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 

 

Viral Spring #17: White Bodies Up Front!

Brooklyn,  6/4/2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Something turned in me over the span of a day last week, maybe because something is turning for America.  

On Thursday morning I opened the New York Times to the most gut-wrenching piece of arts criticism I've ever read. Wesley Morris, a young black man who is the paper's critic-at-large, wrote of  a song that came up on the radio and left him weeping at his kitchen sink. The 1985 song by Patti Labelle is about the end of a long, bad relationship.  If you don't know me by now, she wails, you'll never know me.

Morris's composure broke not over a failed romance but the police murder of George Floyd, and Morris's own feeling that another relationship is ending -- that if we whites still don't get it, after all these years, we never will.  

Here's what he heard in Patti Labelle's lament:    

I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never …

I finished the article shaken.  If black people give up on us -- who were raised to think of them in just these ways, who struggle daily to beat back our pre-conscious ideas, whose very perceptions are still twisted by a racist culture -- what is next?  Is there any hope?