Columbia professor: 'We didn't have to see this kind of violence'

Hey, Gotti. Yes, I’m here with a faculty member, a professor of sociology at Barnard named Debbie Becker. And the faculty have been as affected by all this as the students have been. And so I wanted people to hear from them directly, especially because of the faculty letter that came out earlier this evening, in which many of the faculty expressed their concern about the NYPD entering campus and really signaling to the administration that if something happens, if any of the students are injured tonight, that they are putting the blame on the university’s feet. So I want to hear from you, Professor Becker. How are you feeling? What what is it like for you to watch this unfold tonight? Thank you for that introduction. It’s a incredibly sad day. It’s a sad day for me as a faculty member at Barnard in Columbia. It’s a sad day for our students at Columbia and Barnard. And it’s a frankly, it’s a sad day for American history, for world history. I don’t think that Columbia is gonna faculty are surprised. We’re surprised and in some ways we’re not surprised because we’ve seen this coming. The administration has been keeping us out of trying to help the students express themselves freely for six months now. They have ever since this conflict began. They have continuously suppressed students speech and and faculty have continued to say we need to support them to be able to have difficult conversations. That’s what faculty do. That’s what higher education is about. And instead the administration has continued to suppress them and discipline them and and increasingly use violence. And we saw them use the police without our faculty Senate support just a week ago and now it’s unconscionable they’re sending in hundreds of of police after our students and all day long we asked for the our Senate worked worked with the administration to try to make sure that faculty could even just come on campus to be to be a witness and and to help mediate and they shut us out. Are there faculty members in there. We have not been allowed in there since 8:00 this morning. None of us. How do you think it got to this point? Negotiations. They had faculty members represented, administrators. There were students who were part of these conversations. And we see how those conversations went at Brown, where now the encampment has closed down and the university has agreed to take this to a vote. So there were clearly other alternatives in different ways this could have gone. Why do you think Columbia has landed here? I I think that’s exactly right, that there are many other places where negotiations happened. There was a settlement. We didn’t have to see this kind of violence and instead the administration took this path. It was not a necessary path. And I think the administration has been making choices for months to go along with the demands of the MAGA, Republicans and the right to ruin our universities, to turn our universities into a police state and to repress our students speech. And they’re they’re just following that playbook. So you think some of this is political? I think a lot of it is political. This all started after the congressional hearing a few weeks ago where I mean when I say this all started the the bringing in of the police to arrest our students started right after President Shafiq was in Congress and felt like she needed to show them exactly what they were asking for. But even many of those congressional Republicans are now calling on her to resign. Pro Palestinian students are calling on her to resign. Jewish students who say they’ve been harassed and threatened tell me they’re disappointed and don’t feel safe here on campus. Does she have support? Is someone in her corner right now? When President Shafiq went to Congress, she neither did what the Republicans wanted her to do, which I I think let me take that back. When she went to Congress, there was no way for her to satisfy the Republicans. The Republicans already wanted, not just the Republicans, almost the entire committee, the the the people in Congress wanted her wanted to show that they could take down a university. It’s not about President Shafiq, it’s about taking down higher education. So they wanted to show that they had power over the president of an elite university. At the same time, she failed to stick up for what higher education should be. So she didn’t stick up for. She didn’t talk about academic freedom, she didn’t stand up for freedom of expression. She threw faculty under the bus, she threw students under the bus. She made promises about anti-Semitism that are unconscionable. So. So I think it’s fair to say that she has very little support, but she could have had support if she had stood up for for higher education and what we stand for. So where does Columbia go tomorrow morning? I would hope that we learn a lesson. Clearly, we didn’t learn a lesson from 1968, but I would hope that our administration learns a lesson and listens to its faculty and its students. Frankly, our students are meant. Most of our students are really destroyed by the way they’ve been treated for the last six months and by this incident in particular. It’s just going to be worse. So there’s going to be a need to be a lot of healing and the only way to make to have a lot of healing is to have a dramatic change. And we have actually have a similar problem that perhaps a worse problem at Barnard College. We just had a vote of no confidence against our President Rosenberry for using really incredibly harsh disciplinary tactics against our students. When there was when the police came in after the congressional hearing, she suspended our students and evicted them, sent them out on the streets of New York, out on the streets of New York without notice. They came out of out of getting arrested, had no place to go, had 15 minutes to collect their things. So our students at Barnard and Columbia are quite disenchanted, but they have, they have a lot of spirit. They have a lot of community, they assured. They’ve assured me that they’ve developed a lot of unity and community through these tough times. And I have faith in our students and I think if we can make a dramatic change in the way administration treats us and gives faculty a voice, gives allows faculty to actually participate in in higher education, which is what we do, let the faculty and the students lead higher education and let administration support us, then we’ll be on a good road ahead. Thank you, Professor Becker. I really.