Liberated Zone

letter from Columbia

At first, only five members of the NYPD entered the lawn. They came through the south-east gate and made their way among the tents and sleeping bags scattered across the grass. In the middle of the lawn the protesting students sat in a large ring, arms linked. They wore jeans and scarves. The Five, dressed in riot gear—helmet and vest and baton—began a slow perambulation around them.

Around the lawn, separated by a low fence and hedge, perhaps a thousand students stood facing in. I stood with a second audience, on the steps halfway up the Columbia quadrangle. Farther up, on the steps of the Low Library, were yet more spectators.

The first of The Five, a sort of pathfinder figure, led the way with a satisfied strut. He pointed with authority, stepping over bags and lunch boxes with aplomb. But he was soon overshadowed by the second man, the star of the show, who carried strapped to his belly an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device). He looked like he would soon give birth and behaved the same. The LRAD, which during the BLM protests was used to emit high-pitched tones that damaged the hearing of protestors, this time carried a pre-recorded order to disperse. No party—not the protestors, nor the police, nor the audience, nor the University, expected dispersal. Instead the LRAD merely served to open proceedings.

The performance had to me the uneasy feel of the first stages of a bullfight. First, a loud device, usually a trumpet, announces the start of the show. The participants then parade into the arena, displaying themselves and their fancy outfits to the audience. They always move with a kind of camp arrogance. Next, the matador requests permission of the presidente to proceed. After a signal from the presidente, the performance can commence. The signal always comes: the presidente is in fact the person who scheduled the fight.

Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik passed down her signal just as The Five finished their preamble. We in the audience felt a simultaneous buzzing in our pockets—suddenly a thousand of us were looking at our phones. Shafik had emailed the entire University notifying all of her decision to use the NYPD to “clear” the lawn, transparently orchestrating the arrival of her email to coincide with the beginning of the arrests. Shafik’s comms team is best placed to explain this decision—to the students, it was confirmation that the administration had aligned itself with the NYPD against its own.

With The Five departed, scores of NYPD now entered. They filed in from the south-eastern gate on 114th St. They fell into roughly three categories: the standard cop, the riot gear muscle, and the management type. (The management types, in their skinny-jeaned civilian wear, managed to look even more out of place than their weapon-bearing subordinates, who, like a broken clock, found that their loose-fitting cargo pants were fashionable once again.)

Once the preamble is complete, there are three stages to a bullfight. There is the tercio de varas, in which the bull is lanced by two picadors. Then there is the tercio de banderillas, in which the matador drives two darts into the bull’s shoulders. Finally there is the tercio de muerte, in which the matador drives a sword through the exhausted animal’s spine. This ritualised performance never varies unless the matador fails. Every party—the audience, the fighter, and the bull—knows what is to come. The question is not if the bull will survive, but if the fighter will execute him appropriately. If the matador gets a “bad bull”, by which is meant a peaceful bull, a placid bull, a bull that won’t fight back, he and the presidente are in trouble. They just look cruel.

In her letter to the NYPD requesting police force, Minouche Shafik assured the police they wouldn’t have a bad bull on their hands. ‘I have determined,’ Shafik wrote, ‘that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.’ The threat of the protesters, Shafik assured the NYPD, was high—they would be justified in removing them. They wouldn’t look cruel.

In reality, the ‘clear and present danger’ was that some students had spent one night camped on a patch of grass, blocking no access, impeding no University activity.¹ To make matters worse for the President, the students remained an ongoing posture of nonviolence as they were arrested one by one. Meanwhile, scores of riot-gear-wearing police patrolled the university. The asymmetry was so stark that NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban, later that night, actively distanced himself from Columbia’s messaging. The ‘clear and present danger’, he insisted, was identified by the University, not the NYPD. Moreover, ‘the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say,’ he said. He sounded embarrassed.

At this juncture it’s worth noting that the protestors were so un-disruptive to university life, so non-threatening to the student body, and the President so eager to remove them, that the administration chose to actively manufacture grounds for their removal. That is, lacking a reason to bring in the NYPD, the University first suspended the students so that they could be removed for trespassing. Shafik herself fronts to this in her letter to the NYPD:

‘All University students participating in the encampment have been informed they are suspended. At this time, the participants in the encampment are not authorized to be on University property and are trespassing.’

By the measure of protests from any other era, the political expression we see today is remarkably mild, peaceful, and unambitious. As Lydia Polgreen put it in a good opinion piece for the New York Times, these protests ‘were a mild echo of those of an earlier generation of students, who effectively shut down the campus in April 1985 to demand that Columbia divest from South Africa — protests that were in turn an echo of the 1968 student takeover of the university amid the broad cultural rebellion against the Vietnam War.’ In those protests students occupied buildings, not lawns. And yet our standard for what deserves the riot squad is lower than it has ever been before.

We are amidst a neo-McCarthyite backlash in which University administrators are driven out for the meekest attempts to protect their students’ freedom of expression. It is easy to wonder if we aren’t approaching new variety of authoritarianism. I suspect we are—at least in that supposed bastion of free speech, the university. As Nikil Pal Singh put it on Twitter, ‘The authoritarian turn in elite universities — via administrative imperium, loss of faculty governance, and expansion of contingent labor has been long in the making, obscured by false, reactionary promotion/panic around DEI, which never touched these aforementioned tendencies.’

Meanwhile, as I was writing back in 2021, the chief mode of speech suppression continues to come from the workplace, as 28 Google workers found out this week. This mode of authoritarianism is not felt by people who shy away from political speech, and I suspect such people will have no idea what I am talking about. So much the worse for them. Every era is populated by a class of people who are, for the most part, served by the status quo, and who, even when they find themselves in principled agreement with dissidents, do not find the energy to vocally support them. (The most famous expression of the problem comes from MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.²)

In recent weeks I have for my own purposes been reading and writing about the white Quaker abolitionist John Brown. He thought slavery was wrong and was willing to act violently, and sacrifice his life, to free the slaves of North America. For that he was hanged and dismissed as insane. Moderate abolitionists responded with insistent attempts to delegitimise his efforts, to characterise him as unforgivably violent, and above all, “ineffective”.

I conduct a longstanding informal poll, asking young Americans if they’ve heard of John Brown. Some have; as many have not. Few, if any, know his story in any detail. They are as likely to learn in school about the men who owned slaves as the men who tried to free them. It is as though the nation cannot bear to remember the greatest it produced; it cannot bear to remember that it killed him.

By this I’m pointing to a repeated historical pattern, as present today as in 1854, in which people are so shamed by the presence of moral virtue that they do anything to dismiss it. So much of the broad “moderate” reaction to protest, I’m saying, comes from the knowledge that the dissidents are right and brave. Bravery makes us aware of our own cowardice, and that is an awareness we cannot bear. Better to find a way to explain away the need for protest than face the possibility of acting.

That digression on the psychology of reaction brings me back to the Columbia steps where, as the riot police marched in, I found myself wondering what Minouche Shafik was up to. The choice to bring in the riot police was so clearly a violent, illegitimate reaction; so clearly revealed the administration’s willingness to do anything to silence the protestors; and so clearly played into the tactics of the protesters, that I allowed myself to imagine, just for a moment, that the University President was playing some extraordinary game of 3D chess in solidarity with her students.

Would that it were. ‘The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat,’ writes Baldwin. The protesters demanded that the University divest from the war machine. If that demand had no force, Shafik would have seen no need to act. Instead, she was driven to respond, and panicked. The University did not call the NYPD because it felt powerful. It called the NYPD because it felt the protestors were.

A day later, the administration has got the response it should have known was coming. The Liberated Zone has moved from one lawn to another. It has quadrupled in size. From where I stand in front of Butler library—named for a Columbia President who invited Nazis to speak on campus—I see protestors pass the time by dancing in a drum circle. The Jewish students among them are dancing with a poster they have printed out, on which Minouche Shafik’s face sits next to the words ‘Shabbat Shalom, Motherfucker’. Today at Harvard, and Boston College, and USC, students marched out of their classes in solidarity with Columbia students. The activists are saying that ‘something has changed.’ Let us hope.

1. It is possible that by ‘the substantial functioning of the University’ Shafik was referring to the game of spikeball the fratboys like to play on the grass in spring, but an equally generous lawn remained open for use metres away

2. ‘I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."‘