Columbia Chose Violence
The violent escalation with student protestors was not inevitable. Other colleges chose a better way.
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“I will not risk open war,” Theoden declares in The Two Towers.
“Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not,” Aragorn fires back.
This exchange, handled so memorably by the late, great Bernard Hill, does not appear in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. But it’s become pretty popular among a certain type of armchair general. You see it memed online in the exceptionally rare cases where an American politician expresses some skepticism about sending in the troops. “These losers don’t want to risk war?” social media warriors snort. “Well, open war is upon them, whether they’d risk it or not.” This is asserted definitively, no receipts required.
This was the attitude of Columbia’s administrative “leadership” (I use the term loosely), who called in New York’s Finest to rid them of their own students not once, but twice. The students made demands, Columbia President Nemat Shafik took that as a declaration of war, and she responded in kind. She chose violence.
“This drastic escalation of many months of protest activity pushed the University to the brink, creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level,” Shafik wrote last week, addressing her decision to call the cops. “I know I speak for many members of our community in saying that this turn of events has filled me with deep sadness. I am sorry we reached this point.”
It’s hard to miss the passive voice here — the sense of being carried along by a wave of violence over which she had no say or control. A point has been reached that filled many members of the community with deep sadness because the university had been pushed by a disruptive environment. They had no choice. Open war was upon them.
This weatherman’s objectivity buries the extremely obvious reality that calling the police was a choice. It was one option among many. Shafik wanted to avoid disrupting on her campus, and she chose to do that by causing it: having students arrested, beaten and locked up. This seemed to grant permission to some 50 other universities, who followed Columbia’s lead in summoning cops to teach their students a thing or two about the exact parameters of free speech in this country.
It’s striking to note that not only were other options available, but that other colleges across the country actually chose these options. Ever heard of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington? They didn’t make any headlines this week, because administrators chose to negotiate with students and agreed to divest from companies profiting off illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Administrators at Brown and Northwestern didn’t immediately acquiesce to student protest demands, but did agree to hold votes about divestment at board meetings later this year. Student protestors at these colleges found this compromise agreeable and cleared their encampments, displaying a flexibility and openness to dialog you wouldn’t know college students were capable of if you only knew about them from New York Times pundits. The result was not just peace, but a better world. Not a lot better. But one in which at least a few less dollars are flowing towards enabling a humanitarian crisis. That was one of the options available. Those college administrators chose it.
But Columbia chose violence. They chose to treat protestors like entitled brats (at best) and antisemitic agitators (at worst), and called in police to escalate a tense situation into a tragic one.
This is the foreground here in the U.S. But it is, of course, just a footnote to what is currently happening in Rafah. “The closure of both the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings is especially damaging to an already dire humanitarian situation,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said on Tuesday. Bob Kitchen, the International Rescue Committee’s vice president for emergencies, said that “over a million civilians are now in imminent danger and aid flow through the Rafah crossing has halted with no aid trucks entering since May 5.”
This is an apparent invasion of Rafah, a move Biden had previously claimed would be his “red line” for Netanyahu, who has been ignoring red lines for his entire political career, up to and including his response to the October terrorist attacks. It is, of course, the exact thing these students have been trying to stop. But here again, the people in power chose violence. It is the default choice. The only choice so many of us know how to make.
I’ve been reading Marilynne Robinson’s excellent Reading Genesis. She notes that after Cain killed Abel, he despaired because he knew his life was forfeit. “I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me,” he says, knowing that murder was a capital offense even in those early, wild days.
“Not so,” says God. God then marks Cain in such a way that signals divine protection. Culturally, this “mark” tends to be thought of as something dark: the sign of the first murder. But Robinson notes that the text itself rejects this reading. This mark was a sign of grace. It was a sign of God choosing mercy instead of violence, even though violence was an entirely reasonable response to Cain’s actions. Cain went on to live a long life with his family, and he raised a good son, Enoch, who famously “walked faithfully with God.” Whatever the Mark of Cain looked like, it served Cain wonderfully. “For all we know,” Robinson writes “it could have been beautiful.”
So much is possible when we do not choose violence. So much is possible when we choose something different. And while open war may come upon us here and there, open war is often the result of the violence we chose along the way.