Liberated Zone VII
Everything in its right place
This is the seventh in a series of dispatches from Columbia’s student protests.
You can read the first here, second here, third here, fourth here, fifth here, and sixth here. Thanks for following along over the last two months—we’ll soon return to regular programming.
It is now more than a month since the student occupation, and retaliatory police raid, of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. The NYPD liberated the University of its Liberated Zone. Out the window of where I currently sit, in the grand reading room of Butler Library, the campus is once again serene. Students and security are roughly equal in number, and the tents are gone.
Recently, they were replaced, for about a week, with marquees—tall, canvas, glaring white—erected to house alumni fundraising events. The gates that were used to shut out currently-enrolled Columbia students were flung open to welcome people who left 10, 20, 30 years ago. There were speeches and champagne and networking events, all part of a sophisticated donations pipeline designed to funnel alumni towards the final goal of the modern university: the supplementation of a $13.64B endowment. From the point of view of the administration, everything is once again as it should be.
This new alumni encampment, in its sterile orderliness, made for a surreal imitation of the tents it supplanted. A newcomer would have had no way of knowing that the largest student protest movement in decades started here, barely weeks previous. How could they? The unceasing stream of Events in our lives has an amnesiac quality. Our attention cannot hold. Even now it can be hard to summon the vitality of the encampment’s early days. But for those of us who saw it firsthand, the parallel between the tents and the marquees is bitter. It adds insult to the injury of last month’s eradication of dissent.
Two encampments, one erected by students, the other for donors. Still, the symmetry is hardly perfect: it is not like the protestors ever called for the endowment to shrink in any way. They asked only that Columbia sell stock associated with the Israeli occupation to some other bidder, and to move that capital to other assets. If anything, this was probably good investment advice for Columbia. As Adam Tooze has discussed in detail, the University’s portfolio is woefully mismanaged. In every year since 2016 the endowment has underperformed the S&P500 (and comparable university portfolios, too).
Which is all to say that the University’s resistance to divestment has very little to do with its financial interests. Even major donors, often blamed for administration decisions, don’t hold that much sway. Everyone, from the New York Times to the most rabid antisemites, seems to agree that donors exert massive influence over universities, but few acknowledge that there’s little reason individual donors ought to be able to. Next to the size of the endowments, their individual contributions are tiny. Robert Kraft, a Columbia major donor who, in interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper and Fox’s Sean Hannity, actively and vocally threatened to withhold funding from the University until it squashed the protests, appears to have given less than $10 million dollars in two decades. That is peanuts.
And yet the administration acted in lock-step with his wishes. Individual donors clearly do exert power over university presidents: the mystery is how. And I think the most plausible explanation is that, in the political economy of the university system, material factors take a back seat in determining power relations. The size of a particular donation matters less than the status of the donor qua donor. The revealed belief of university boards is not that donors do have more power than students and faculty, but that they ought to.
I am of the view that the modern university holds faculty and students in disdain. This is maybe hard to see for people who are not familiar with the trajectory of the university-institution over the last 40 years, but it is palpable to those who try to exist inside the system. The rift between the administrative class (who view the university as a portfolio, students as customers, and degrees as commodities) and the pedagogical class (who view the university as a site of social growth, democratic development, and learning untethered from the needs of the labour market) is what ultimately grants veto power to billionaire alumni.
Students, especially those who take to protest, stubbornly refuse to accept the terms of the new university, and continue to fall in behind their teachers in the belief that education is something special, something human, something that ought not be reduced to an exchange value. Remarkably, this continues to be true of students in 2024, decades after the neoliberal turn in universities. Students somehow remain committed on to an older vision. College administrations once agreed with their students, but since the turn they no longer do: this disagreement is one source of the disdain.
Meanwhile, alumni donors are functionally in full agreement. They have a central role to play in achieving the goal of the neoliberal university—which, again, is the continued growth of the endowment. And, while the contributions of individual donors are negligible, the contributions of the donor class collectively and through time are substantial. It is from this fact that donors receive exalted status from administrators—they exist symbiotically, even symbollically, within the corporatisation of the academy. They are what the university is for.
The consequence is that college boards believe earnestly that the views of the richest alumni are more important than the views of the students. Put another way, the administration’s commitment to billionaire voice is in fact the same thing as the administration’s antagonism towards student voice. In the contest over the Future of The University, the administration sees donors as allies and students as foes.
This is all true before we even approach the content of the dispute, which only makes matters worse for student protestors. To find itself opposing its students, the administration does not even need to disagree with students about Israel/Palestine—but, as it happens, they do. The base fact is that university boards share the same ideological commitments as billionaire donors like Robert Kraft. This means that Kraft’s refusals to donate, far from being a source of genuine material power, serve for the administration as a useful pretext for what they already hoped to do.
Meanwhile, the war goes on.