Competing pressures of activism, order test US colleges

When Minouche Shafik was appointed as the 20th president of Columbia University last July, she was asked to describe her leadership style. The Egyptian-born, U.S.-educated economist told the school’s alumni magazine that she wouldn’t be seeking the spotlight. 

“I subscribe to Nelson Mandela’s philosophy that you should lead from behind when you can, and as part of the team as often as possible,” Dr. Shafik said. 

After 10 days of tumult at Columbia, that is no longer an option for a university president who’s being assailed from all sides – students, faculty, and even politicians – for her handling of a spiraling crisis that has now spread to colleges and universities across the country. Months of protests over the Israel-Palestinian conflict reached a crescendo after Columbia cracked down last week on a pro-Palestinian student encampment on its quad, arresting some 100 protesters one day after Dr. Shafik testified before a U.S. House committee investigating antisemitism on campus.

Since then, the Columbia encampment has only sprung back, while others have sprung up in solidarity on campuses from Emory in Atlanta to the University of Texas at Austin, from Harvard to George Washington University. In recent days, various school administrators have called in police to arrest demonstrators for violating policies against camping on school grounds and posing a threat to public safety. Some have been forced to create virtual options for the final weeks of classes or relocate exam classrooms. 

The situation has created an extraordinarily difficult balancing act for university leaders, who are trying to thread a needle between encouraging free speech and academic freedom, and cracking down on antisemitism and making sure Jewish students feel safe on campus. With just weeks to go before graduation, administrators are also scrambling to restore a general sense of order for their communities, including the many students not involved in the controversy. 

Perhaps no one is in a more perilous position right now than Columbia's president, as the university senate voted to call for an investigation into campus leadership Friday, while she also was negotiating with protest leaders over a Friday night deadline to dismantle their tents. Many are watching to see whether she can placate Columbia’s circling critics on both the left and right. On Wednesday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson visited the campus and said the president should go unless she could immediately “bring order to this chaos,” amid jeers from onlookers. 

“I’ve never seen this much pressure from outside on college campuses and college presidents,” says Brian Rosenberg, a former president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. “The last time we saw anything like this was probably the late ’60s.” 

Colleges have welcomed student activism

Some critics say these elite institutions are reaping what they themselves have sown. At highly selective schools like Columbia, where fewer than 4% of applicants are admitted, social justice and activism have been increasingly valorized in recent years, with prospective students encouraged to demonstrate a commitment to causes greater than themselves. Now these same institutions that have encouraged their students to seek change are trying to rein in protesters who say they are simply putting those ideals into action. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean all students are inclined toward activism. For many simply trying to finish up their term or graduate and plan their next step, the protests and counterprotests have been mostly a distraction. 

“It’s definitely more tense,” says Cole Donovan, a Columbia graduate student in education and philosophy, describing the situation in recent days. “We live on campus and so we could hear the helicopters, [which were] quite loud.” Speaking on Wednesday, Mr. Donovan, whose curly red hair was tucked under a baseball cap, seemed unfazed by the swarm of media around the pro-Palestinian encampment.

At the protest camp, a student in shorts and a dark-green T-shirt rifled through reusable grocery bags full of donated food and other supplies. When a passerby offered to donate more, he waved him off. “We’re good here. Try NYU or the New School,” he said. 

Away from the encampment, a small group of pro-Israel students had taped up pictures of Oct. 7 hostages, an Israeli flag, and a “Bring them home” flag. A man facing the hostage photos began praying, his head bobbing up and down. Columbia has about 5,000 Jewish students and has a joint degree program with Tel Aviv University. 

Commencement for undergraduates is scheduled for May 15. Dr. Shafik has said she wants Columbia students whose high school graduations were disrupted by the pandemic to experience a full ceremony.

But universities across the country are now bracing for protesters to disrupt the occasion. On Thursday, the University of Southern California canceled its main commencement ceremony after arrests of pro-Palestinian students at its campus the previous night. Last week, the university drew criticism when it canceled a speech by its valedictorian, a Muslim student who has expressed support for the Palestinian cause, citing safety concerns. 

Columbia’s end of term was likely always going to be bumpy, given the roiling protests over the war in Gaza. But recent events have made normalcy seem even more tenuous. 

A timeline of tension at Columbia

In her April 17 testimony to a Republican-led House committee, Dr. Shafik seemed determined not to fall into the rhetorical traps set for other university presidents during a similar hearing in December. At that hearing, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, one of three presidents called to testify about antisemitism on campuses, had equivocated when asked if calling for genocide against Jews was protected speech. Four days later, under pressure from donors and lawmakers, she resigned. Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, later went too. 

By contrast, Dr. Shafik more forcefully condemned antisemitic speech on campus and revealed details of internal investigations into professors at Columbia accused of expressing support for Hamas. The armed group carried out the Oct. 7 attack in Israel that killed some 1,300 people and took hundreds of hostages. That attack led Israel to invade Gaza, where the local health ministry says over 34,000 people, mostly women and children, have since died. 

Student protesters at Columbia have been calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and for the university to divest from companies that do business in Israel. While the protests have been nonviolent, some participants have made verbal threats toward Jews and voiced support for Hamas. On Friday, one of the Columbia protest leaders issued an apology after statements he had posted on social media came to light in which he said Zionists “don’t deserve to live.”  

“Antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly,” Dr. Shafik told members of Congress. 

The day after her Capitol Hill visit, Columbia asked the New York Police Department to dismantle a “Gaza solidarity encampment” that students had assembled on its main lawn in defiance of university policy. Over 100 students were arrested and later suspended by Columbia and Barnard, its sister college, though Barnard has since offered to revoke some of its suspensions. 

Over the weekend, the situation escalated as pro-Palestinian protesters faced off against pro-Israel protesters, on and off campus, before Columbia closed its gates to the public and classes went hybrid. Over 100 faculty members walked out Monday to protest the police action and call on Columbia and Barnard to lift all student suspensions. 

Instead of restoring order on campus and deflecting critics in Congress, Dr. Shafik has managed to alienate almost every constituency, says Professor Rosenberg, the former Macalester president who now teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “I understand how hard the job is, but I think this was a case of very bad judgment.”

Protests now versus the 1960s

In her April 18 request to the NYPD, Dr. Shafik wrote that the encampment posed “a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University” and raised safety concerns for the community. It was the first time Columbia had summoned law enforcement since 1968. That year, amid sweeping national protests against the Vietnam War, nearly a thousand Columbia students were arrested after they occupied five buildings, took a dean hostage, and shut down the campus for a week.  

Columbia isn’t facing a crisis on that scale now, and its leaders ought to have shown more restraint, says Robert Cohen, a historian at New York University and scholar of campus activism, who expresses dismay at the arrests of students. The pressures “on these administrations have made them much more willing to suppress dissent even when it’s not disruptive,” he says. “It’s a terrible precedent for violating free speech and academic freedom on campus.”

It’s also counterproductive, says Bettina Aptheker, a retired professor who co-led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, which set the stage for the student activism of the period. “When you repress them, you guarantee that more students are going to come out,” she says. 

Steven Bahls became the president of Augustana College, a private liberal arts college in Rock Island, Illinois, in 2003. At that time, campus activism was mostly a nonissue; students seemed far more focused on getting jobs. But that changed over his 19-year tenure, he says, as subsequent generations began increasingly to flex their activist muscles and make demands of administrators. 

That created new challenges over how to draw a line on free speech. “Sometimes free speech hurts,” says Mr. Bahls, a legal scholar. But colleges also have to ensure that speech doesn’t become harassment. “That’s the problem that presidents have. These two values clash, and there are no easy answers,” he says. 

How social media changes protests

The current political climate, and the rise of social media, have exacerbated the problem, say analysts, as student activists today seem less willing to compromise, concede, or hear opposing viewpoints. Instead, they often seek to be the loudest voices on campus, with the goal of sparking viral moments. Add in zero-sum Israeli-Palestinian politics and a bloody war in Gaza, and the pressure has only grown on college presidents. 

“Colleges have encouraged their students to think about changing the world. What they’ve not done a particularly good job of is preparing students to deal with viewpoints that are different from their own. And that is also part of what we’re seeing right now: an inability to engage in hard conversations,” says Professor Rosenberg. 

NYU’s Professor Cohen says the crackdown at Columbia has already had one direct effect on him: Enrollment in his fall undergraduate class on student activism in the 1960s has spiked. 

On Wednesday, Akua, a student from Africa who asked to go by first name only out of concern for privacy, was enjoying the spring sunshine on Columbia’s campus near the Israeli protest site. “My friends all the way around the world are telling me how lucky I am to be here, how inspired they are by the grassroots [protests],” she says. She adds, “Columbia recruits some of the most brilliant and driven students from around the world and then is shocked when they take action.”