Day of the Swan

Nadia Abu El-Haj is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. 

In a December essay in the New York Review, she wrote “Since the start of the latest Israel–Palestine war it has become all but de rigueur for universities to censor speech criticizing Zionism and the Israeli state—especially when student groups are involved.” By appealing to “extraordinarily broadly construed” interpretations of words like “safety,” “security,” and “intimidation,” she argued, Columbia and other schools were making “an end-run around the university’s First Amendment principles—its foundational commitments to freedom of expression.” 

From her first-person, on-campus perspective, she said that after the riot police arrested students and staff this week and cleared the initial encampment, students moved to an adjacent lawn and set up an encampment much bigger than the first one. "It’s unbelievably well organized," she reports. "There’s a food area; people are going around picking up trash; they have a code of conduct that you have to consent to before you come in, including prohibitions on harassment, littering, drugs, and alcohol. It’s extremely calm and somewhat festive."

A few days ago, five students came into the encampment with a huge Israeli flag and posters with pictures of the hostages. They were asked to agree to the code of conduct, they did, and came in, staying for two hours. "Nobody bothered them," she reports, "and they didn’t bother anybody. It’s really not unsafe."

The tension on campus, she asserts, comes from the militarization and demonstrations off campus. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s visit last week brought even more attention to Columbia. "His depiction of the campus as a dangerous, anti-Semitic place has been broadcast around the country. The campus was overrun by every possible news outlet that day, from the more mainstream ones to Fox News to dubious folks with press cards. The founder of the Proud Boys was there, hovering around the encampment. And Thursday night there was a rally outside the campus gates that had been organized by white Christian nationalists." They were very aggressive, she reports, trying to scale the gates, yelling "go back to Gaza," and calling students inside "monkeys.”

In sum, things have been tense on the Columbia campus, but not because of students. “The only reason we didn’t descend into violence that day was that the students remained calm. They were the only adults in the room.”