Columbia Is Cannibalizing Its Mission
Columbia’s Low Library. Photo courtesy of Pexels.
Since the beginning of the 2024 fall semester, members of the Columbia administration have sent thirteen university-wide emails expressing Columbia’s dedication to protecting “open inquiry.” The authors of the correspondences themselves vary—from former interim president Katrina Armstrong to trustee David Greenwald in his announcement of Armstrong’s departure—yet the unifying message remains clear. Caught between the pro-Palestinian and Zionist debates on campus, Columbia attempts to position itself as champion of a third, alternative side: that of free speech and open discussion. Through initiatives and administrative proceedings, the university has attempted to materialize this rhetorical commitment to discourse; on-campus ‘Listening Tables’ aim to “generate connection and understanding” in the fight against the “censoring of uncomfortable but important speech.” Last March, Columbia announced the establishment of their Provostial Advisory Committee on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression (the committee’s name, albeit a tongue-twister, effectively outlines its purpose).
However, over the past two years, Columbia has made it apparent that on-campus freedom of speech is limited by problematically unclear boundaries. Undeniably, the Columbia administration views its preservation of “vigorous and open debate” as a tenet of the university’s identity, “central to achieving [its] academic mission.”
Yet, in the eyes of the administration, the protection of free speech is not the university’s sole obligation. In the midst of the publicity storm spurred by post-October 7th campus events, Columbia’s leaders have felt immense pressure to address what many politicians, largely Republican, have deemed rampant anti-semitism and hate speech on campus. Facing retaliation from the House of Representatives and now the Trump administration, the university has doubled down on its efforts to combat perceived campus discrimination. Perhaps most notably, the university established the Office of Institutional Equity (OEI), responsible for “oversee[ing] the review and arbitration of all reports of discrimination and discriminatory harassment at Columbia.” Interestingly, Columbia itself recognizes a tension within this doubled obligation to both free speech and anti-discrimination. In an update to the institution’s protest-related procedures, the university announced that “values of free speech, open inquiry, and rigorous debate … cannot come at the expense of the rights of others to live, work, and learn here, free from discrimination and harassment,” posing the two as at odds.
In theory, Columbia’s assertion here is principled. Investigating genuine cases of anti-Semitism is essential—anti-Zionist speech that crosses into anti-Jewish rhetoric does not constitute legitimate conversation on a university campus or anywhere. Student protestors dangerously blurred the two when they entered a “History of Modern Israel” course and distributed flyers with a boot positioned over the Star of David. The tamest interpretation of this flyer would be the one literally written on the bottom of the page in all-caps: that protestors want to “crush Zionism.” Crucially, though, the invocation of the Star of David allows for a much more sinister, alarming subtext to seep through. Whether students intended to depict the Star as removed from the Israeli flag is ambiguous; in any case, the reception of its isolation is the same. What is being “crushed” is not just Zionism but an inarguable symbol of the Jewish people—this sort of configuration demands condemnation.
However, Columbia has started confusing instances of anti-semitic rhetoric and genuine argument, the foundation of the discourse it claims to want to protect. In March, the Associated Press broke news of the Office of Institutional Equity’s targeting of Maryam Alwan, a then-Columbia senior. The OEI accused Alwan of “discriminatory harassment” for her alleged association with an op-ed penned in the Columbia Spectator’s Opinion section on behalf of the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition (CPSC). The op-ed serves both as an explanation of the coalition’s exigency and as an argument for both fiscal and academic divestment from Israel.
What is central to the op-ed’s critique of university policy and the Israeli government, though, is its reliance on evidence in building a sound line of reasoning: when the piece proposes that the university halt the Tel Aviv Global Center’s opening, it points towards the inaccessibility of the program for Columbia’s Palestinian affiliates, alongside the majority vote against the center in the 2024 university referendum by participating Columbia College, Barnard, and SEAS students. Even in making its most controversial point, implicitly supporting armed resistance in an affirmation of the Palestinian right to resist, the article immediately calls upon legal precedent. The CPSC invokes the “Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. General Assembly’s resolution 37/43” before describing national and institutional recognition of grievances, based on which resistance may be justified. Alwan’s coalition is arguably more moderate than the organization it disaffiliated from, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which the article critiques for its focus on “revolutionary ideals.” The OIE’s invocation of this specific op-ed in accusing Alwan of discrimination implies that mere discussion of contentious subjects (i.e., violent resistance) can be targeted as prejudicial, limiting the bounds of campus conversation to the university’s status quo.
By its end, the CPSC’s op-ed is not solely limited to on-the-page conversation. Calling attention to CPSC’s role as “student organizers,” the piece describes how “by recentering Palestine, we reignite pressure against the University.” Pivotally, though, what the CPSC recognizes here is that mobilization—“reignit[ing] pressure”—is an essential extension of argument itself. Conversation is pointless without a movement towards action at stake; ultimately, CPSC dedicates itself to “shifting the discourse” because it wants to effect actual change. While Columbia gestures towards preserving “open inquiry,” their protection is performative if it ends before discussion of real-world activism. The university cannot claim to champion free conversation if it neuters any possibility of tangible action arising from intellectual debate.
Doubly alarming, Columbia targeted an op-ed published by an independent student publication—beyond its attack on overall discourse, the Office of Institutional Equity’s actions grossly infringe upon Columbia’s free student press. The Spectator, in which CPSC’s piece was published, operates financially independent of Columbia, allowing the paper to report on the university’s disciplinary measures and faculty relationships without the school’s influence. Its separation from institutional authority is key to the Spectator’s ability to keep Columbia accountable. Furthermore, Columbia targeted the publication’s section dedicated explicitly to free discourse: Opinion. The section publishes both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian op-eds that often explicitly cite and disagree with each other, perpetuating a heated yet self-regulatory conversation. The editorial board affirmed the importance of their own roles in a staff editorial: “a newspaper’s opinion section acts as a vital aspect of the free press … it is through the exchange of diverse perspectives that we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the issues that shape our community and are, in turn, more readily able to hold power accountable.” The Opinion section has always operated as a forum for open, even contrarian student discourse separate from the university’s authority. By threatening a Spectator contributor with disciplinary action, Columbia establishes an implicit, yet dangerous, precedent for administrative interference in what the student press can publish without fear of retaliation against its authors or staff, risking the autonomy of one of the most prominent vehicles of institutional accountability.
In a more recent development, Columbia and Barnard placed four undergraduate Spectator and WKCR reporters under interim suspension for their presence at May 7’s Butler Library protest, all of whom had stated their roles as press to Public Safety. While all suspensions were eventually removed, the Spectator’s editor-in-chief and managing editor published a joint editorial the following week, accusing Columbia of “hav[ing] betrayed the trust of their student journalists and hav[ing] broken an essential campus norm” by failing to guarantee its student press’s protection.
Columbia’s suppression of Alwan’s beliefs is not a self-contained issue. Rather, it is indicative of a larger silencing of pro-Palestinian perspectives in open academic discourse, a perversion manifested in the proto-receivership of the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department, a department known, as noted by the New York Times, for its willingness to hire anti-Zionist faculty. This stifling of anti-Zionist speech on-campus was only furthered in July, when Columbia’s administration, under pressure from the White House, chose to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of anti-semitism, a dire act for on-campus free speech. In explaining their working definition, the IHRA explicitly states that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” is anti-Semitic. As anti-Zionism typically predicates the notion that Israel’s manifestation of Jewish self-determination was unjust, almost all anti-Zionist speech university-wide becomes effective grounds for disciplinary action. Indeed, the punitive bias against anti-Zionist advocates has already become apparent: nearly 80 students involved with the Butler protest in May were met with a 1 to 3 year suspension or expulsion, a level of punishment deemed unprecedented by Columbia’s student worker union. As the union references, when an occupation of then-president Lee Bollinger’s office took place in 2019 for fossil fuel divestment, the protestors were not suspended but merely told to write “an essay and apology letter” to the custodial overtime workers.
While the university has attempted a performance of agnosticism within the Palestine-Israel debate, Columbia’s crackdown on free speech, specifically that critical of Israel, reveals a bias incompatible with institutional neutrality. Clearly, the political pressure Columbia faces to limit such discourse is enormous, and in many ways, it is easier for the university to capitulate than to pursue legal action in the face of governmental repercussions. However, as the university itself recognizes, free discussion is at the bedrock of Columbia’s existence—the loss of one entails the decay of the other. Beyond announcements and lengthy emails, Columbia must rededicate itself to accepting open inquiry from all perspectives, not only in rhetoric but in action. Otherwise, the university will lose the basis of its institutional identity altogether.
The author of this article chooses to remain anonymous.