Following up on my previous post, New York Times: 54 Columbia Law Faculty Condemn Administration For Disciplinary Action Against Anti-Israel Student Protesters: Washington Post Op-Ed: At Columbia, Excuse the Students, But Not the Faculty, by Paul Berman:
My own experience as a Columbia University student radical under arrest took place in late April 1968 in the course of a massive campus uprising. The uprising was led, or at least initiated, by a radical social-democratic organization called Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, together with the Student Afro-American Society, or SAS. And, since I was a stalwart of SDS, I spent a week camping out in the university president’s office and elsewhere, too, which I regarded as an exercise in insurrectionary citizenship. The authorities preferred to regard it as “criminal trespass.” …
The students want to take over the lawn? It would not be so terrible, if some of them did not insist on persecuting Jews. But I recoil at what are plainly the ends. … [I]t has to be acknowledged that ultimately the central issue in the war is Hamas and its goal, which has lately seemed more realistic than anyone among Israel’s friends has imagined in recent years. The goal is and has always been the eradication of the Israeli state. And the radical students at Columbia, even if not all of them, have shown that, at some level, if not at every level, they understand and embrace the goal. …
The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants. …
If I were the autocratic overlord of Columbia University, I would be generous, despite everything, to the student radicals, even if they horrify me. How could I be otherwise, considering that, more than a half-century ago, I myself was not without what might be called moments of excess? I would amnesty the whole lot of them, except for anyone who seems genuinely a menace.
But I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors — not just the handful who sound crazy, but the professors who sound reasonable. These are the professors who have created a disastrous climate of opinion at Columbia.
They are the professors who maintain that Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre could plausibly be regarded as (I quote a statement by well more than 100 Columbia professors, some of them very brilliant people, a mere three weeks after the massacre) “just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies.” Or the massacre could be regarded “as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.”
I would turn on those professors out of a belief that, at Columbia, appalling chants and occasional hints of violence from students on a tear are not ultimately the problem. Intellectual degeneration is the problem. Otherwise, the existential attacks on Jews, euphemistically advocated, would not be under discussion. I would turn in anger on the professors out of a belief, in short, that a university ought to be a place of resistance to the worst of ideas, and not a place of acquiescence.
That was my own lesson from 1968, hammered into me by thoughtful professors who remembered the 1930s, which I offer back to the Columbia administrators and the more levelheaded professors in 2024 exactly as I would if I myself were on the faculty right now, and I had run into bright and beloved students on the redbrick walks who had gone out of their minds, as students sometimes do.
