The chaos in Columbia continues

On the morning of the first day of classes at Columbia University, the grounds management office received a call. “Alma Mater,” the famous sculpture of a woman wearing a laurel wreath that stands in front of Lowe Library, had been splattered with red paint, presumably by a protester opposing the university’s refusal to take money from Israel. The paint dripped from “Alma Mater’s” forehead to the tip of her nose onto the marble platform on which she rests—which, one grounds worker noted, is difficult to clean. “We did our best to clean the floor,” he told me. “We used hot water and a pressure washer.” Students stood around and watched them work. “I felt unsafe,” the grounds worker said. He was afraid they would think, “These people are cleaning up something we made”—and that the workers would be accused of erasing their act of dissent.

New academic year, same problems. Three weeks before the start of the semester, Columbia President Minouche Shafik resigned from her post, retiring from academia for good. On her way out, she visited the well-traveled stops of doomed university presidents: She testified before Congress, insisting that Columbia protects students from anti-Semitism; she called the police on protesters who refused to vacate their tent camp on the lawn at the heart of campus; she faced a vote of no confidence from a group of faculty who accused her of an “unprecedented attack on student rights.” An interim president, Katrina Armstrong, the head of the school's medical campus, was installed. But she faces the same persistent question: What can a university do about student protests that rightly believe that violating school rules is the best way to draw attention to their cause?

While media coverage of campus demonstrations tends to focus on the top brass of universities, the impact of protests is usually felt most keenly by workers at the lower levels. That's what happened in the spring, when a group of about 50 protesters barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall, one of Columbia's academic buildings. Four workers — three janitors and a security guard — were inside the building when the occupation began and had to “fight their way out,” according to the president of the local transportation workers union, Alex Molina, who also works as an electrician on campus. “After the building was retaken, there was a group that didn't want to return to work,” Molina told me. “But they had no choice. We have to feed our families.” He said union members are feeling uneasy about the new academic year. The union has demanded a written safety protocol, as well as a liability release in case workers need to defend themselves. But “nothing was ever said by the university about that,” Molina said. “We are not getting anything that guarantees our safety.” (A university spokesperson said Columbia is committed to the safety of all its employees and is working with the union to address its concerns.)

For months, Columbia University's main campus in Morningside Heights has been effectively locked down, accessible only to people with IDs and their guests. An army of security guards enforces the policy, some employed by Columbia, others from private security firms the university has maintained in recent months. Staff members told me they sometimes felt students viewed them as the enemy, perhaps mistaking uniformed guards for police officers. In the spring, protesters often yelled, “We are part of the problem, we are part of the genocide,” a longtime security official told me. On the first day of classes this week, a group of protesters gathered outside the gates at the corner of 116th Street and Broadway, blocking students from coming onto campus. “We are the ones who take the brunt of the attitude, the anger and the frustration,” the official said. “Nothing works here without us.”

Columbia's version of the protests that have played out at universities across the country is bound to attract a disproportionate amount of attention. The university is in the middle of a city where outsiders can easily get involved, and it's a short drive downtown for reporters. But Sian Beilock, the former president of Barnard, Columbia's sister university, who is now president of Dartmouth College, said the protests have gotten most out of control on campuses without strong community norms. “How do you make the students who are engaging in dialogue the heroes, rather than the protesters? That's not something that happens by presidential decree,” she told me. “It's something that comes from a culture, from the students.”

Creating such a student culture is a difficult task, however, especially when a university has failed to convince its students of its vision of “dialogue.” Peter Bearman, a sociology professor at Columbia University who helped organize the faculty vote against Shafik, said this spring, “I felt there were real opportunities for Columbia to lead the way and transform student engagement and interest in the world into meaningful educational activity.” And yet, Bearman said, “that was not the response. It was about calling the police on campus and breaking up the camp.” The New York police initially arrested forty students, and two others were provisionally suspended.

Like Shafik, Beilock decided to call the police last spring to break up a protest camp at her school, which led to 89 arrests and a vote of no confidence from a group of faculty members. (Beilock defended her decision on the grounds of student safety and said she was glad that students who are charged face only charges akin to a “traffic ticket.”) Over the past year, university presidents have been “put in situations where we’ve had to make impossible decisions,” Beilock said. “You’re never going to satisfy everybody with the decisions you make. I deal with that by making decisions based on principle.” Everyone should feel welcome, she said. No one’s education should be disrupted. Opposing viewpoints should be voiced, and faculty should model that kind of discussion. Dartmouth’s campus may be as divided as Columbia’s — but so far, at least, Beilock has kept her job, and no one has tried to occupy a building.

After the occupation of Hamilton Hall this spring, John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, which represents the Columbia workforce as well as tens of thousands of subway, bus and commuter rail workers in New York City, made a plan for what to do if it happened again. “We're not going to let a bunch of damn trust fund babies hold our members against their will in Columbia,” he told me. “We're going to come and get the track workers with sledgehammers and track pliers, and we're going to get them. That's our plan.” (Another union official, Shannon Poland, who heads the TWU's security team, clarified that track pliers are like regular wrenches, “just supersized.” Given “the size and girth of the men coming,” he added, “the protesters would part like the Red Sea.”)

Samuelsen understands the impossible dilemma faced by university presidents who must answer to students, professors and alumni with vastly different worldviews. “The presidents are caught in the middle, like a piñata,” he says. “I don't want this job. It's untenable.” But the situation has long been out of the administration's control. Just days after the semester began, more protesters were arrested. Molina told me, “I feel like this is just the beginning of what's going to happen this school year.” ♦