To understand broad trends, it can often be helpful to dig into a particular case. With respect to the tumult over the encampments protesting the U.S. backed Israeli offensive in Gaza, it would be hard to find a more illuminating example than Columbia University.
Here, we can clearly observe students’ sincere but contradictory concern for the least among us on the one hand, and their ambitious social climbing on the other. Here, we can most clearly recognize elite institutions’ deep commitments to purely sterile forms of activism – and we can readily see how identitarian and safetyist approaches to “social justice” are easily weaponized in the service of the status quo. At Columbia, we can most readily perceive the jarring dissonance between the spectacle of unrest over Gaza on the one hand, and the realities of the conflict that has been overshadowed by the spectacle on the other.
But let’s start with some basic facts.
On April 17th, Columbia University Nemat “Minouche” Shafik appeared before the House of Representatives to testify about the prevalence and nature of antisemitism on campus. Eager to avoid the fate of her peers at Harvard and University of Pennsylvania, Shafik kept her head down and capitulated aggressively on everything.
Uncritically, she endorsed claims that Columbia (and universities writ large) were awash in antisemitism and Columbia was not doing enough to fight it. She paid comparatively little attention to pro-Palestine students who have faced assaults, doxxing and harassment – including by professors – under her watch. She did not resist at all when the term “intifada” was equated with hate speech, despite her own deep knowledge (as a native Arabic speaker and Egyptian immigrant) that the term is used broadly for mass uprisings, including in many contexts outside of Israel / Palestine, to include resistance movements led by Jews.
Over the course of the three-hour hearing, Shafik offered few appeals to academic freedom and made little mention of the role of universities to be places where people must confront difficult ideas and disagreeable views. Instead, she proudly touted her suspension of Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups from campus, and other crackdowns on unsanctioned speech. At one point in the hearing, she even vowed to remove a tenured professor, Joseph Massad, who made controversial statements from a leadership post without regard for due process.
It was an embarrassment, start to finish.
Meanwhile, as the president was busy debasing herself in Washington, Columbia University’s students set up an encampment to host demonstrations against the war. Although the NYPD itself asserted that the protests were non-violent and non-harassing, and the students complied with all instructions, Shafik ordered cops in riot gear to break up the encampment immediately upon returning to New York — leading to the arrest of more than 100 students. It didn’t work out well for her.
Despite her servile testimony and the immediate and militant response to student protests, Elise Stefanik and other GOP lawmakers called for President Shafik’s resignation. After all, President Shafik had, herself, acknowledged that, under her leadership, Columbia had become an antisemitic hellscape. The encampments and heavy-handed response were all the proof they needed that the situation did not seem to be within her control.
Indeed, rather than ending the protests, the aggressive clampdown at Columbia spurred a wave of solidarity encampments at other Ivy Plus schools and public flagship universities – and even at elite institutions abroad. Tony Karon collectively referred to these demonstrations as the “Ivy League Intifada.”
It deserves to be underlined, this movement took place almost exclusively at elite schools. Less expensive and selective schools overwhelmingly lacked protests and (especially) encampments, and polls and surveys suggest that most college students nationwide are not particularly focused on Gaza and few have taken part in any demonstrations (on campus or off) related to the conflict.
But within the elite education world, it wasn’t just peer institutions that got in on the action following Shafik’s crackdown. A new, even larger, encampment quickly returned to Columbia as well. Given how badly her previous clampdown backfired, President Shafik vowed not to involve the NYPD with dismantling this encampment, and pledged to negotiate with the protestors for an amicable resolution instead.
However, concerned about the university putting its best face forward with graduation fast approaching, President Shafik abandoned negotiations after only a couple of days. She then announced unequivocally that the university “will not divest from Israel” and her administration began trying to identify and suspend participants in the encampments. Many students abandoned the protest at this point. Others responded to this escalation by the administration by taking their civil disobedience to the next level. A contingent of students broke into and occupied Hamilton Hall in a clear attempt to evoke the now-celebrated 1968 anti-Vietnam protests. And they received the same type of reception.
In response to the occupation, President Shafik immediately called upon the NYPD to clear out all vestiges of the encampment and retain a strong presence on campus through graduation. The police complied and showed up in force, in full riot gear, guns drawn. Professional journalists were largely forbidden from covering the raid, on penalty of arrest – and student journalists were likewise threatened if they left Pulitzer Hall (although they still did one hell of a job reporting on the clampdown). Despite the communication blackout, surfaced videos show that although the police were not met with violence, they meted plenty out, sending dozens of students to the hospital with fractures, concussions, sprains and other injuries (despite NYPD statements to the contrary at the time). One officer even discharged his weapon (fortunately, failing to hit anyone).
However, this authoritarian response likewise failed to break the will of demonstrators. Instead, much like how Shafik’s crackdown on the initial encampment led to a wave of solidarity encampments at elite schools in the U.S. and worldwide, her aggressive response to the occupation of Hamilton Hall seems to have pushed others to occupy buildings at their universities (UChicago, UPenn, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and beyond), daring their leaders to follow Columbia’s ignoble example.
At Columbia itself, the violent raid of Hamilton Hall seems to have only increased activists’ commitment to resisting university administration. For instance, many students, barred from protesting on campus, have carried out demonstrations in front of trustees’ homes, even as Shafik herself is publicly shamed when she’s spotted by outraged students.
Columbia’s faculty, meanwhile, cast a vote of no confidence in President Shafik by a 2:1 margin. And an alumni group has vowed to withhold more than $74 million in donations unless Columbia makes serious movement on the protestors’ demands.
In recognition of the reality that students and other stakeholders remain committed to exerting pressure on the university, Columbia remains locked down. All classes have been moved online. The commencement ceremony President Shafik was so eager to protect has been cancelled because it is clear that attending students would almost certainly use the event to engage in further activism – displays that the president is unwilling to countenance… and perhaps is unable to tolerate as well.
President Shafik’s appointment as the 20th president of Columbia University was historic. She is the first woman to occupy that role, and its first leader “of Arab Muslim origin.”
According to the logic of banal “social justice” discourse, Shafik’s gender, ethnic, religious and immigrant background should have rendered her especially sensitive to social justice concerns, particularly supportive of social justice activism, and uniquely capable of responding to the crisis in a constructive way.
But of course, President Shafik is far more than an immigrant woman of Arab and Muslim background. She is also, for instance, a literal baroness. And prior to her role at Columbia University, she served as the Vice President of the World Bank, the Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Deputy governor of the Bank of England, and the Director of the London School of Economics. This background is much more essential for understanding how events have played out at Columbia University than considering Shafik’s ethnicity or gender.
On the one hand, in light of her history and affiliations, it would be easy to view someone like President Shafik as endowed with extraordinary power and freedom. It would be easy to think she has wide discretion in shaping how events play out. This is true, in a sense. It is also incomplete.
The sociologist Max Weber argued that while bureaucrats do wield impressive power and social prestige, it is never truly theirs to possess. Instead, it typically derives from their office. If they are pushed out of their position or institution, their wealth and status tend to vanish precipitously too. In order to avoid this outcome, Weber argued, bureaucrats tend to avoid alienating anyone with the capacity to strip them of their rank and prestige (even to the point of compromising their integrity or alienating large swaths of the rest of society in order to ingratiate themselves to elite gatekeepers).
Bourdieu would later describe people like Shafik as the “dominated faction of the dominant class.” They are elites, but their elite position is typically contingent on continued patronage from wealthy people or the state — and on association with prestigious institutions such as universities or media outlets (which, themselves, are reliant on patronage from other elites and/or the government). As a consequence, although they may fancy themselves as rebels or speakers of uncomfortable truths — and although they can and often do leverage their clout to push elites or institutions in particular directions — they also tend to know their limits, and generally take care not to cross any lines that would result in their expulsion from corridors of influence.
Insofar as she is eager to cling to her position at Columbia (or analogous posts elsewhere downstream), Shafik is not free. She has little choice but to go, hat in hand, prostrating herself before Republican lawmakers and billionaire donors who summon and deride her. When Democratic lawmakers and their high-profile patrons called on her and the trustees to clear the encampments or resign, and Joe Biden himself declared students should be purged from the buildings they’re occupying, President Shafik knew what she had to do. And she did exactly what she was “supposed to” on the very day that these demands went out.
In making these moves, Minouche was not acting as individual following whatever convictions she may (or may not) have. She was acting as agent of Columbia University, which serves a very particular set of functions in society.
Columbia University is many things. Some have described it as a massive hedge fund with a world class research university attached to it. Superficially, this isn’t far from the truth. Nearly half of Columbia’s 13.6 billion dollar endowment is invested in equities, with another third in hedge funds. Another 14 percent of the endowment is invested in real estate, rendering Columbia the largest private landowner in New York City. Put simply, Columbia University is a vast enterprise. However, its main business is not speculating on stocks and real estate – that’s more of a side hustle.
Columbia’s core product is the reproduction and legitimation of social inequality. This is the source of their multibillion-dollar endowment, derived primarily from donations by alumni and their families who are invested in that enterprise’s success. Universities in general, and elite schools in particular, exist largely to launder wealth into perceptions of “merit.” They help the children of wealthy and well-connected families reproduce their social position and feel like they “earned” it.
As my advisor Shamus Khan has powerfully illustrated, students from non-traditional Ivy backgrounds (like myself), and the world class scholars these universities employ, play an important role in this legitimation scheme: If these others are attending because of their exceptional grit or talent, nepo babies can come to believe that they are at Columbia because they are geniuses and scrappy bootstrappers too – because those are apparently the type of people the university selects for. These same impressions allow elite institutions to primarily hire the rich kids who graduate from these schools under the auspices of “merit”: in virtue of graduating from Columbia University they must be especially gifted (and not merely privileged).
Yet, as I detail at length in my forthcoming book, the truth is that elite institutions like Columbia primarily select for highly-conscientious and capable conformists. If you’re sufficiently talented and prolific, the conformity expectations can be slackened slightly (a win-win that helps other conformists understand themselves and the institution as more “edgy” than they are). If you’re sufficiently rich, deficits in capability or conscientiousness can be overlooked or worked around. But the modal student is not an idiosyncratic genius or a billionaire kid who failed his way to the top.
Instead, as Chomsky pointed out decades ago, colleges and universities (and consequently, the symbolic professions) are overwhelmingly comprised of the kind of people who showed up to school every day and on time; who did not have bad disciplinary records, but did have the right kinds of extracurriculars; who turned in their assignments on time and according to the specified instructions; who mastered regurgitating the information that the teachers provided precisely, and in a form that said teachers find aesthetically pleasing; who craved approval from their teachers and other authority figures; who take pride in their grades, believing that their academic records say something meaningful about themselves; who do well on standardized tests, again, often believing that their high scores say something meaningful about themselves; who are willing to virtually indefinitely delay gratification. This is how one ends up with sterling attendance and disciplinary records, a high GPA, and the glowing letters of recommendation that help get one into a selective college. These same dispositions allow one to flourish as a college student and, later, in the symbolic professions.
As economist Bryan Caplan subsequently demonstrated at length, the main signal our college degrees send to employers is that we are the kinds of people who are willing to endure drudgery, degradation and busy work (such as is required to obtain a college degree); we are the kinds of people who see things through to completion (which is why a degree, even an associate’s degree, will give you a bigger boost on the job market than several years of schooling without a degree); we are the kind of person who will follow the rules, who will complete tasks on time and according to specifications, and so on.
These selection patterns, which define higher ed writ large, are even more pronounced at institutions like Columbia. They’re filled with people who have been totally consumed by what Daniel Markovits called, “The Meritocracy Trap.” Everything is a competition. Everything is a chance to build one’s brand. Everything is a risk or opportunity to move up or down the ladder. Even social justice activism.
I say all this as a product of Columbia University, myself. And I must confess, I loved my time there. I continue to feel a deep affection and gratitude towards the institution. My affiliation with the university opened many doors I would have never had access to otherwise. While enrolled, I was offered unparalleled resources. My mentors and colleagues were truly excellent. The undergrads were bright, earnest, ambitious, and highly-invested in getting good grades (if markedly less committed to learning – and alternatively unaware of and unbothered by their ignorance). It’s been heartbreaking to see the institution riven by struggles, locked down and purged.
Compared to most other campuses, the way things played out at Columbia was extreme. However, as my mentor Saskia Sassen liked to emphasize, extreme cases can “make sharply visible what might otherwise remain confusingly vague.”
In the real world, politics requires building broad coalitions by appealing to superordinate identities, shared goals and common values and deemphasizing points of contention. People often have to make compromises, deal with difficult tradeoffs, and adjust their aims, strategies and goals in light of realities “on the ground.” Effective political action requires discipline, patience and persistence, to the extent that Weber famously likened it to the “slow boring of hard boards.”
However, because elites are largely insulated from the actual consequences of politics, they often feel free to approach politics as a sport, a holy war, or a means of self-expression. After all, the government programs on the table for being cut or painfully restructured aren’t usually ones that they directly rely upon; it is generally not their jobs being automated or outsourced; their neighborhoods are not being hollowed out by economic forces, ravaged by drugs, or plagued with crime and blight; it’s not their children getting caught up in the criminal justice system, deployed into a war, or staring down especially grim life prospects. ‘Those people’ and their problems are largely abstractions — little more concrete than the principles elites are trying to score points for, or the hypothetical future generations for whom their symbolic advocacy, they assert, will somehow pay off.
We can see this reality clearly when, one of the few people arrested at Hamilton Hall with no ties to the university was a multimillionaire lawyer descended from wealthy ad executives who is married to a model, lives in a $2.3 million townhouse, and regularly engages in violent agitation for sport.
This dynamic was likewise obvious Norman Finklestein emphasized to Columbia demonstrators that, even rejecting the notion that phrases like “from the river to the sea” or terms like “intifada” are antisemitic, they’re nonetheless highly polarizing — and if the goal is to bring in people who aren’t already on board, to construct a big tent or persuade the persuadable — if they’re serious about trying to affect social change — then folks should probably tone down this kind of polarizing rhetoric. The students responded by immediately doubling down on their ‘from the river to the sea’ chant the moment he handed off the mic.
Many who took part in the protests didn’t do basic research to find out what they were protesting for, or how the institutions they’re making demands of actually function. For instance, students at Columbia and other universities seem to be largely operating under the mistaken assumption that their tuition money funds university endowments (which entitles them to direct how these dollars are spent because they’ve internalized the neoliberal assumptions that students are “customers” of the university, and the customer is the boss). In reality, only a small share of students pay the full sticker price of attendance, and collected tuition rarely covers students’ full cost of attendance. Endowments expenditures are used to cover the remaining costs. That is, far from student tuition dollars going towards Israeli firms, instead, investments in arms manufacturers and Israeli firms help subsidize students’ own attendance at Columbia. They have the actual financial flows precisely backwards.
This doesn’t necessarily invalidate their cause: there is still a case to be made for transparency, or for pushing universities to follow their own established precedents and policies with respect to divestment. But when making demands of a university, it’s helpful to show you’ve done your homework first.
With respect to the demonstrations themselves, the encampments were unauthorized. Therefore, taking part in the enactments was not merely an act of protest, but an act of civil disobedience. In principle, civil disobedience is about willfully defying the rules and defiantly accepting the consequences. It’s putting yourself at stake for the sake of others. As Mario Salvo memorably put it back in 1964:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!”
Many contemporary student protestors, however, seem to be operating under the assumption that engaging in civil disobedience should be risk free, consequence free, and perhaps even career enhancing. They are under this impression because admissions officers say things like:
“For those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world. We value student voices on campus and we encourage discourse and action. To punish our applicants for doing just that would go against the very beliefs that make Yale such a special place to study.”
Elite schools across the board market themselves as sites for activism, as Tyler Austin Harper ably chronicled. At Columbia, even President Shafik sent in the NYPD to forcibly end the occupation of Hamilton Hall – on the exact same day the now-celebrated occupation of Hamilton Hall was broken up in 1968 – she audaciously continued to emphasize the university’s “long and proud tradition of protest and activism.” Critically, the university’s own resources on the 1968 tumult note that the clampdown against students was a mistake whose fallout “dogged Columbia for years.” They emphasize, “it took decades to recover from those turbulent times,” but insist, “Columbia is a very different place today.”
For students who’d internalized these messages, it must have been a profound source of shock and heartbreak to discover that their institutions, in fact, are not committed to social justice or social change. It must have likewise been stressful to discover that, although symbolic-economy employers who recruit elite college graduates regularly claim to seek out people who color outside the lines and take bold stands – on this issue, activism was not career enhancing, but likely quite detrimental to their future plans. As these realities snapped into place, it turned out that many were disinclined to bear the costs of genuine civil disobedience.
Instead, protestors have widely adopted masks and refused to go “on the record” with journalists about their participation in the protests. A core demand throughout the negotiations has been amnesty. Students now understand that any disciplinary records for pro-Palestinian protests would not be institutionally valued within the “woke” symbolic professions they aspire towards (as Black Lives Matter activism might have); it’s more likely to serve as a scarlet letter undermining their competitiveness for elite jobs. Rather than declining to work for companies who would penalize them for their moral stand, they are instead demanding retroactively unblemished academic records as a condition of ending their “civil disobedience” campaign.
With respect to the law, at least, their affiliation with Columbia University has already greatly reduced their “skin in the game.” For instance, contrary to earlier claims by Columbia and the NYPD, the New York Times has pointed out that more than 70 percent of those arrested had direct institutional ties to the university (and most were in their late 20s, white and female). This was reflected in how they were treated after arrest. Most of those swept up were released without charges. Among Columbia affiliates who were formally charged, none faced more than a single misdemeanor (and most of those charges have already been quietly dropped). Meanwhile, those picked up from City College, the nearby public university raided by police the same night, were all hit with felonies. If you’re going to be a rebel, it pays to be an elite rebel.
As a case in point, current City College of New York President Vincent Boudreau is a graduate of Ivy League school Cornell University. While he attended Cornell, he was arrested multiple times for activism pushing the university to divest from South Africa. As reported in The City, these protests “included sit-ins and the erection of a ‘shanty town’ where students camped out for 65 days.” As the president of a university, however, Bourdeau waited less than a week before sending in the authorities to aggressively dismantle the Gaza encampment – giving the cops a “2 for 1” deal as they were preparing to lock down Columbia University. He said his biggest regret about how things played out at CCNY is that he allowed the encampments to be established at all, rather than responding much more aggressively much sooner.
If they play their cards right, Columbia students arrested in the recent pro-Gaza protests may likewise go on to squash dissent from others someday – including and especially those less affluent than themselves.
On the one hand, it’s easy to mock the ignorance and privilege of many of those who took part in the Ivy League Intifada at Columbia and peer institutions. However, it should also be emphasized that, for the most part, these were students who saw immense suffering in Gaza and committed themselves to “doing something” about it – even if much of what they did was not particularly self-aware, thought through, or well-executed. And for those Gazans who have sufficient access to the outside world to witness the protests online, major public resistance to the ongoing military campaign in Gaza has been a rare source of encouragement and hope.
Likewise, although there is much to condemn about the armchair radicalism of professors who campaign for social justice while aggressively perpetuating and exploiting inequalities, it should also be acknowledged that many put their bodies on the line to protect their students in the face of draconian crackdowns and experienced injuries, arrests and formal sanctions in the process.
And they didn’t come away completely empty handed. Although the demonstrators seem to have failed at changing the policies at Columbia proper, Union Theological Seminary, which is tied to Columbia but has a separate endowment, responded to the protests and the crackdown by voting to divest from companies financially invested in the war in Gaza. They’re among the first higher ed institutions in the U.S. to make this move. They may not be the last.
Of course, even if other universities end up divesting too, this would do little to end the current conflict. For that, it’d be more effective to exert direct pressure on the lawmakers and multinational corporations enabling Israel’s campaign instead of trying to adjust the investment portfolio of one’s own university.
But again, even if their specific tactics and aims could be better calibrated towards their ultimate goal, at least the demonstrators and their institutional allies were not content to stand idly by in the face of an ethnic cleansing campaign underwritten by their own elected officials and institutions. Comparatively, most of the people “tut tutting” the demonstrators seem largely indifferent to the suffering in Gaza and possess an even less coherent vision of social change.
Joe Biden, for instance, emphasized that although peaceful protest is protected in America, “dissent must never lead to disorder.” In truth, as Frederik Douglas observed, “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Stonewall, now widely celebrated, was a literal riot. Ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights campaigns, meanwhile, have always had an intimate relationship with violence and coercion. The idea that social change primarily occurs through positive, pleasant and non-disruptive means is silly and out of step with most human history or contemporary events.
Across the board, a sense of unreality has dominated the protests, the counterprotests, and the discourse about the protests.
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Irsa Hirsi, was arrested during the first crackdown on student encampments, alongside the children of millionaires and billionaires and other well-connected folks. In addition to her arrest, Hirsi was suspended from Columbia University and, in virtue of not being allowed on campus, was temporarily evicted from her university housing and denied access to university dining halls. Reporting on these events, an article in the Daily Beast declared, “When Isra Hirsi joined several of her Barnard College and Columbia University peers in the pro-Palestinian campus protest known as the Gaza encampment, she had no idea she would end up suspended, homeless, and left without food within a matter of days.”
In a context where actual homeless people wander the street outside of Columbia’s gates begging for food, it takes a special type of person to describe the daughter of a sitting Congresswoman as facing homelessness and food insecurity for what is, at best, an inconvenience.
In subsequent protests, demonstrators put up signs declaring the encampment is a “people’s university for Palestine.”
This is an audacious claim for students attending a gated school that is protected by private security and doors that require active Columbia-issued identification to get through – an institution that admits a miniscule share of applicants and costs, on paper, nearly $90k per year to attend. In reality, Columbia is an elite school: its purpose is to identify, cultivate and legitimize elites. The students taking part in the protests are, themselves, attending Columbia University (instead of, say, their local land grant university) largely because they personally desire to be more elite than other college graduates. Many of them arrived as elites. Most others will leave as such. To describe Columbia as a “people’s university” in any capacity is to completely misunderstand universities in general and Columbia in particular.
Even more striking, during the occupation of Hamilton Hall, a spokesperson from the protestors compared their plight to the people of Gaza – they claimed to be facing “starvation” and “dehydration” and demanded the university allow “humanitarian aid.”
Left out of her comments was the reality that, unlike the people of Gaza, she could leave at any time. And upon departing, she could buy all the food she wants: she is the daughter of wealthy and prominent professionals who have a million-dollar flat on the Upper East Side.
It’s easy to see how she and her allies could be confused, however, because their opponents often validated and reinforced the sense that the protestors were genuinely dangerous people engaged in truly radical action.
For example, many students and donors plead for a suppression of the protests because Jewish students felt “unsafe.” Unsafe from who? As Sohrab Ahmari reported of the protests, “Keffiyehs abounded, sometimes jarringly matched with midriff tops; young women seemed to dramatically outnumber the men.” The community guidelines for the camp called for all participants to “Respect personal boundaries — tight quarters are not an excuse to cross physical boundaries without physical consent” and included myriad similar rules and pronouncements. The participants, he emphasized, were “too wedded to the logics of the corporate, safety-ist society against which they rebel to pose any serious challenge to it.’”
These are, again, students who relentlessly made sure they checked all the right boxes and pleased all the right authorities to get into an Ivy League school. These are kids who were not even willing to show their faces while they engage in non-violent protest to avoid risking their planned Goldman Sachs job or legislative internships. These are not students who are likely to engage in murders or assaults. Indeed, even people who were suspended for using genuinely violent rhetoric were… not intimidating… to put it mildly, and were highly unlikely to live their words in this instance any more than they do for the other “radical” rhetoric they espouse (while building their elite careers and credentials).
Statistically, there were a total of four on-campus aggravated assaults, four weapons violations, and 15 nonviolent bias incidents looking at all five Columbia University sites in New York City over the last three years on record combined (2020-2022). There were no murder or manslaughter incidents committed by students, nor were there any violent hate crimes perpetrated on campus. Almost all of the danger Columbia students experience, in practice, is from random people in New York City who occasionally rob or assault them. The idea that Columbia students pose a severe physical danger to their peers is both empirically and theoretically ridiculous.
In reality, there was little violence at any of the protests at Columbia or nationwide over the past month – and the violence that did occur was almost uniformly againstthe protestors themselves, at the hands of the authorities and, at UCLA, pro-Israel mobs.
In truth, universities are not hotbeds of antisemitism that indoctrinate young people into hating Israel and Jews. In fact, highly educated and liberal people are among the least likely constituents in America to hold antisemitic views or engage in antisemitic behaviors – and higher education is empirically associated with greater support for Israel, not less.
Pesky facts like these, however, did not stop former CNN anchor and Meta executive Campbell Brown audaciously declaring her children would be safer in Tel Aviv than on the Upper West Side. For those unfamiliar, Brown is the daughter of disgraced Louisiana senator and secretary of state James H. Brown. She is married to Dan Senor – former spokesperson of the coalition provisional authority in Iraq and advisor to Paul Bremer and eventual foreign policy advisor to Mitt Romney during his ill-fated presidential campaign. The idea that her silver-spoon kids are facing serious danger at an Ivy League school – to the point where they would be better off in a Middle East country currently embroiled in a literal war – this is transparently absurd. If anything, it seems to demean the October 7 massacre in Israel and belies the state of paranoia and siege consuming Israel at present.
Columbia Business School professor Shai Davidai has likewise gone viral multiple times by declaring that he feels “unsafe” on campus – even as he repeatedly described student demonstrators as terrorists and kapos (Jews who collaborated with the Nazis).
On April 21, Davidai sent an email to university leadership and many journalists (and then published on social media) declaring his intention to directly confront the protestors in the encampment, alongside other pro-Israel supporters – and he aspired to use the university’s private security as his muscle to rough up or intimidate any demonstrators that stepped out of line. The university replied by informing him that he and his confederates would be provided space for a counterprotest on another lawn, if he’d like, and would be provided security to protect that demonstration, per his request. Davidai responded back that he wasn’t interested in a counterprotest. He wanted to wreck the existing protest. And if the university didn’t protect him as he tried to initiate a conflict, he vowed to sue them. The next morning, Shai showed up with a small throng of supporters and a giant Israeli flag draped around his shoulders only to find out that his access to the campus had been revoked. He immediately compared being unable to stoke a violent conflict on campus to the situation faced by Jewish intellectuals in Nazi Germany – a comparison that is outrageous and belittles the genuine persecution that scholars faced under the reign of Hitler.
Davidai is, himself, the son of a multimillionaire tied to weapons manufacturing and the grandson of the former deputy CEO of the Israeli airline company El Al. When he stomps and yells like a spoiled child while pretending to be the only thing standing between terrorists and Nazis taking over Columbia University and establishing pogroms on the Upper West Side of Manhattan – this is not one bit less ridiculous than Ivy League kids cosplaying as revolutionaries in the service of social justice causes.
In fact, the absurdity is mutually reinforcing. People like Davidai try to puff up the protestors to make them seem dangerous and menacing so he looks heroic (rather than pathetic) in trying to squash them. Meanwhile, aggressive suppression efforts by pro-Israel supporters and institutions like Columbia reinforce the sense in the protestors’ minds that what they are doing must be truly important and threatening to the status quo.
In truth, there is very little at stake on any side of the struggles at Columbia University and, ultimately, all affiliated parties will be just fine. The students will overwhelmingly proceed to their well-renumerated jobs – protestors, counter-protestors and neutral parties alike. Whether President Shafik manages to hold on at Columbia or ultimately gets pushed out, she will spend the rest of her days filthy rich. Likewise, even in the unlikely event that Shai Davadai is terminated for his many indiscretions at Columbia, he’ll still have his nepo baby golden parachute and a promising future as a right-aligned influencer. Columbia, too, will be just fine. The school is older than America – it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. All those people who say they’ll avoid applying to or sending their kids to the Ivies downstream are lying to others, and possibly themselves (and were perhaps unlikely to gain admission anyway).
The only people in this story who face genuine suffering have been almost completely absent from the popular discourse over the last several weeks.
Jean Baudrillard observed that, “behind every image, something has disappeared.” The Ivy League Intifada is no exception.
While Americans obsessed over tents on the Columbia quad, hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sleeping in tents in Rafah. They are not “unsheltered” because the university revoked their access to the campus, but because their homes and communities were leveled by a campaign of destruction with few analogs in modern history. And even their tents are being bombed.
It’s impossible for them to carry out demonstrations on their own campuses or to worry about whether their commencement will go smoothly, because every single university in Gaza has been willfully targeted and destroyed by Israel. Instead of dealing with the inconvenience of being unable to access the dining hall or hang out on the quad – and rather than stressing out over whether they’ll land their dream job or if others are saying mean things about them (that make them feel emotionally “unsafe”) – the people of Gaza are witnessing their loved ones killed in front of their eyes, are undergoing amputations without anesthesia, and many are literally starving to death. There is nowhere left for them to flee, but a ground invasion seems imminent despite Hamas ostensibly agreeing to a ceasefire.
Joe Biden and others aligned with Netanyahu would rather talk about student protestors instead of Gaza for obvious reasons. Mainstream media outlets, meanwhile, recognize that “campus culture war” stories get far more clicks and are far easier to produce than responsible reporting on bleak international events, so they emphasize “kids these days” stories aggressively. The student activists, for their part, seem to genuinely desire more attention for the plight of Gazans – albeit ideally in a way that enhances their own clout.
In an editorial for The Guardian, the Columbia College Student Council urged everyone to listen to their perspectives, and elevate their voices, so they can help bring attention to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. The actual conflict they are ostensibly protesting to end gets only a single oblique mention in the last sentence of the piece. The rest of the article is focused on the struggles Columbia students have faced and calls for them to get still more attention relative to other stakeholders. In truth, Columbia students don’t need your attention. They don’t need your support. They don’t need your solidarity.
Attention is finite. Energy is finite. Time is finite. Resources are finite. Save your concern and your efforts for the crisis in Gaza. Don’t let the farce at Columbia obscure the tragedy that the protests were supposed to call attention to in the first place.