle and dispatched with a congressional committee that could have been one of the biggest threats to her presidency.

Without objection, there being no further business, the committee stands adjourned.

But back on campus, some of the students and faculty who had been watching the hearing came away with a very different set of conclusions. They saw a president who was so eager to please Republicans in Congress that she was willing to sell out some of the university's students and faculty and trample on cherished ideas like academic freedom and freedom of expression. that had been a bedrock of American higher education for a really long time. And there was no clearer embodiment of that than what had happened that morning, just as President Shafiq was going to testify before Congress. A group of students before dawn set up tents in the middle of Columbia's campus and declared themselves a pro-Palestinian encampment, in open defiance of the very rules that Dr.

So these students in real time are beginning to test some of the things that Columbia's president has just said before Congress.

Exactly. And so, instead of going to celebrate her successful appearance before Congress, Shafiq walks out of the hearing room and gets in a black SUV to go right back to that war room, where she's immediately confronted with a major dilemma. It basically boils down to this. She had just gone before Congress and told them, I'm going to get tough on these protests. And here they were.

And what does she decide?

So for the next 24 hours, she tries to negotiate off ramps. She consults with her deans and the New York Police Department, and it all builds towards an incredibly consequential decision. And that is, for the first time in decades, to call the New York City Police Department onto campus in riot gear and break this thing up, suspend the students involved, and then arrest them.

To essentially eliminate this encampment.

Eliminate the encampment and send a message, this is not going to be tolerated. But in trying to quell the unrest, Shafiq actually feeds it. She ends up leaving student protesters and the faculty who support them feeling betrayed, and pushes a campus that was already on edge into a full-blown crisis.

After the break, what all of this has looked like to a student on Columbia's campus.

I'm Julie Turkowicz. I'm a reporter at the New York Times. I have been trying to understand changes in migration. So I traveled with photographer Federico Rios to the Darien Gap, this hot, mountainous, 70-mile stretch of jungle straddling the border of Colombia and Panama. We're hiking through a river, just like, covered in mud.

Hello?

Is this Isabella?

Yes, this is she.

Hi, Isabella, it's Michael Barbaro from The Daily.

Hi, nice to meet you.

Earlier this week, we called Isabella Ramirez, the editor-in-chief of Colombia's undergraduate newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, which has been closely tracking both the protests and the university's response to them since October 7th. So, I mean, in your mind, how do we get to this point? I wonder if you can just briefly describe the kind of key moments that bring us to where we are right now.

I mean, since October 7th, there has certainly been constant escalation in terms of tension on campus. And there have been kind of a variety of moves that I believe have distanced sort of the student body, the faculty, from the university and its administration. Specifically, the suspension of Colombia's chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. And that became a huge moment in what was sort of characterized as suppression of pro-Palestinian activism on campus, effectively rendering those groups quote-unquote, unauthorized.

What was the college's explanation for that?

They had cited in that suspension a policy which states that a demonstration must be approved within a certain window and that there must be an advance notice, and that there's a process for getting an authorized demonstration. But the primary point was this policy that they were referring to, which we later reported was changed before the suspension.

So it felt a little ad hoc to people.

Yes, it certainly came as a surprise, especially at Spectator. We're sort of nerds of the university, in the sense that we are familiar with faculty and university governance. But even to us, we had no idea where this policy was coming from. And this suspension was really the first time that it entered. most students' sphere.

So just to be really – so just to be super clear, it felt to students – and it sounds like journalistically, it felt to you that the university was coming down in a kind of uniquely one-sided way against students who were supporting Palestinian rights and may have expressed some frustrations with Israel in that moment.

Yes.

Isabella says that this was just the beginning of a really tense period between student protesters and the university. After those two student groups were suspended, campus protests continued. Students made a variety of demands. They asked that the university divest from businesses that profit from Israel's military operations in Gaza. But instead of making any progress, the protests are met with further crackdown by the university.

I think there was obviously a lot of intention in timing those two things. I think it's sort of inherently a critique on a political pressure and congressional pressure that we saw build up against, of course, Claudine Gay at Harvard and McGill at UPenn. So I think a lot of students and faculty have been frustrated at this idea that there are not only powers at the university that are dictating what's happening, but there are perhaps external powers that are also guiding the way here in terms of what the university feels like it must do or has to do. And I think that timing was super crucial. Having the encampment happen on the Wednesday morning of the hearing was an incredible, in some senses, interesting strategy to direct eyes sort of to different places.

This is about the system that Manoush Shafik, that the Board of Trustees, that Columbia University is complicit in.

What are you going to do to try to get us out of here? And that was obviously promptly answered.

So the crackdown sought by the president and enforced by the NYPD ends up, you're saying, becoming a galvanizing force for a broader group of Columbia students than were originally drawn to the idea of ever showing up on the center of campus and protesting.

Yeah, I can certainly speak to the fact that I've seen my own peers, friends, or even acquaintances who weren't necessarily previously very involved in activism and organizing efforts, suddenly finding themselves involved.

Can I just, I have a question for you, which is, all journalism, student journalism or not. student journalism, is a kind of first draft of history. And I wonder, if we think of this as a historic moment for Columbia, how you imagine it's going to be remembered.

Yeah, there is no doubt in my mind that this will be a historic moment for Columbia.

Nick, Isabella Ramirez just walked us through what this has all looked like from the perspective of a Columbia student. And from what she could tell, the crackdown ordered by President Shafiq did not quell much of anything. It seemed instead to really intensify everything on campus. I'm curious what this has looked like for Shafiq.

It's not just the students who are upset. You have faculty, including professors, who are not necessarily sympathetic to the protesters' view of the war, who are really outraged about what Shafiq has done here. They feel that she's crossed a boundary that hasn't been crossed on Columbia's campus in a really long time. And so you start to hear things by the end of last week, like censure, no confidence votes, questions from her own professors about whether or not she can stay in power. So this creates a whole new front for her.

I saw an image of that. I mean, what it seemed to evoke was the message that Hamas should murder those Jewish students. I mean, that's the way the Jewish students interpret it.

Right. It's a pretty straightforward and jarring statement. At the same time, just outside of Columbia's closed gates, protesters are showing up from across New York City. It's hard to tell who's affiliated with Columbia, who's not.

Right. In fact, go back to the places where the Holocaust was committed.

Exactly. And this is not representative of the vast majority of the protesters in the encampment, who mostly had been peaceful. They would later hold a Seder, actually, with some of the pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters in their ranks. But those videos are reaching members of Congress, the very same Republicans that Shafik had testified in front of just a few days before. And now they're looking and saying, you have lost control of your campus, you've turned back on your word to us, and you need to resign.

They call for her outright resignation over this.

That's right. Republicans in New York and across the country began to call for her to step down from her position as president of Columbia.

So Shafik's dilemma here is pretty extraordinary. She has set up this dynamic where pleasing these members of Congress would probably mean calling in the NYPD all over again to sweep out this encampment, which would mean further alienating and inflaming students and faculty who are still very upset over the first crackdown. And now both ends of this spectrum, lawmakers in Washington, folks on the Columbia campus, are saying she can't lead the university over this situation before she's even made any fateful decision about what to do with this second encampment. Not a good situation.

No, she's besieged on all sides. For a while, the only thing that she can come up with to offer is for classes to go hybrid for the remainder of the semester.

So students who aren't feeling safe in this protest environment don't necessarily have to go to class.

Right. And I think, if we zoom out for a second, it's worth bearing in mind that she tried to choose a different path here than her counterparts at Harvard or Penn. And after all of this, she's kind of ended up in the exact same thicket, with people calling for her job with the White House, the mayor of New York City and other. These are Democrats, maybe not calling on her to resign quite yet, but saying, I don't know what's going on on your campus. This does not look good.

I mean, that reality that, taking a different tack that was supposed to be full of learnings and lessons from the stumbles of her peers, the fact that that didn't really work suggests that there's something really intractable going on here. And I wonder how you're thinking about this intractable situation that's now arrived on these college campuses.

Well, I don't think it's just limited to college campuses, right? We have seen intense feelings about this conflict play out in Hollywood. We've seen them in our politics in all kinds of interesting ways.

In our media.

We've seen it in the media. But college campuses, at least in their most idealized form, are something special. They're a place where students get to go for four years to think in big ways about moral questions and political questions and ideas that help shape the world they're going to spend the rest of their lives in. And so when you have a question that feels as urgent as this war does for a lot of people, I think it reverberates in an incredibly intense way on those campuses. And there's something like, I don't know if it's quite a contradiction of terms, but there's a collision of different values at stake.

Right. And set up an encampment in the middle of campus, no matter what their rules say.

Right. And from the administration's perspective, they say, well, yeah, you can say that and you can think that, and that's an important process. But maybe there's some bad apples in your ranks. Or, though you may have good intentions, you're saying things that you don't realize the implications of, and they're making this environment unsafe for others. Or they're grinding our classes to a halt and we're not able to function as a university.

And at this very moment, what we know is that the forces that you just outlined have created a dilemma and uncertainty of how to proceed, not just for President Shafiq and the students and faculty at Columbia, but for a growing number of colleges and universities across the country. And by that, I mean this thing that seemed to start at Columbia is literally spreading.

Absolutely. We're talking on a Wednesday afternoon, and these encampments have now started cropping up at universities from coast to coast, at Harvard and Yale, but also at University of California, at the University of Texas, at smaller campuses in between. And in each of these institutions, there's presidents and deans, just like President Shafiq at Columbia, who are facing a really difficult set of choices. Do they call in the police? At the University of Texas in Austin this afternoon, we saw protesters physically clashing with police.

Well, Nick, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me, Michael.

We'll be right back.