Protest, Palestine, and the University—Whoever That Is
On Who Writes Our History, and How
“If someone said to me again: ‘Supposing you were to die tomorrow, what would you do?’ I wouldn’t need any time to reply. If I felt drowsy, I would sleep. If I was thirsty, I would drink. If I was writing, I might like what I was writing and ignore the question. If I was having lunch, I would add a little mustard and pepper to the slice of grilled meat. If I was shaving, I might cut my earlobe. If I was kissing my girlfriend, I would devour her lips as if they were figs. If I was reading, I would skip a few pages. If I was peeling an onion, I would shed a few tears. If I was walking, I would continue walking at a slower pace. If I existed, as I do now, then I wouldn’t think about not existing. If I didn’t exist, then the question wouldn’t bother me. If I was listening to Mozart, I would already be close to the realms of the angels. If I was asleep, I would carry on sleeping and dream blissfully of gardenias. If I was laughing, I would cut my laughter by half out of respect for the information. What else could I do, even if I was braver than an idiot and stronger than Hercules?”
—Mahmoud Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst: Journals
Dear Reader,
Come back in time a week with me.
Thursday, April 18, 2024, 3:30 p.m. EST. Middle schoolers swarm the M60 eastbound to LaGuardia, loud-mouthed and life-loving, startling myself and the other passengers out of a resigned, post-work-day silence. It’s like being caught amidst a flock of pigeons taking flight, a jumbled flurry of noise and movement. We shouldn’t be surprised. The back of the bus has always been the stomping ground of cool kids. Cool and courteous—“Are we bothering you, miss?” one of them asks. I want to tell him that he couldn’t be more perfect. They clock me smiling at their antics and ham it up, conversation in cacophony. Which stop is ours? Are we going to McDonald’s? Did you hear Jalin’s going out with Bethany?
All I can think about is the people dead in Gaza, so many of them children like these.
Two hours ago (days by the time you read this), Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, sent out an email explaining that she had “authorized the New York Police Department to begin clearing the encampment from the South Lawn of Morningside campus that had been set up by students in the early hours of Wednesday morning.”1 (You can read her letter to the NYPD here.) The students in question had organized the camp-out to protest the war in Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinian people, calling for peace and for the university to divest financially from Israel. Countless people showed up in and around the campus to support, many of them actively enrolled students, some of them my friends. Since the email went out, many students have been suspended, some have been evicted from their dorms, and over a hundred have been arrested.2
(I’m no journalist and thus in no hurry, so by the time you read this, it will already be out of date.)3
Have you ever watched history careen into the present like the 1 train arriving in the 116th Street Station? Thundering, screeching, its harsh light illuminating our ugliness: litter and rats and things we don’t want to think about, much less see. I have—more times than I would have thought possible in a mere two decades on the planet. Once again, I find myself a primary resource for historically significant events, bearing witness to what’s unfolding at Columbia.
This isn’t the kind of thing I usually write about here. I was all set to publish an entry about my poetry practice, business as usual. But Loose Baggy Monsters is a writer’s journal, which means that it’s often about storytelling, which means that it ends up being about everything. Stories—who tells them, how, and why—permeate every aspect of our lives, often without our noticing it.
Columbia is near and dear to my heart. It’s my alma mater—Latin for “nourishing mother,” though it is hard to imagine any nourishing mother would allow her kids to be led away in zip ties. I graduated almost exactly a year ago. Had things gone differently—had I taken a gap year, for example, or delayed my education due to COVID—I like to think I would have been brave enough to be out there on the lawn with my peers.
In her email, Shafik wrote the following:
“Protests have a storied history at Columbia and are an essential component of free speech in America and on our campus. We work hard to balance the rights of students to express political views with the need to protect other students from rhetoric that amounts to harassment and discrimination. We updated our protest policy to allow demonstrations on very short notice and in prime locations in the middle of campus while still allowing students to get to class, and labs and libraries to operate. The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students.”4
I don’t envy Shafik’s job. Nevertheless, I can’t say she’s doing a great one. She has been tasked with telling the story of the protests on behalf of the university administration. In doing so, she connected it to a larger story: a “storied history,” in fact, one in which Columbia is and has been a center for protest and social change. She was not the only one to do so; Mayor Eric Adams said the same thing, swapping a “storied history” for a “proud” one.5
The proud, storied history to which the university president and the mayor are alluding includes the famous 1968 protests of Columbia’s investment the Vietnam War. Back then, 700 students were arrested and at least 148 were injured.6 A dean got taken hostage.7 The Grateful Dead was there. It was a whole thing. In most ways, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment is nothing like 1968. There are, however, some eerie similarities. A group of students opposed to a war. A global conflict that feels unjust and imbalanced. Images of violence in our news feeds. And a university at the heart of it all, financially, intellectually, and emotionally.
When we say a university has a proud history of protest, what do we mean? Who do we mean? Specifically, who do we mean by “university”? Is the university the administration? The president? The students? The faculty? The alumni? The staff? It can’t be everyone at once. In 2018, when I was a junior, I joined the picket line with the striking grad students who wanted better treatment from the administration. Using that strike as a case study, if you used the term “university” to refer to everyone involved, you would end up with a nonsense sentence like, As the University and the University entered mediation and sought agreement on these issues, the University held major picket lines and protests. (The actual line from an article in Columbia Spectator was “As the union and the University entered mediation and sought agreement on these issues, striking student employees held major picket lines and protests.”8) Often people use capital-U University to refer to the administration, which feels unfair. When I say Columbia is near and dear to my heart, I certainly don’t mean the administration. I mean the students, instructors, and staff who made my education what it was.
All this to say, the students of Columbia absolutely have a proud, storied history of protest. But Columbia’s administration has a storied history of quelling and condemning those protests—only to turn around years later and look back on them with pride. Shafik is taking credit for a history that she likely would not have supported had she been president at the time.
My prediction—not so much a premonition as a recollection—is that Columbia’s future administration will side with its present students. That they will reflect on the Gaza Solidarity Encampment with pride, just like they’re doing with the 1968 protests today. It could take years—fifty-six of them, perhaps—but I do believe it will happen. The pro-Palestine movement will become an emblem of Columbia students’ bravery and commitment to change. Maybe the future administration will even invoke it as a proud point in an email condemning some new protest, one that’s obviously inexcusable, one that’s obviously different from before. Stories are funny like that. They can be told over and over again, changing in every retelling, and still remain very much the same.
Unfortunately, the people of Gaza don’t have that kind of time.
In her email, Shafik affirmed the importance of protest in the university and in the country at large. Yet she also condemned the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and related protests for violating University policy, disrupting campus life, and creating a harassing and intimidating environment for some students. Those two positions contradict each other. Of course a protest must violate university policy—it believes those policies are unjust. Of course it must disrupt campus life—how else would it garner attention? Think of the disrupted lives of the Palestinian people for whom nothing will ever be the same. Of course I have deep sympathy for the Jewish and Israeli members of the Columbia community who feel harassed and intimidated by the pro-Palestinian protests. None of us can choose who we are, where we come from, or the legacies of violence and oppression into which we are born. But the pro-Palestinian movement is not inherently anti-Jewish—that is merely one story being told.9 As a friend of mine recently put it, institutions only want to recognize protest as activism when it is comfortable to do so, and it is never comfortable in the moment. If it were comfortable, there would be no need for protest.
There is much more that I could and want to write about this tragedy that is so far away and so close to home. As I watch the middle schoolers nail each other in the head with pens, I keep thinking about how all of our stories are connected, stories of oppression and of liberation too, how they hold each other up like building blocks, each one a part of something larger than their sum. I wonder who will tell these kids this story, and how, and to what end. I wonder how this day I’m living in will be remembered, and who will get to live to remember it.
The bus stops. Most of the middle schoolers get off, nearly trampling each other in their haste, leaving two girls behind. One of the boys whips around in the door. He blows a kiss to the girls, shouts, “Bye, beautiful ladies!” and is gone. The girls erupt into giggles, half exasperated, half pleased. I leave what hope I have with them: a hope that soon the children of Gaza will experience such simple joy.
Thanks for reading.
Yours,
Jane
P.S. A song worth listening to about a different, much deadlier response to a student protest . . .
Minouche Shafik, email message to Columbia University committee, 18 April 2024.
Sharon Otterman and Alan Blinder, “Over 100 Arrested at Columbia After Pro-Palestinian Protest,” The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 18 April 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/nyregion/columbia-university-protests-antisemitism.html.
It is. Since April 18th, I have seen:
Students re-rally every day, flooding the lawns, pitching new tents, reading poetry and holding space for each other and for Gaza
Non-Columbia affiliates gather outside the campus gates with signs and drums and Palestinian flags
Counter-protestors show up to the same gates with Israeli flags wrapped around their shoulders, carrying signs with declarations like, “Unapologetically Zionist”
Another email from Shafik, in the middle of the night on Monday, April 22nd to announce that classes would be held virtually and to denounce antisemitism, without making any mention of Islamophobia
An increase in police presence on and around campus
Students organizing encampments at many other universities, resulting in more student arrests
The Columbia College student body overwhelmingly pass a referendum to divest from Israel
Shafik, email. Emphasis mine.
Otterman and Blinder, “Over 100 Arrested,” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/nyregion/columbia-university-protests-antisemitism.html.
Vimal Patel, “A protest 56 years ago became an important part of Columbia’s culture,” The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 18 April 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/nyregion/columbia-protest-1968-vietnam.html?action=click&pgtype=Article&module=&state=default®ion=footer&context=breakout_link_back_to_briefing.
Ibid.
Talia Traskos-Hart, “After reaching tentative agreement with University, SWC has voted to end strike,” Columbia Spectator, Spectator Publishing Company, 7 January 2022, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2022/01/07/after-reaching-tentative-agreement-with-university-swc-has-voted-to-end-strike/.
See this statement from Jewish Voices for Peace—a student organization currently suspended by Columbia—who argue that “the administration’s actions have made the campus much less safe for Jewish students” by creating a culture of fear around speaking out.
This this this. I love you. ❤️