Liberated Zone V

Material analysis, psychological analysis, etc.

This is the fifth in a series of dispatches from the Columbia campus. You can read the first here, second here, third here, and fourth here.

When yesterday I described the hard right’s clamouring for the National Guard, I did not expect that the Columbia Administration would themselves make that threat hours later. But at 9.39pm my phone lit up with yet another bizarre campus-wide email from President Minouche Shafik. She was writing to students to declare an artificial deadline to negotiations with the protestors. ‘Those talks’, she wrote, ‘are facing a deadline of midnight tonight to reach agreement.’ She went on:

‘I very much hope these discussions are successful. If they are not, we will have to consider alternative options for clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus.’

Meanwhile, University negotiators were more explicit in their talks with student protestors. They told Columbia University Apartheid Divestment (CUAD) that the National Guard were ready to be called in. It was a threat.

The problem for the University is that they, uh, don’t have the power to call in the National Guard—only the Governor does, and Kathy Hochul has said she will not deploy them. Still, the police remain on speed dial, and so, as the University’s arbitrary midnight deadline approached, students protestors began to prepare for another raid by the NYPD.

Word of possible arrests soon spread, and I got on the 1 train up to campus as soon as I could. By 11.30pm hundreds of students, perhaps more than a thousand, were again gathered around to support the protestors. It was an eery replication of the scene a week ago when the NYPD arrested 113 of their classmates, except that beyond the protestors and their supporters, the campus was last night otherwise empty. There was a low murmur of anticipation among those who gathered to watch; many repeatedly refreshed their social media to keep track of developments.

The protestors themselves were in full arrest-preparation mode, dividing themselves into groups willing to be arrested and groups unwilling to be arrested. The former received instruction on arrest best practice: how to be zip-tied comfortably; how to turn off a phone’s biometric security; what phone numbers to write on their arms. Since October arrests have become so routine among New York’s anti-Zionist left that these skills are now widespread among the protestors. Even so, a last-minute refresher course was held for newcomers, of which there are many. Beside me, I overheard a young woman, perhaps 22, tell her friends why she had turned up to support. ‘I wasn’t going to join because I was pretty uncomfortable with some of the chants,’ she said, ‘but after the way the administration reacted I feel I have no choice.’

Then, just before midnight, news came through from the student organisers that the administration had pushed their “deadline” back until 8am the next morning. Some feared a trap—would the police raid at 3am, in the dark, once the audience had gone to bed? But by 1am most of the crowd had thinned out, and the protestors had begun to behave as if the 8am deadline would be held in good faith. They returned their tents to the lawn, which they had cleared to make the arrests safer; they brought equipment back from storage; they began to plan for the next morning. They made the right call: the negotiations continued through the night, and this morning I woke to yet another bizarre email from the President’s office, sent at 4am:

‘We are making important progress with representatives of the student encampment on the West Lawn,’ it began, before listing a range of minor concessions made by the protestors. It also announced that the University had moved to a new arbitrary deadline: Friday morning.

The press release from the students, ‘Columbia University Concedes to Student Demands Issuing Written Assurances of Safety from State Violence,’ framed things differently:

‘Columbia’s reliance on state violence against peaceful protestors has created an unstable ground for the negotiations process…However, Columbia’s written commitment and concession not to call the NYPD or National Guard signifies an important victory for students.’

The situation, as you can tell, is moving quickly. With solidarity protests breaking out around the world, the most acute phase of media backlash complete, and the students ready to call the University on its bluffs, this campaign is moving into a new phase. The University’s “deadlines” are clearly manufactured attempts to pressure negotiations, but a real deadline looms: graduation, and the end of semester.

The real genius of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment is its placement. The two lawns it has been situated on, the East and the West, provide no functional purpose to the University except on graduation day. They are supposed to host seating for the huge audience that will, looking up toward the Low Library, watch the graduating students walk across the stage. University divestment campaigns, as a decade’s worth of student environmental activists have learned, are notoriously difficult to achieve exactly because semester always ends; the students always graduate. This means that it is all too easy for the University to wait the students out. But the CUAD students of the Liberated Zone have turned this logic on its head. The University now faces the prospect of a graduation ceremony in which half of the audience will be comprised of extremely vocal student activists: tents replacing chairs, keffiyehs replacing gowns.

I have been writing regularly in these letters about the politics of self-defeat: the key actors have consistently made decisions that have weakened their hand. But the mistakes have not been symmetrical. Since I first warned of the need for the students to aggressively disavow antisemites on the perimeter of the University, they have made no unforced errors. The university administration, however, continues to demonstrate political incompetence.

This pattern of incompetence first began over a week ago with President Shafik’s craven performance in front of a Congressional House Committee hearing into antisemitism. In exchange for prostrating herself in front of the McCarthyite right and sacrificing the basic principles of liberal education, Shafik seemed to think she would be spared by the right wing antagonists who brought down her peers at Harvard and Penn. But, after Shafik did the bidding of Representative Elise Stefanik, who is building a career on this McCarthyite surge, Stefanik still claimed Shafik had not done enough and called for her resignation. Like the scorpion and the frog, only a naif could not have seen it coming.

What can explain such behaviour? Last week’s arrests created a disastrous political environment for the University, hardening support here and around the world; last night’s empty threats have only emboldened the CUAD protestors, demonstrating to them them their own strength. The question we have to answer, then, is why is the administration behaving this way? Is incompetence a sufficient explanation?

My first inclination when answering these questions is always to turn to a material analysis. That approach immediately leads us to the influence of donors. After all, as The New York Times tells us:

It was wealthy alumni like the financiers Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman who helped push for the ousters of Liz Magill at Penn and Claudine Gay at Harvard. Much of their power lay in the millions that they give to schools — and their threats to withhold that money.

By undertaxing the wealthy and causing our universities to overrely on major donors, we have functionally granted our billionaires veto power over the political expressions of students. As I found in my own conflict with billionaire university donor Steve Schwarzman, there exists an expectation amid the ultra-rich donor class that their money will buy fealty to their political vision. At Columbia, Robert Kraft, who has a building named after him, has already committed to withholding donations to the school until ‘corrective actions’ are taken against the protestors. He is only the first to go public, but we can assume that Shafik is under massive background pressure to make the decisions she has been making. How else to explain their panicked incoherence?

There is one other explanation, one that requires a turn from the material to the psychological. I think it does have a role in our understanding, though I’ll let the psychoanalysts give it its full expression. This story would suggest that many people behind the decisions at Columbia University are motivated by fantasies of domination, power, and control. They view insurgent popular expressions of power like those out the window to my right on the grass of the University with a kind of visceral disgust. It provokes in them emotions that they want to displace or indulge.

I have in my mind right now the image of Saturn Devouring His Son, though this would predetermine the psychoanalytic reading. Instead what I want to stress is that these people, like everyone else, have their own hang ups, their own fantasies, their own anxieties, their own fears, their own desires. There is something psychosexual behind the administration’s relationship with its own students, and with the men outside in leather boots and armoured vests. The point is probably best communicated by this dumb meme I found from a Twitter account called Walrus Bird. The older I get, the more I think Freud just might have been right.