Mid-morning on the first day of classes at Columbia University, the grounds department got the call. “Alma Mater,” the famous sculpture of a woman wreathed in laurel that sits in front of Lowe Library, had been splattered with red paint, presumably by a protester who objects to the university’s refusal to divest from Israel. The paint dripped down “Alma Mater” ’s forehead to the tip of her nose, onto the marble platform upon which she rests—which, as one grounds worker noted, is hard to clean. “We did the best we can on the floor,” he told me. “We used hot water with a power wash.” Students stood around watching as they worked. “It made me feel unsafe,” the grounds worker said. He was worried that they’d think, “ ‘These guys are cleaning something that we did’ ”—and that the workers would be blamed for erasing their act of dissent.
New school year, same problems. Three weeks before classes started, Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, resigned her post and left academia altogether. On her way out, she visited the well-travelled stations of doomed university presidents: testifying before Congress, insisting that Columbia protects students from antisemitism; calling the cops on protesters who refused to vacate their tent encampment on the lawn in the heart of campus; facing a vote of no confidence from a group of faculty, who accused her of an “unprecedented assault on students’ rights.” An interim president, Katrina Armstrong, the head of the school’s medical campus, has been installed. But she faces the same intractable question: what can a university do about student protesters who believe, correctly, that violating school rules is the best way to bring attention to their cause?
While media coverage of campus demonstrations tends to focus on the top ranks of universities, the effects of the protests tend to be most keenly felt by lower-level workers. That’s what happened this spring, when a group of about fifty protesters barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall, one of Columbia’s academic buildings. Four workers—three janitors and a public-safety officer—were inside when the takeover started, and they had to “fight their way out,” according to the president of the Transport Union Workers local, Alex Molina, who also works as an electrician on campus. “After the building was taken back, there was a group that didn’t want to return to work,” Molina told me. But “they didn’t have a choice. We have to feed our families.” He said that union members are feeling uneasy going into the new school year. The union has asked for a written safety protocol, along with indemnification from legal liability if workers feel they have to defend themselves. But “nothing has ever been put out from the university,” Molina said. “We’re not getting anything to assure us that we’re safe.” (A university spokesperson said that Columbia is committed to the safety of all its employees and is working with the union to address their concerns.)
For months now, Columbia’s main campus, in Morningside Heights, has been effectively locked down, open only to those with I.D.s and their guests. An army of security guards enforce this policy, some of them employed by Columbia, others part of private-security firms that the university has maintained in recent months. Workers told me that, at times, they’ve felt like students see them as the enemy, perhaps because they conflate uniformed guards with police. In the spring, protesters would often scream that “we’re a part of the problem, we’re a part of the genocide,” one longtime security officer told me. On the first day of classes this week, a group of protesters gathered outside the gates at 116th and Broadway, blocking students from coming onto campus. “We’re the ones getting the brunt of the attitude and the anger and frustration,” the officer said. “Without us, this place doesn’t really run.”
Columbia inevitably attracts disproportionate attention for its version of the protests that have unfolded at universities nationwide. The school is in the middle of a city, where outsiders can easily join in, and it’s a quick trip uptown for reporters. But Sian Beilock, the former president of Barnard, Columbia’s sister school, who now serves as president of Dartmouth College, suggested that the protests have got most out of control on campuses without strong communal norms. “How do you make the students who are engaged in dialogue the heroes, rather than the ones protesting? That doesn’t come by presidential decree,” she told me. “It comes from a culture, through the students.”
Creating this kind of student culture is a hard task, though, particularly when a university hasn’t brought students on board with its vision of what “dialogue” should look like. Peter Bearman, a sociology professor at Columbia who helped organize the faculty vote against Shafik, said that, this spring, “I felt there were real opportunities for Columbia to lead the way to turn student engagement and interest in the world into a meaningful pedagogical activity.” And yet, he said, “That was not the response. It was to call the police on the campus and break up the encampment.” The N.Y.P.D. initially arrested forty students, with another two kept on interim suspension.
Like Shafik, Beilock also made the decision to summon police to break up a protest encampment at her school, last spring, leading to eighty-nine arrests and a censure vote from a group of faculty. (Beilock defended her decision as a matter of student safety, and said she was pleased that the students who are being prosecuted are only facing charges akin to “a parking ticket.”) This past year, university presidents “were placed in situations where we had to make impossible decisions,” Beilock said. “You’re never going to make everyone happy in the decisions you make. The way that I deal with that is by making decisions by principles.” Everyone should feel welcome, she said. No one’s education should be disrupted. Opposing points of view should be aired, and faculty should model that kind of discussion. Dartmouth’s campus may be just as divided as Columbia’s—but at least so far, Beilock has kept her job, and no one has tried to take over a building.
After Hamilton Hall was occupied this spring, John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, which represents Columbia’s staff, along with tens of thousands of workers for New York City’s subways and buses and commuter trains, made a plan for what to do if something like that were to happen again. “We’re not going to let a bunch of freaking trust-fund babies hold our members against their will at Columbia,” he told me. “We’re going to go get track workers with sledgehammers and track wrenches and we’re going to go get them. That’s our plan.” (Another union representative, Shannon Poland, who leads the T.W.U.’s security team, clarified that track wrenches are like regular wrenches, “just supersized.” With “the size and the girth of the men that’s coming,” he added, “the protesters would part like the Red Sea.”)
Samuelsen has sympathy for the impossible dilemma facing university presidents, who are accountable to students, professors, and alumni with vastly different world views. “The presidents are caught in the middle, like a piñata,” he said. “I wouldn’t want that job. It’s untenable.” But the situation long ago spun out of administrators’ control. Just a few days into the semester, more protesters have already been arrested. Molina told me, “I have a feeling this is just the beginning of things that will happen this school year.” ♦
