A (Very Brief) History of Student Protest at Columbia University

By عباد ديرانية - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147749568

On April 30, 2024, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called the New York City Police Department to break up student occupation protests on the University's east lawn and inside Hamilton Hall. The protests were organized by a coalition of over 120 student groups: Columbia University Apartheid Divest, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. The protests have had support from a number of other Columbia faculty members and similar encampments at universities across the country, including my alma mater, Northwestern University.

Over the course of the night, riot cops broke the human chain made by students and faculty, destroyed the encampment, and arrested the student protestors occupying Hamilton Hall, which they had renamed "Hind's Hall" after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl murdered by Israeli soldiers after surviving a tank shot that killed six of her relatives. Over 100 arrests were made that night. We don't know many more details because NYPD forced all press out of the area before they got to work with their firearms and flash-bangs. At least one shot went off inside the Hall, but don't worry; the police are investigating themselves. I'm sure they'll be very thorough and honest with their findings...

If you've been paying attention to protests in the past decade or so, you're probably not surprised by any of this. Protest, particularly leftist protest, is often met with armed police resistance at the behest of those in power. This protest, and the University's reaction to it, is a bit more notable. To understand why, we need to add some historical context.

Columbia University has a long relationship with student activism. These students were often on the right side of history: anti-Nazi protest during the Third Reich, divestment from private prisons in 2014, and pro-union strikes in 2021 to name a few. Columbia administrators' reactions to the demonstrations have been... mixed. Columbia did divest from private prisons in 2015 and the labor strikes led to better conditions for workers at Columbia. On the other hand, Columbia has still not done anything to rectify their actions in 1936, when they expelled class of '38 president Robert Burke for protesting the University's friendly relationship with Nazi Germany. Instead, they sent a representative, professor Arthur Remy, to a celebration in Germany led by Josef Goebbels. Remy said he had a good time.

Now we need to look at Hamilton Hall's place in the protests. Throughout the 1950s and '60s Columbia slowly pushed into Harlem, which neighbored the campus. This expansion displaced thousands of the largely Black and Puerto Rican residents. This came to a head when the University tried to build a segregated gymnasium on publicly-owned land in Harlem. Two student organizations: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Afro-Society (SAS) participated in a joint demonstration against the construction project. The protesters were pushed from locations on campus by University security to the construction site, where they were opposed by NYPD. They then made their way back to campus where they finally occupied Hamilton Hall, which contained University administrators' offices.

The two student groups eventually split due to differing objectives. The SAS, made up of African-American students, were focused on stopping the construction of the gym and the larger issue of racism on campus, while the SDS, which was mostly white, wanted to expand their protests to encompass the recently exposed relationship between Columbia and the military-industrial apparatus responsible for extending the Vietnam War. The SDS moved to the nearby Low Library, which allowed the Black demonstrators to clarify their messaging around Columbia's racism and leverage the public reaction to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination just a few weeks prior. The Black students renamed Hamilton Hall "Malcolm X Liberation College" during the occupation. The demonstration was forcefully ended by the University's President Grayson Kirk when he called the NYPD to expel the students from both buildings. In the end, 132 students, 4 faculty members, and 12 cops were injured, and over 700 protestors were arrested. Columbia's actions against the protestors led to financial issues and a drop in enrollment for decades, but sparked a wave of similar protests across the country.

The next major occupation of Hamilton Hall was in the 1980s. Columbia was financially invested in South Africa, which had been under apartheid since 1948. Students, faculty, and staff had repeatedly called for the University to divest from South Africa. Their requests were, of course, ignored. In 1985, almost 2,000 students occupied the area outside Hamilton Hall and some ultimately pushed into the building itself. The demonstration lasted a few weeks, during which the students renamed the hall "Mandela Hall" in the tradition of the Civil Rights protests of '68. Unlike in '68, University President Michael Sovern did not call the cops on the protestors. Sovern instead treated the students as what they were: informed, peaceful activists. While the occupation didn't end with a guarantee of change, later that year Columbia became one of the first American universities to fully divest from South Africa.

Shafik clearly did not learn the same lesson that Sovern did. As we have seen in the past, police never deescalate situations they're involved in, especially when they're armed with riot gear and have the backing of the rich and powerful. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you're a canister of tear gas, a singing college student looks like a domestic terrorist. And when you're an Israeli precision-guided missile, a marked World Central Kitchen truck looks like Hamas, apparently.

Hopefully this history explains why there's so much attention on the protests at Columbia and why occupation protests in particular are used. Protest is messy, disruptive, and yes, sometimes violent. But it's also effective. Just about every major change in public policy in US history was spurred on by collective action. These students deserve our support; they're trying to make the world a better place.