Last week, the congressional spotlight fell on Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, who followed the acts of Claudine Gay (formerly Harvard’s president) and Elizabeth Magill (formerly Penn’s). Gay and Magill were asked to speak in December to a House committee about their schools’ climates since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel launched a siege on Gaza; both presidents’ tenures unraveled shortly after. Shafik, who had other plans the day of their testimony, was now called back to the stage. “Do you want Columbia to be cursed by God?” Rick Allen, a Republican of Georgia, asked her. “Definitely not,” she replied. Back on campus, hundreds of students convened on a section of lawn; since the scholarly hour of 4am they had been pitching tents, constructing a Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
The next day, Shafik summoned the higher power of the New York Police Department, which conducted a sweep, arresting more than a hundred protesters. (“The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” John Chell, the NYPD chief of patrol, told reporters.) The gates were mostly closed, a security measure imposed by the university’s department of public safety; some members of the press found themselves locked out. As the action swelled, the Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus newspaper, was positioned to be the main source of information about events that soon reverberated across the world.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here