by Ferenc Laczó
How do Columbia students who have been reporting on campus and amplifying voices of their fellows interpret the recent wave of student protests and its suppression? What do they find most surprising about the conflict’s escalation and how do they reflect on their own role in such turbulent times?
Acting as a visiting professor at Columbia University this spring, I got much more than I had bargained for.
The practically continuous series of events with brilliant, innovative academicians on campus has been most memorable but so have Columbia’s internally divided and often tense campus, its numerous vocal student activists, the polarizing Republican attacks on New York City’s “activist Ivy,” and a university administration under pressure from multiple sides.
As is widely known, the leadership’s (mis)handling of a multifaceted, escalating crisis eventually led them to authorize several heavy-handed police interventions whereby they enabled the arrest of student demonstrators. Such an authorization has also implied a strict policing of campus space that remains ongoing at the time of writing and resulted in the prolonged exclusion of such “non-essential workers” from campus as students and faculty.
The conflict that has been raging, if with varying intensity, ever since the horrific Hamas attacks on October 7 and the beginnings of Israel’s massive and cruel campaign of retaliation escalated further in the wake of President Minouche Shafik’s congressional testimony in mid-April. The student encampment at Columbia University colloquially known as “Gaza solidarity encampment” or as “the liberated zone” and the police attacks on it received prominent media attention in the second half of last month, including extensive coverage in leading newspapers and television channels.
Being committed to liberal arts education, and having a long-standing scholarly interest in the definitions, manifestations, and political leveraging of charges of antisemitism, I was in equal parts disturbed and intrigued by what I saw unfold at one of the most impressive institutions of higher education in the world. I even penned an overview in my native Hungarian to try and make sense of the major stages of escalation and the larger political stakes of these sorry developments.
What I felt was missing from that previous, essentially top-down coverage were the insights of some of the best-informed members of the university when it comes to events on the ground: students who have been reporting on and amplifying the voices of their fellows on campus.
I wondered how the causes of the conflict and the accompanying fierce polemics looked to them; what they thought about divisions internal to Columbia and the accusations levelled at the university from the outside; what they saw as the most surprising elements of a murky story; and how they reflected on their own role as student journalists in such turbulent times.
I was fortunate to have gotten to know and tutor two of them during my graduate course on contemporary European history: Achilles Frangos and Alejandra Díaz-Pizarro. Once our course had been completed, they were kind enough to discuss their experiences and views with me in some detail.
Achilles Frangos, who is from Greece, is deputy editorial page editor at the Columbia Daily Spectator, the second oldest continuously operating college daily in the United States, which has been legally independent from the university for over sixty years. The editorial page Achilles helps co-edit provides an important forum for students and faculty members and, accordingly, it aims to strike a balance between various opinions – including pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli ones. Their core priorities, Achilles says, are “academic freedom, truth, and the dissemination of information.”
Alejandra Díaz-Pizarro, who comes from neighbouring Mexico, contributes to Columbia’s student radio WKCR and recently even acted as station manager. Alejandra was also member of the team of nineteen reporters at the station who covered the fierce situation on campus between mid-April and early May. This experience provided her, as she says, with “a firsthand education in how media narratives are created because so much of what we were seeing on the ground was not being reflected in mainstream media or in the news.”
When discussing with them separately, I first wished to find out what they see as the main sources of the conflict and its recent escalation.
Achilles Frangos explains in response that Minouche Shafik’s testimony at Congress, where the President “appeared to adopt the tone and the kind of ideas that condemn Columbia students to speak of rampant antisemitism on campus,” came on top of a serious issue: the university administration, instead of acknowledging what students were protesting for, started to categorise protests as either sanctioned or unsanctioned. This became a source of friction already in the fall and led to the suspension of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Achilles believes that students from such groups decided to pitch up tents on campus because they felt that “this was no longer the kind of university they had applied to, one which is inspired by liberal values.”
It was their arrest by the police the day after Shafik’s congressional hearing which then galvanized students who had been rather indifferent until then – and would soon inspire students across the US and the entire globe.
The police intervention also made many Faculty members – many of whom were neither pro-Israel, nor pro-Palestine, Achilles clarifies – side with the student protestors in the name of academic freedom and Columbia’s traditions; even Faculty members who may have been “privately displeased with a lot of the methods used by student protestors or the optics of what they were doing,” he adds.
Alejandra Díaz-Pizarro agrees that the “very impulsive” decision taken at the top to call in police forces was made after a prolonged attempt of trying to suppress student protests. It was predictable, Alejandra adds, that such a decision would only give such protests new life and turn many more students against the administration.
Another controversial question concerns who the occupants of a central campus lawn – the so-called South Lawn – were, what intentions they had, and how they acted while there. After all, the police intervention was justified through reference to outside agitators posing an imminent threat.
Achilles agrees that the pitching of the tents “undeniably violated university rules” but quickly adds that the repeated portrayal of the students involved as posing a serious threat to the university had no basis in fact.
The majority of those attending at first probably consisted of members of Columbia University Apartheid Divest – about whom Alejandra states that “no one seems to be really sure what their hierarchy or structure looks like; it’s rather like a loose coalition of student groups in favour of divestment from Israel” – and of the union of student workers, which is a union for instructors, teaching assistants and researchers at Columbia, Achilles says. Alejandra adds that – while members of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were “certainly involved,” alongside a group called Jews for Ceasefire, which in her understanding was not yet participating at the beginning – most students present may have been unaffiliated and showed up without any organization mobilizing them. They both emphasize that a broad variety of people spent time on the lawn, with significant movement in and out of campus – which included visits by prominent figures such as famed public intellectual Cornel West, Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, or House Speaker Mike Johnson. The two of them also agree that the role of “outside agitators” has been vastly exaggerated in several mainstream media accounts.
“I don’t think there ever was a desire to antagonize peers or disrupt Columbia as an institution. The protests were more targeted toward the administration,” Alejandra argues.
Few questions related to these student-led protests are as fraught or as contested as the one regarding antisemitism – a concept which may be understood loosely or more strictly, and one that may be used these days to try and stifle various criticisms of the current Israeli government.
Achilles thinks that the role of antisemitism is among the hardest questions to assess, not least because it is often impossible to judge a person’s sentiments or motivation.
He also claims that a good part of what has made the conflict at Columbia so intricate is that “Jewish students were participating on both sides.”
He explains that numerous Jewish students at Columbia who were eager to publish opinion pieces in the Daily Spectator around the time complained that there has been a weaponization of the antisemitism charge, which in their eyes was meant to lead to a false choice of either Zionism or antisemitism. Others on campus, he adds, indeed view Zionism as an essential part of Jewish identity and thus perceive opposition to it as by definition antisemitic.
In a similar manner, Alejandra points out that a rather large group of Jewish students on campus wrote an open letter stating that even if they practice Judaism in their different ways, they think that not supporting Israel means that you cannot qualify as a “real Jew.” They were in fact penning such a letter just as their fellow Jewish students were being arrested for precisely that kind of stance towards the State of Israel, she notes.
At the same time, she thinks that there has been an unwillingness among leftists “to accept that some chants and certain messages might be understood as antisemitic,” i.e. in their eyes, if they did not mean it that way, then the accusation could only be groundless.
For Alejandra Díaz-Pizarro from the student radio station WKCR, what remains most difficult to grasp about these turbulent days is how a university administration can take decisions in such a non-transparent way and how it “could care so little about students and faculty who actually make Columbia a university, make it a place of learning.” That there were days when only administrators were allowed onto campus “felt like a very allegorical and bleak representation of what this university has become,” she notes poignantly. “Our reporters had to sleep on benches and be on campus for more than forty hours straight because if they had left campus, they wouldn’t have been allowed back in,” she explains.
What surprised Achilles Frangos the most relates precisely to that element of the story, i.e. that not even reporters were allowed in when the New York police was sent in a second time on April 30, this time to arrest students occupying Hamilton Hall, clear the encampment, and take full charge of campus at the expense of closing it off. Being an editor at the Daily Spectator that is committed to amplifying student voices, he was struck by just how stifling of those voices the official policy has been and to what lengths the leadership has gone to try to control what would become known.
And that really put student journalists in a position of needing to correct the main narrative, Alejandra concludes.
Photo credit: View of the (second) encampment on the South Lawn, Columbia’s Morningside Height campus from the 7th floor of Hamilton Hall. Picture taken by Ferenc Laczó on April 23, 2024
