Columbia University‘s pro-Palestinian protests and campus occupation have drawn criticism from virtually all sides for the school’s inadequate response to both its free speech and public safety responsibilities.
Led by the 116-member coalition group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” has maintained its occupation of part of campus for more than a week. Despite heavy police presence and a since-passed deadline to clear the area that has been extended 48 hours, Columbia has been unable to thread the needle on speech and safety concerns.
“Violent conduct is the opposite of free speech. Universities have to crack down on violence in order to allow students to express themselves. That also holds true for disruption, punishable harassment, [and other] violations of university rules,” Zach Greenberg, senior program manager at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the Washington Examiner. “What we’re seeing now with the civil disobedience is students willfully disobeying university rules creating an encampment to get the message across, and [the] university has a responsibility and authority to punish that to ensure their campuses are safe.”
However, Greenberg added, enforcing those rules can be difficult while trying to ensure “campuses remain free for the greatest amount of political expression, which merits the highest level protection under First Amendment standards.”
Universities across the country are facing a difficult situation as they weigh how to respond to protests on their campuses. Free speech and safety concerns are notoriously difficult to balance because the bar for stopping speech has been made close to insurmountably high by the U.S. Supreme Court, and because the line between when provocative or even hateful speech, which is protected legally, crosses into punishable harassment and violence is often unclear.
For Columbia’s leadership, the balancing act has so far been unsuccessful. As the Washington Examiner reported, Columbia is being pulled in both directions, with members of Congress and conservatives criticizing the school’s decision to hold classes virtually rather than address the safety concerns of Jewish students, while some on the Left, including professors who have protested in solidarity with the encampment, have called out the university administration for bulldozing free speech and academic freedom.
Columbia’s president herself pointed out this difficulty in an op-ed she wrote prior to congressional testimony last week, before the protests began.
“A more complicated issue was the conflict between the free-speech rights of pro-Palestinian protesters and the impact that these protests were having on our Jewish students and their supporters,” Columbia president Minouche Shafik wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Trying to reconcile the speech rights of one part of our community with the rights of another part of our community to live in a supportive environment or at least an environment free of fear, harassment and discrimination, has been the central challenge at our university and on campuses across the country.”
“Contrary to the depiction we have seen on social media, most of the people protesting do so from a place of genuine political disagreement, not from personal hatred or bias or support for terrorism,” Shafik wrote.
Parker De Deker, a Jewish first-year student at Columbia who feels unable to return to campus until it is more safe, tends to agree with Shafik on this point, telling the Washington Examiner that the student protesters have been largely peaceful and, while the experience has certainly been jarring for some Jewish students, the protesters’ actions have not been “inherently harmful.”
However, as the encampment grew, more people started showing up who were unaffiliated with Columbia, and De Deker said that is when the sense of danger increased, exacerbated by Shafik bringing the New York City Police Department onto campus. The Columbia student said it was a show of force to prove to Congress she was taking action, as the encampment began the day Shafik appeared on Capitol Hill for testimony.
“Nothing is actually happening internally. Jewish students aren’t being protected, public safety officers are saying they’re watching Jewish students get verbally assaulted, physically harassed, and aren’t doing anything,” De Deker said. “You have pictures of the NYPD outside of campus like this is a police state, but the police aren’t actually inside campus doing anything for the students.”
Setting aside the recent encampments, which violate campus rules, universities have faced difficult choices handling demonstrations since Oct. 7, Greenberg said, because third parties such as members of Congress, alumni, and others have seemingly called for schools to clamp down on what is likely legally protected speech.
“Congress, especially the House Committee on Education and Workforce, is very much bent on ensuring universities crack down on what I would say is protected political speech,” he explained. “When universities are in this situation, I think the most important thing is to be principled. It’s to stand on their free speech commitments, to have their policies explained clearly and understood by the campus community and by these outside actors, third parties, what they mean and why they’re important.”
Greenberg added that it is important to remember that, “in general, antisemitic speech or speech that’s critical or hateful toward certain groups is protected by the First Amendment’s standard, robust protection for offensive speech.”
That protection stops when it turns into discrimination, publishable harassment, or true threats, where the university has a responsibility to get involved, he continued, “but to the extent the university is punishing students for merely being hateful, or offensive, or controversial, that punishment violates the First Amendment policies the university promises to its students.”
Across the country, many critics have also pointed out that the dispositionally left-wing schools have done much to slow-walk a response to some of the pro-Palestinian protests, even when they become violent, by citing academic freedom and free speech concerns, but those concerns are typically thrown out the window in favor of enforcing harassment and bias policies when students or speakers espouse conservatives viewpoints
Columbia has missed the mark with its response to the pro-Palestinian protests, Greenberg said, explaining that prior to the current occupation, the school was not doing much of anything to respond to the protests, and now it has overcorrected by “cracking down on a wide area of speech protected by the First Amendment standards, and because of this they’re facing calls that they’re being hypocritical, having double standards.”
The solution seems clear to many critics, who note that the pro-Palestinian occupiers are violating university rules and should simply be cleared out by police. In fact, it appears the school is moving in that direction, as Shafik issued a Tuesday update on the occupation after failed negotiations with the organizers to deconstruct the camp. Shafik said that if the talks are not successful by the now-extended deadline, Columbia “will have to consider alternative options for clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus.”
After all, as Cherise Trump, executive director of Speech First, told the Washington Examiner, private universities have a different relationship with the U.S. Constitution than public universities.
“If they wanted to, they could choose to disassociate with Jihadists and shut this all down today,” she said. “The fact that they are taking no action to ensure their Jewish students have undisrupted access to education all in the name of ‘free speech’ is not only a clear violation of their very own anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies, but also a violation of Title VI.”
Greenberg agrees that the university has the power to clear the encampments, particularly given the reports that students are unable to get to class, which De Deker confirmed.
However the spectacle of forcibly clearing out protesters comes with consequences as well, Greenberg said, because, on the one hand, having a weak response to breaking university policies will ensure that “behavior that’s rewarded will be repeated,” and Columbia’s failure to crack down on disruption and violence “creates an environment where students feel free to break other university rules, create more violence or disruption, which in turn reduces the cloud for free speech.”
On the other hand, a crackdown on speech could have a “chilling effect” on other legitimate forms of speech because when “students see their friends and their colleagues getting punished for protests and they may in turn, self-censor and not speak out,” Greenberg said.
Crackdowns on speech are also often not productive ways to deal with hate speech anyway, Greenberg explained. “Punishing people who have warped their views doesn’t change hearts and minds, and it doesn’t make the campus any safer or better off,” he said.
De Deker, who has faced confrontations with agitators and heard antisemitic speech at Columbia, and who had to redirect his flight to Florida to celebrate Passover there instead of returning to campus, said a dialogue is exactly what is needed to solve many of the issues, but noted that Columbia has been a poor steward of such discourse.
“We can’t just keep having this grandstanding big conversation about, ‘Oh, here’s what progress looks like or here’s what antisemitism looks like,’ we need to sit down with people from both sides of the issue and we need to have a critical dialogue on, ‘How can we move forward and talk about these issues in a peaceful manner? How can we advocate for Palestinian statehood and the Palestinian people without at the same time harassing Jewish students in the process and making them feel unwelcome on campus?'” he said, explaining the table needs to include pro-Israel voices, pro-Palestinian voices, Zionists, and anti-Zionists.
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“How can we partake in this discourse without it becoming harassment and violence, without it turning into antisemitism, Islamophobia, and pure bigotry?” he said. “No one on either side wants violence, no one on either side wants loss of life, but when you feel like your identity is being questioned and challenged, that’s when you become defensive, and when you’re defensive, you’re not able to participate in conversations.”
Columbia did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
