The Theatre of Life: Jill Johnston

 

Jill Johnston, c. 1970    

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Edited by Clare Croft

Duke University Press, 2024

Everyone knows that post-modern dance began at Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s, but few people today remember what actually happened there. Luckily, the Village Voice was on the story, 

and sent its most daring critic to cover it. Jill Johnston’s columns of the 1960s and 70s have now been collected in a book, an invaluable chronicle of dance in the context of a social/sexual/political sea change.   

Columbia 2025: The Students' Turn to Roar

-- By Tom Phillips 

B'way and 114th  

Students held the upper hand yesterday in the first big protest of the school year at Columbia.   Acting president Claire Shipman was forced to call the NYPD to clear a pro-Palestinian occupation of Butler Library, and at least two people were carried out on stretchers among 75 arrested.  Hundreds of students then staged angry protests at both ends of 114th Street, cursing the officers who pushed them off the blocked streets and onto the sidewalk.  Students on Amsterdam then made an end run down to 111th Street, turned right,  and marched up the middle of Broadway with exhausted police bringing up the rear.  

The scene was in sharp contrast to last year's bust at Hamilton Hall, carried out by an army of cops who blocked off the entire campus, clambered into Hamilton as if it were a medieval fortress under siege, and then occupied the university for the rest of the academic year.   

This year, things are different.  

• Shipman makes no sense when she claims that non-Columbia people were among the occupiers of Butler Library: there's no way anyone gets onto the locked-down campus without a Columbia ID.  The chief security guard at 116th Street last night described Shipman's claim as "false information."  
• The students clearly hold the moral high ground, alongside Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as they contend with illegal detentions by an increasingly unpopular Trump regime.  
• Columbia's crackdown on faculty and student speech looks cowardly in the light of Harvard's stand against government intrusion,   
• Israel's war crimes in Gaza justify the protests, and expose the Republican campaign against campus antisemitism as exactly what  Claire Shipman originally called it: "Capitol Hill nonsense."  

Shipman is out of options. With students on their high horse, another police occupation would be a bloodbath.  It's too late to join Harvard's resistance.   All she has left are lies --- the protesters aren't Columbians, the problem is antisemitism, ICE is nice, etc.  As a former TV journalist who believes none of this nonsense, elected to make the medieval trustees look modern, Shipman's best course is to resign before they axe her.  And then? 

Listen up, Columbia, here is an idea that could save you: 

Let the University Senate choose the next President.  Let it be a president with academic stature,  committed to academic freedom.  Give the University back to its rightful stewards: faculty, staff, and students.  Roar, Lions, Roar.  

 

Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips