56 years ago, I was a young associate professor in the Columbia philosophy department, on leave for the year to teach at Rutgers University, but still living half a block from the Columbia campus on 115th St. between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. My wife and I had just had our first child, Patrick, who was about two months old when things blew up on the campus. It is not an important part of the story, but it is worth noting just for the sake of keeping the history correct, that there were actually two student protests that spring. The first was carried out by a group of white students associated with SDS, who occupied the administration building to protest Columbia’s involvement in war work supporting the Vietnam war. The second was carried out by a group of black students who occupied Hamilton Hall to protest Columbia’s announced intention to build a new gymnasium and Morningside Park, which the residents of Harlem considered part of their world. The new gymnasium, needless to say, would be open only to Columbia students, not to residents of Harlem.
And here we are again. In 1968, the Columbia University
administration, headed by Grayson Kirk, handled the whole matter very badly, with
the result that David Truman, a distinguished political scientist who was
widely thought to be the next president of Columbia, was forced to complete his
career as the president of Mount Holyoke College instead.
How might the current president of Columbia have handled the
matter better? The answer seems to me to be obvious, but for reasons which are
equally obvious I am sure it never so much as occurred to her. As soon as the
first evidence of student concern about the disaster in Gaza popped up, she
should have called in the managers of the Columbia endowment and told them to
sell all the shares in companies in any way involved with Israel’s attack on
Gaza. I gather the Boeing Corporation makes bombs that the United States has
been delivering to Israel and that Israel has been dropping on the Palestinians.
I am sure there are other holdings in the endowment that are suspect in the
same way. There are undoubtedly also ways in which the University is involved
with Israel, and they should have been put on hold by the president. Then she
should have asked for a meeting with all of the students, of any faith, and
whatever their position on the current situation in the occupied territories.
She should have told them that the official position of the University was that
there should be an immediate cease-fire, a commitment by all parties to a two
state solution, massive aid to the people of Gaza, and a demand that the US
government withhold military aid to Israel so long as Netanyahu continues to
insist that he is going to continue the war. She should have stated that if
they wished to establish an encampment on the Columbia campus, they were
welcome to do so and that so long as they did that she would join them there, conduct
the business of the University from the encampment, and call on all faculty and
students to join with her.
This would, of course, have had a dramatic effect on the
political situation and it would have encouraged other private universities and
colleges to do the same. (There is some question whether public universities
could take this sort of political position but there is nothing to stop the
presidents of those universities from announcing their personal support for a
similar political stance.)
It is I think obvious that there is not the slightest
possibility that anything like this will ever happen. As I say, they never
learn.
