-- By Tom Phillips
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| Photo: NY Daily News |
We all know the expression “an elephant in the room.” It means a subject everyone is afraid to talk about, but which is too big and important to go away. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side today, a herd of elephants is in the room, and on each of their their enormous sides, in dripping red, four letters are inscribed. GAZA.
Student protesters were camped on a campus lawn again over the weekend, after taking over a big tent set up for Columbia University's Alumni Reunion.
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| The People's Graduation: Cathedral of St. John the Divine |
Hundreds of students, faculty, parents and guests gathered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on May 16 for a "People’s Graduation,"after Columbia University cancelled its on-campus commencement. They heard 93-year-old Reverend Herbert Daughtry urge young people to commit their lives to a great cause, and expect to sacrifice for it. Offering prayers along with Jewish and Muslim clergy, Daughtry quoted Dr, Martin Luther King Jr. ---"if you haven't found a cause for which to die, you haven't found a cause for which to live." Daughtry added, “they will call you names, but the idea of freedom cannot be destroyed.”
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| Rev Herbert Daughtry Sr. |
The Cathedral made its sanctuary available to all — including students who had been arrested, suspended, and evicted for protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. Some came to continue their protest, others just to experience something like a college graduation. The mood was celebratory. Cathedral Dean Patrick Malloy greeted the gathering, saying the church wanted to welcome a full range of people and opinions. A parade of speakers then lambasted the university for misrepresenting and punishing the protesters — and praised the students for starting a movement that spread around the world.
Lacking the power to hand out degrees or diplomas, the ceremony ended with a song, adapted from the biblical Book of Ruth:
“Where you go I will go
my friend,
Where you go I will go ---
your people are my people
your people are mine
Your people are my people
our struggles align.”
Copyright 2024 by Tom Phillips
Last night’s bust at Columbia University was the police equivalent of the Powell Doctrine in war —The application of massive or overwhelming force to disarm and incapacitate the enemy with as few casualties as possible. It worked. No one was hurt as a massive force of police surrounded and then invaded the campus to clear about a hundred remaining protesters from Hamilton Hall and the encampment on the south lawn. Here's how it looked on Broadway.
My wife, a 71-year-old retired Presbyterian minister, and I, an 82-year-old retired journalist, were among the witnesses —searching, in our separate wonted ways, for the moral high ground. In the end, the cops stood on it, by default.
Hamas blew it by its inhuman tactics against Israeli civilians. Israel blew it by its excessive force and disregard of civilian casualties in Gaza. Columbia blew it by caving in to political pressure, and refusing to respect what started out as a peaceful protest. The US blew it by mindlessly pouring arms into another unwinnable war. Biden and Blinken are blowing it daily by allowing themselves to be blown off by Bibi Netanyahu.
The students blew it by allowing the protest to be derailed by the usual suspects — agents provocateurs, and fringe political groups pushing violence and hate. We saw it last night, standing by the police barricades. The usual call and response chants were going on —and the students, like sheep, followed whatever calls were loudest. A couple of middle-aged guys showed up on Amsterdam Avenue, one with a bullhorn, and from the rear of the crowd they took the lead intermittently with chants like “NYPD, Piggy, Piggy, we will make your lives shitty” and “NYPD, KKK, we know you’re Israeli-trained.” I asked the one guy where he got his bullhorn. "Amazon," he said. I asked the other who he represented, and he said “the people.”
The chants, of course, were all recorded, and will be used as evidence that the protesters were “spewing hatred” and deserve to be expelled. I can attest from my own and others’ eyewitness reporting, that the core of the student protest was moral outrage over US and university support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. But Fox News has half of America’s viewing public, and it is now having a ball vilifying and ridiculing the protesters. In his prime-time stew of news and right-wing views, Jesse Watters last night called it the “Arab Spring Break,” led by the “Columbia Caliphate” AKA the "Keffiyeh Antifa" in their “terror tepees.” The protesters are “Pro-Hamas” and “Hamas is Iran.” Their Columbia professors are “indoctrinators.” Meanwhile the hero of the nation is detained at a “show trial” downtown, designed to prevent him from going out among the people.
Right now at Columbia, the cops are playing the role of grownups. Shoulder to shoulder at the barricades last night, they were in defensive mode, confident in their overwhelming numbers, with face shields and bullet-proof vests, but only lightly armed, A friendly sergeant at the corner turned away everyone who wanted to cross the barricades, even students with Columbia IDs, and an old lady who said she wanted to go home. It’s a hard freeze, he said. Nobody gets in. We’ll tell you when it’s over.
Their operation was meticulously planned and methodically carried out, with little if any resistance and no casualties. It was like the strategy General Colin Powell used to rout Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 in four days, with so few US losses that American medical units wound up treating the enemy’s wounded.
There’s more to to the Powell Doctrine, though, than overwhelming force. It’s a list of questions that have to be answered “yes” before undertaking a military operation. Is a vital national interest at stake? Do we have a clear attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
Did anyone, in Israel or the US, ask those questions about Gaza? And at home, has anyone asked if the Powell Doctrine is appropriate to use against college students?
By its own request, Columbia will be a police state through graduation. It’s a nanny police state, created by a university that treats its students like misbehaving middle-schoolers, not “men and women” supposedly educated to think and judge for themselves.
No disrespect to the police. But when they hold the moral high ground on an Ivy League campus, where do we turn for instruction?
Copyright 2024 by Tom Phillips
Columbia University’s Nanny Police State -- cracking down on some students in order to comfort others -- collapsed and died last week. The cause was contradictions.
When Columbia president Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to arrest more than 100 peaceful protesters because opponents said they felt "unsafe," it galvanized the university in support of the protest. The occupation mushroomed in size, doubled down on its demands, and spread to Yale, NYU and campuses across the country.
No violence or injuries have been reported, but Shafik said “students across an array of communities have conveyed fears for their safety“ amid “too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior.” Meanwhile Shafik is being harassed and intimidated by members of Congress demanding a crackdown on campus protests. Behind it all: Big-money donors to politicians and schools.
Students, faculty and staff are protesting US and university support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. As of Monday their demands were for Columbia to divest from companies with ties to Israel, bar police from campus, grant amnesty to all protesters, and end seizures of land and displacement of people, “whether in Harlem, Lenapehoking or Palestine.”
Just a walk through or past the occupied lawn would let anyone know there is little to fear. It’s a different demo from 1968, when Vietnam war protests were led by fiery activists like Mark Rudd and Stokely Carmichael. This occupation is mostly female and/or non-binary, and organized co-operatively, with no hierarchy of leaders. This afternoon, in the area set aside for press interviews, all the media-trained representatives were women and most were women of color. Many were from Barnard, the Columbia women’s college which has suspended and evicted students for protesting. I interviewed a Barnard student, a third-year Psychology major, of Asian ancestry. She called Palestine a “compass” — pointing the way for all kinds of intersecting liberation movements, including feminism. The struggle, she said, is against the “violence of the patriarchy.”
Monday night, as observant Jews marked Passover in homes and dorms. about 100 students and faculty gathered on the occupied lawn for an improvised seder. Earlier I asked a group of Jewish students gathered in front of their tent if they’d seen any evidence of anti-Semitism among their fellow student protesters. They all said no.
Meanwhile, the protests were spilling over into the street outside Columbia’s gates at 115th and Broadway. Students with bullhorns inside the gates led supporters on the sidewalk in chants which inluded: “One two three four, Apartheid no more!” and “Genocide no more; “ And then — “five, six , seven, eight, Israel is a racist state.” A few feet away, separated by police barriers and cops in riot gear, a much smaller pro-Israel group called the protesters “terrorists” and “Hamas lovers,” and one woman yelled, “Go home! Go to Hell!” Police surrounded the entire campus and a police helicopter hovered noisily above.
Most of the nastiness is on the street, outside the closed campus. Recently I was walking up Broadway with a friend when a large young man wearing a Nazi-style helmet came careening down the sidewalk on a motorized scooter. As he veered past, we both heard him say “Sieg Heil!” Then there was a guy outside Columbia’s gates draped in Israeli colors, marching up and down before the pro-Palestinian crowd, with a sign advising them to behead their children.
So far, the only casualties have been the truth, twisted by both sides — the lawn, trampled by campers — and the public, which is indefinitely barred from the campus. I talked my way in as a member of the press.
The encampment covers one of Columbia’s many lawns. Across the path, workers were preparing another field for a graduation tent. Commencement comes in May, and protesters say they’ll stay put until Columbia divests. President Shafik is pleading for peace, dialogue and “respectful engagement.”
Columbia could re-arrange the seating and and let the students hold their ground. The students could agree not to disrupt the ceremonies. But can anyone hold their tongue?
Copyright 2024 by Tom Phillips
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| Kiyan Williams "Ruins of Empire" |
This is an abridged, adited version of an article originally published in Persuasions Online, Vol 44, No, 1, Winter 2023, titled "What the Coachman Said: Servants and Servanthood in Mansfield Park."
- By Tom Phillips
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| Jane Austen |
“‘It is a pleasure to see a lady with such a heart for riding! . . . I never see one sit a horse better’” Thus begins a singular speech in the Jane Austen canon, spoken by a serving-man, invoking fear and trembling, body and spirit. Addressed to Fanny Price early in Mansfield Park, it foreshadows a tale of upheaval in England, the British empire, and the world.
