Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
This was how Columbia University's acting president, Claire Shipman, described what happened at a protest in the school's Butler Library on May 7:
I spent the late afternoon and evening at Butler Library, as events were unfolding, to understand the situation on the ground and to be able to make the best decisions possible. I arrived to see one of our Public Safety officers wheeled out on a gurney and another getting bandaged.
When I have journalism students to teach, I like to teach them that different observers may describe the same thing in different ways for different purposes. This was what reporters for the Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper, wrote about events at the library:
Inside the building, Public Safety officers attempted to clear out protesters from the reading room. Public Safety officers forcefully pushed several protesters to the ground both near the building’s front entrance and the reading room’s entrance.
[...]
At around 5:03 p.m., the crowd rushed past the first set of doors, and several protesters entered the vestibule of Butler, pushing past Public Safety officers standing in the doorway. At least four Public Safety officers stood in the doorway between the vestibule and the library pushing protesters out of Butler.
[...]
One protester and one journalist were pushed to the ground.
“You’re hurting this guy right now,” one individual shouted.
Protests can be chaotic and hard to follow, especially when police and security get involved. The evening of the protest, I'd followed the helicopter noise in the neighborhood to the edge of the Columbia campus to have a look at what was going on. There was a crowd at 114th Street and Broadway, on the east side of the street, with people in keffiyehs and a Palestinian flag flying. A group of Orthodox Jews with anti-Zionist signs was in the mix. A line of NYPD cops was positioned on the campus side of the protest, between the crowd and the back side of the library. They were in regular blue uniforms, without riot gear.
I stopped short, on the Broadway median, where other loosely engaged observers and passersby had set up. I didn't have any press credentials on me, and getting any closer would have meant attaching myself to the back of the demonstration where it spilled off the sidewalk into the roadway, with trucks and buses still going by. More NYPD officers stood on the west side of Broadway, watching the events.
A police helicopter hovered low overhead, making itself ostentatiously loud, and near it a camera drone hung, quiet but ostentatious in its own way: The authorities were going to be making a record of all of this.
More people kept drifting into the scene and attaching to the crowd as it chattered against the helicopter clatter. A young woman held up a scarf to briefly shield her face from the people and the phone cameras outside the protest proper. Sections of the crowd surged one way and another; the police rearranged themselves, and one batch of officers broke off and formed a line retreating along 114th Street, moving closer to the library. Amid it all, in motion, were young people with PRESS tags dangling.
"New York Police Department officers arrested around 75 protesters and led them out of Butler Library into an NYPD bus on 114th Street starting at around 7:25 p.m.," the Spectator would report. "... NYPD officers—including members of the Strategic Response Group—entered campus through Butler at around 7:04 p.m."
When the NYPD Strategic Response Group stormed Columbia's Hamilton Hall one year—and two Columbia presidencies—ago, one of the cops managed to fire their gun. Since then, the university has offered a lot of public assurances and apologies about a lot of things, but it hasn't said much about keeping any more police bullets from flying. Instead, it applied for a subset of its campus safety force to be classified as special patrol officers under NYPD authority, so that they "possess all the powers and discharge all the duties" of regular city cops. And when the demonstrators descended on the library, Shipman swiftly called in the NYPD, declaring afterward that it "is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community."
What makes a safe campus? While other schools have tried to resume normal operations, Columbia operates under a state of perpetual lockdown and surveillance, sealed off behind gates. Security guards screen people entering the campus and monitor their behavior inside; local residents who used to take the public right of way from Amsterdam Avenue to Broadway have to circle the campus instead.
Columbia "opens doors to the vibrancy of New York City," Shipman wrote last month, in a recruiting email to high school seniors trying to decide whether to accept admission to Columbia. In another recruiting email, she wrote, "As we continue to evolve and grow as a university, we remain rooted in the values that define us: academic freedom, freedom of expression, and an unwavering respect for one another. Every student belongs here and deserves a Columbia experience that is supportive, inclusive, and empowering."
Shipman sent that second email five days after Mahmoud Khalil missed the birth of his child, because he was being held in federal detention in Louisiana, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had sent him after seizing him in the lobby of his Columbia-run apartment building. Khalil, who had just finished his master's degree studies in December, has not been accused of committing any crimes, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed the power to revoke his permanent residency and deport him for his "participation and roles ... in antisemitic protests and disruptive activities."
Shipman and the university have not spoken out in Khalil's defense, nor in the defense of the Columbia undergraduate Mohsen Madawi, who was locked up for 17 days after ICE seized him at an appointment where he was supposed to be taking his citizenship test. Not only was Madawi not charged with any crimes, but he had reportedly moved out of active leadership in the Columbia protest movement. Nor did Columbia say anything in defense of Ranjani Srinivasan, who fled the country after ICE agents came to her Columbia housing; the university disenrolled her when the government stripped her of her student visa, allegedly for failing to report that she'd been been given a summons on crowd-control charges, then had the summons dropped, when she was caught in a mass roundup of people near a protest.
Shipman did allude to the threat of ICE in one of her statements about the library protests. After castigating the protesters for disrupting their fellow students' studying during spring exam season, she added, "Moreover, I am deeply disturbed at the idea that, at a moment when our international community feels particularly vulnerable, a small group of students would choose to make our institution a target."
Columbia was made a target more than a year ago, when congressional Republicans brought the school's then-president, Minouche Shafik—along with Shipman, in her prior role as president of the board of trustees—into a hearing where Rep. Elise Stefanik, proponent of the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, accused the school of not doing enough to fight antisemitism. It has been letting itself be bullied by the government ever since, inspiring the government to come back for more and more. The claim that one more student demonstration would be to blame for the next wave of abuse was shamelessly absurd.
And it was made even more shameless by Shipman's description of the conflict inside the library. "The students were told they simply needed to identify themselves and then leave, but most refused," Shipman said. But that combined two separate requests into one refusal: the Spectator reported that the protesters were willing to leave, but that campus security wouldn't let them out unless they showed I.D. The point in dispute was whether the protesters would be required to register that they'd been at the protest—exactly the information that ICE, and the far-right network encouraging the Trump administration to target pro-Palestinian protesters, would want.
"We refuse to show our I.D.s under militarized arrest," the protesters wrote in a statement. It would have sounded like dramatic activist hyperbole, were it not being issued at a university whose protesters have already been snatched by masked government agents. The student reporters at the library did show I.D.; the next day, they were notified that they had been suspended by Columbia or by Barnard College on the advice of the public safety department. The suspensions were rescinded later, but it was the second time student journalists had been temporarily hit with disciplinary notices because they had covered a protest. One way or another, the young people are getting an education.
