I have taught at Columbia University for the better part of 25 years. Last Wednesday, I held office hours, as I do every week. I met with students and we talked about their classes, their essays on Shakespeare and Milton, their progress toward their respective degrees, and their feelings about graduation.

We also spoke about their reactions to Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s recent Congressional testimony and her decision to authorize New York City police to break up the “Gaza Solidary Encampment” on campus, along with their views on the protests.

In each conversation, I was impressed with their thoughtfulness, intelligence and compassion – and with their skills as evaluators of others’ use of language. They are English majors, so they should have good close reading skills. But they took the time to evaluate the statements of others, in context, from multiple perspectives.

In some ways, Columbia students are getting two world-class educations right now: one in their classes, and another on a campus that has become a center of cultural and political forces we will spend years parsing.

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Everything changed on campus after our president authorized police to sweep the encampment, resulting in dozens of students being arrested. It was done without appropriate consultation with faculty and the university senate. There was no “clear and present danger,” as the administration claimed.

Columbia faculty are, for the most part, longform thinkers, researchers, experimenters and writers, considerers of evidence and engagers in dialogue, experimentation and peer review. We are not good at sound bites – or at least I am not. I am not interested in social media as a platform for speech or dialogue. But I am passionately interested in the university as a place for teaching, research and debate.

The president’s action not only degraded the mission of a great university as such a place, but it subjected our students and every single member of this community to an unnecessary escalation of turmoil both inside and outside our gates.

Many students were outraged. Many faculty were outraged. And the full media circus, along with dozens of extremists of all kinds, arrived at our gates. 

Much of our time now – the time of biologists and language teachers, of immunologists and anthropologists, teachers of literature and computer science and art – is going into handling the fallout from this grossly mismanaged crisis. It is not a good use of our time.

In some ways, Columbia is still working as it should. Students are protesting a brutal war, including in tents on a lawn, they are going to classes and to the library, writing essays, putting on the Varsity Show, and reporting, at a very high level, on the events unfolding for campus publications WKCR, BWOG and The Columbia Spectator.

Students are learning, very imperfectly, about the history of the Middle East, the history of protests on Columbia’s campus and elsewhere, and about the rights of protestors and the rights of other students.

They are also learning, again imperfectly, about the differences between their perceptions of what is happening on campus and the perceptions of others on that same campus at the same time, and about the difference between suspending a student for hate speech or harassment, and suspending them for participating in a protest.

They are learning about the power and opportunism of some members of the U.S. Congress, and about the consequences of bad decisions on the part of their university’s administration.

Our students also belatedly learned that administrators might learn from their mistakes after Columbia’s president, provost and trustee chairs took a step back Friday night, writing in a letter to the entire Columbia community that calling the police back to clear the encampment a second time “would be counterproductive, further inflaming what is happening on campus, and drawing thousands to our doorstep who would threaten our community.”

On Monday, they discovered that talks with administrators and student organizers have failed to reach an agreement.

The pressures working against nuanced dialogue across vast differences and experiences are enormous. Yet, we must restart those conversations. There are established places on campus for that work to take place: in classrooms, in representative student governing bodies, in representative faculty governing bodies, in conversations among students, faculty and administration, and in the university senate – the shared governing structure for the university.

More than 550 people came to the last open senate meeting on Friday. After much debate, the majority of senators voted on a resolution demanding that Columbia address reports of administrative actions jeopardizing academic freedom and breaching privacy and due process of students and faculty, along with violating shared governance principles. 

They proposed establishing a senate task force to present findings and recommendations for further senate action. The senate is contentious and baggy, but it, along with Columbia’s rules of conduct, were put in place 50 years ago to ensure that major university decisions be made representatively rather than by fiat.

They worked for 50 years. It’s time to bring them back.

Julie Crawford is the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Editor’s note: The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Columbia University’s Teachers College.

This opinion piece about campus protests was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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