It’s impossible to know for certain what behind-the-scenes pressures and cross-pressures buffeted Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, Columbia’s president, between her testimony at last month’s congressional hearing and her authorization, almost immediately afterward, of a police action on campus to clear student encampments. (As everyone knows by now, that crackdown only escalated tensions, as have similar crackdowns across the country.) Before the hearing, a policy of wise forbearance appeared to be in place. After it, as if at the direction of the state, tolerance was supplanted by punitive police intervention. Not that it helped her with Congress: Elise Stefanik called for Shafik to resign anyway.
Why did so many campus leaders suddenly decide they had to clear — right away! — the tent cities? Why didn’t they predict that such actions would inflame protesters further and multiply the troubles they were meant to solve? In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper quotes “an experienced senior administrator at a major research university”: “When I saw what Columbia was doing, my immediate thought was: They have not thought about Day 2. If you confront an 18-year-old activist, they don’t back down. They double down.”
To some left critics, the crackdown is primarily ideological, an expression by college administrations of their intolerance for protest on the issue of Israel and Palestine specifically. Another explanation points the finger at donor pressure. A third credits the administrations with genuine worries over campus safety. I can only imagine that presidents and other upper administrators had gamed out worst-case scenarios involving violent outside agitators or vigilantes — scenarios that, in a country as armed to the gills as ours is, would leave enough hypothetical blood on the quad to panic anyone. Measuring the plausibility of those catastrophes against a Kent State massacre redux must have poisoned the sleep of many a provost and president.
Then there’s the perceived risk of vulnerability to antidiscrimination law, as Congress launches probe after probe into supposed antisemitism on campus. Could anxiety about those investigations have triggered Shafik’s initial decision to clear the encampments? Were college leaders over-complying with what they took to be the demands of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says that “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance”? (Since 2004, religion has also been understood, by and large, as a protected category under Title VI.)
