The Crackdown on Student Protesters The New York Times

Table Of Content

• Former Cipriani honchos took $3M in kickbacks during decade long scheme: lawsuit
• year-old girl allegedly mobbed by parents, beaten by student in caught-on-video altercation at NY high school
• Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music
• Columbia University is at the center of a growing showdown over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech.
• The Crackdown on Student Protesters
• Serafina at The Time Hotel
• TIMES SQUARE

So students who aren’t feeling safe in this protest environment don’t necessarily have to go to class. There’s a video that goes viral of one of them shouting at Jewish students, go back to Poland, go back to Europe. Nick, Isabella Ramírez just walked us through what this has all looked like from the perspective of a Columbia student. And from what she could tell, the crackdown ordered by President Shafik did not quell much of anything.

Former Cipriani honchos took $3M in kickbacks during decade long scheme: lawsuit

And now these schools only have a week or two left of classes. But we don’t know when these standoffs are going to end. We don’t know if students are going to leave campus for the summer.

year-old girl allegedly mobbed by parents, beaten by student in caught-on-video altercation at NY high school

It basically boils down to this, she had just gone before Congress and told them, I’m going to get tough on these protests. So either she gets tough and risks inflaming tension on campus or she holds back and does nothing and her words before Congress immediately look hollow. The Republican Chairwoman of the Committee, Virginia Foxx, starts reminding her that there was a student who was actually hit with a stick on campus. There was another gathering more recently glorifying Hamas and other terrorist organizations, and the kind of chants that have become an everyday chorus on campus, which many Jewish students see as threatening. But when the questioning starts, President Shafik is ready. One of the first ones she gets is the one that tripped up her colleagues.

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My phone blew up, obviously, from the reporters, from the editors, of saying, oh my god, the NYPD is on our campus. And I saw a huge crowd of students and affiliates on campus watching the lawns. And as I circled around that crowd, I saw the last end of the New York Police Department pulling away protesters and clearing out the last of the encampment. All eyes were going to be on Shafik in DC. The encampment is set up in the middle of the night slash morning, prior to the hearing. And so what effectively happens is they caught Shafik when she wasn’t on campus, when a lot of senior administration had their resources dedicated to supporting Shafik in DC.

Columbia University is at the center of a growing showdown over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech.

But there are also communities that rely on people being able to trust each other and being able to carry out their classes and their academic endeavors as a collective so they can learn from one another. So in this case, that’s all getting scrambled. And I think if we zoom out for a second, it’s worth bearing in mind that she tried to choose a different path here than her counterparts at Harvard or Penn. And after all of this, she’s kind of ended up in the exact same thicket, with people calling for her job with the White House, the Mayor of New York City, and others. Maybe not calling on her to resign quite yet, but saying, I don’t know what’s going on your campus.

And I think that timing was super crucial. Having the encampment happen on the Wednesday morning of the hearing was an incredible, in some senses, interesting strategy to direct eyes to different places. So these students in real-time are beginning to test some of the things that Columbia’s president has just said before Congress. And right off the bat, they’re put through a pretty humbling litany of some of the worst hits of what’s been happening on campus. And when this spring rolls around, the stars finally align. And the same congressional committee issues another invitation to Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s President, to come and testify.

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Columbia University has become the epicenter of a growing showdown between student protesters, college administrators and Congress over the war in Gaza and the limits of free speech. And from the administration’s perspective, they say, well, yeah, you can say that and you can think that. But maybe there’s some bad apples in your ranks. Or though you may have good intentions, you’re saying things that you don’t realize the implications of.

They were asked very pointed questions about the kind of speech taking place on their campuses, and they gave really convoluted academic answers back that just baffled the committee. But there was one question that really embodied the kind of disconnect between the Committee — And it wasn’t just Republicans, Republicans and Democrats on the Committee — and these college presidents. And that’s when they were asked a hypothetical.

And Columbia is watching all this play out. And I think their first response was relief that she was not in that chair, but also a recognition that, sooner or later, their turn was going to come back around and they were going to have to sit before Congress. So on one side of Broadway, you see camera crews. There’s barricades, steel barricades, caution tape. This is normally a completely open campus. And I’m able to — all members of the public, you’re able to walk through.

And this suspension was really the first time that it entered most students’ sphere. Eliminate the encampment and send a message, this is not going to be tolerated. But in trying to quell the unrest, Shafik actually feeds it. She ends up leaving student protesters and the faculty who support them feeling betrayed and pushes a campus that was already on edge into a full blown crisis. And it’s a university on top of all that that has a real history of activism dating back to the 1960s. So when students are recruited or choose to come to Columbia, they’re actively opting into a campus that prides itself on being an activist community.

Something is not connecting with those two points of view. And as if that’s not hard enough, you then have Congress and the political system with its own agenda coming in and putting its thumb on a scale of an already very difficult situation. Well, I don’t think it’s just limited to college campuses. We have seen intense feelings about this conflict play out in Hollywood. We’ve seen them in our politics in all kinds of interesting ways.