“Sorry class, I have to turn my phone off, my coworkers are messaging in the group chat.” This seemingly normal sentence, uttered by a computer science teacher at Columbia University, quickly alchemises into a grim reminder. “Makes me nervous when they do that. These days you never know if your coworkers will get fired over what they say”, my professor continues, referring to the three Columbia administrators who had been recently fired for texting each other criticisms of the Hillel — America’s predominant Zionist campus organisation, facilitating roughly 35,000 student trips to ‘Israel’ per year.
Columbia, like many other colleges around the world, has not been the Columbia that students, faculty, and alumni alike conceptualised it as for a very long time now. What was once an open campus is now a Cop City of its own, with letter-coded levels of security, closed-off gates, and swarms of Public Safety Officers at every corner. Even if a gate is closed for the foreseeable future, there is always a guard (or sometimes even three) watching it. This is all in response to student protests — both April’s encampment, and more recent protests, including the first-day-of-school picket where two students were arrested.
While Columbia University is undoubtedly, consistently, and deliberately censoring free speech on its campus, its insidious desire to control its student body goes much deeper than just speech. Columbia is a perfect example of what it means to submit oneself to an institution: a submission of the whole body, part by part.
The day after the Alma Mater sculpture was covered with red paint as a form of protest, her perimeter was enveloped by portable fencing, a security guard propped by her side — her very own guardian angel. This is not the first time Columbia had fenced in the Alma Mater immediately after a protest; after a late-2023 protest that occurred on the Low Steps, the same thing happened. While this is a relatively minor example, it still demonstrates how Columbia University controls the movements of its students. Most recently, Columbia has hired Pinkerton Security guards to surveil the student body — the same Pinkertons that were enlisted as strikebreakers during the infamous 1892 Homestead Mill Strike, where 16 were killed and 23 injured. The university’s panoptical approach to surveilling and controlling where students can walk or sit permeates the spaces between every guarded gate and every newly-established security tent.
On April 29th 2024, students participating in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment were handed notices demanding, under threat of suspension (and thus, immediate eviction from campus housing), that the encampment be cleared, and that protesting students agree to abide by University policy “through June 30, 2025, or the date of the conferral of your degree, whichever is earlier.” According to a report in the Columbia Spectator, the notices also said:
If you do not identify yourself upon leaving and sign the form now, you will not be eligible to sign and complete the semester in good standing. If you do not leave by 2pm, you will be suspended pending further investigation.
These are serious threats — suspension entails, among other penalties, the loss of housing. It’s important to emphasise that the students of the Solidarity Encampment were not being threatened with death or grave injury in the way that Palestinian and Lebanese people are. But the uncanny similarity of these notices to the evacuation leaflets distributed by the IOF throughout Gaza and Lebanon cannot go unmentioned. One such leaflet reads, as translated from Arabic:
To all residents and refugees living in the area of the camps, Hezbollah is firing from your region. You must immediately leave your homes and head north of the Khiam region before 4pm (13:00 GMT). Do not return to this area until the end of the war. Anyone present in this area after this time will be considered a terrorist.
Both notices exist on a continuum — the former exists to defend the latter — and both share an explicit strategy: the monitoring and criminalisation of anyone in a specific area after a certain time.
Another matter is the physical identification of the students. Surveillance over student whereabouts is key to subjugation; without it, a suspension notice is nothing but an empty threat. During the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, immediately after three Barnard students were suspended (allegedly having been identified through appearances in interviews and protests), Columbia openly declared its intent to identify the students in the encampment and subsequently suspend them, as a University spokesperson wrote in the following:
Students who are participating in the unauthorised encampment are suspended… We are continuing to identify them and will be sending out formal notifications.
Once the dam of institutional trust is broken, as it was this past April, something as simple as a morning stroll around campus is subject to meticulous control and restriction. The subjugated foot is told where not to walk, what detours to take, what gates are barred off indefinitely from its use, and who can and can’t accompany it on its trek through the Morningside Heights campus. If it does not do as told, the foot is forced to leave.
As any university naturally would, Columbia cares about upholding its reputation. To do this, it must control what is seen by the eyes of students, faculty, and outsiders alike — not just in a metaphorical sense, but also in a physically grounded one. How the campus looks at a given point in time is just as much an instrument of control as the aforementioned ID checkpoints and security tents.
Columbia University portrays itself as a green, safe haven: a beacon of community bolstered by its many lawns and trees. In 2023 alone, Columbia University spent 352 million dollars on ‘operations and maintenance’, including landscaping. There is a red/green flag system and even an online dashboard to alert students when they can and can’t sit on the lawns. Rest assured, though, that whatever money Columbia expends bettering its own property, it makes back in leasing property to others; Columbia, as of 2023, is the largest private landowner in New York City, and is known in this context for revoking the lease of Red Balloon Early Childhood Learning Center, “the only affiliate Columbia daycare service with tuition under three thousand dollars a month.”
There is also plenty to be said about how, just as Columbia destroys the local neighborhoods, it destroys ecological systems and agricultural lands through the resources used for the curation of its ‘green’ environment. More broadly speaking, turfgrass covers 1.9% of the United States, and may have more acreage than the eight largest irrigated crops combined. Just the amount of fertiliser Americans use on their lawns produces 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. Additionally, runoff from certain fertilisers contaminates water, leading to dead zones, congenital disabilities, and cancer.
Lawns do not happen spontaneously. Their sleekness requires labour, and the processes to establish and maintain lawns are not only controlling but ecologically destructive. This destruction outwardly permeates Israeli military strategies, with ‘mowing the grass’ often used by ‘Israel’ as a metaphor for its policy periodically attacking Gaza to keep the people under control. It is productive to examine the usage of this phrase in a 2018 speech made by Naftali Bennett, a former Prime Minister of ‘Israel’: “He who does not mow the grass, the grass mows him” (as roughly translated). The ‘grass’ is referred to as an enemy that must be controlled, which serves as both a villainisation of natural processes and a dehumanisation of people designated, albeit metaphorically, as part of that process. The quote delineates a threshold signifying what is ‘He’ — the living, breathing human being — and what is merely ‘grass’: an inhuman enemy trying to rise up from the ground, but one that, under the hegemonic order, must be kept there. In this sense, the lawn evokes image — a utopian representation from which no blades of grass must deviate. Of course, this portrayal of ‘the grass’ and, generally speaking, nature, is not unique to ‘Israel’ or Columbia University. The history of the lawn, as Raymond Williams puts it, is inextricably linked to the process of making “Nature move to an approved design” and the production of “cleared lines of vision; the expression of control and of command.”1
By curating a physically green Columbia and thus portraying itself as ‘safer’ than its surrounding area, the university mirrors ‘Israel’’s tactic of greenwashing, the recurring cry that settlers “took dry, arid land and made it bloom with green” and is thus justified in its actions. How could Columbia be responsible for thousands of evictions when it has organised such a lovely community space? By hyper-monitoring its lawns, and disciplining those who camp out on them, along with disciplining nature, Columbia designates the Green space an inherently Upstanding and Moral one.
Another way that Columbia controls its appearance is, bizarrely, by imitating ancient Greece. The combination of ionic columns on several buildings and engraving of famous Greco-Roman thinkers’ names on the outside of Butler Library reveals the university’s intention to be perceived not as Greek but as Greece-like: a “space for our scholars and students to fill with their own moral and intellectual conversations,” as former Columbia president Minouche Shafik said in her second-ever email concerning the genocide. It is for this reason that every Core Curriculum class begins with a Greco-Roman unit: Literature Humanities begins with the Iliad, Contemporary Civilisation with Plato and Aristotle, and Art Humanities with the Parthenon. In this way, Columbia idealises itself, projecting an agreeable and aesthetically admirable version of itself into the world. There is also a resoundingly Eurocentric dimension to this auto-idealism, the lines deliberately blurred between ‘what was once great, and Columbia must thus represent’ and ‘what is white’.
This idealisation is a form of physical control of the student body — controlling what is seen and what intentions can be gleaned from those sights. If the campus maintains an aesthetically pleasing appearance that frames it as a hub of community and intellect, the control that the institution exerts over student movements can be justified — rationalised. If the eyes comply, the rest of the body will, too.
A single person chanting produces a sound of roughly 70 decibels. Every time the number of people chanting doubles, that quantity goes up by about 3dB. Thus, 100 people chanting would produce a sound of approximately 90dB — 10 decibels louder than an average police siren.
Of course, none of these numbers mattered on April 30th at 12:30am, when protestors took over Hamilton Hall and renamed it Hind’s Hall in honor of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was murdered by ‘Israeli’ tanks. With every cry of “Long live Hind’s Hall, every fascist state will fall,” it became clearer and clearer that, no matter how loud the actual chanting was, the whole world was listening in, whether in outrage, solidarity, or ambivalence.
‘To hear’ has a different definition now than before. We live in a world where a piece of information can ‘be heard’ by someone, anyone, across the world. It is for this very reason that Columbia University strives to meticulously control what is heard by the ears of the student body, as well as of the greater population under whose gaze Columbia rests.
The encampment, admittedly, came at an already very turbulent time for Columbia’s administrators. On April 17th, right before the first encampment, Minouche Shafik testified before a US congressional committee in response to accusations of her failure to protect Jewish students. Placed in a position where every word she uttered was monitored, scrutinised, and immediately broadcasted, Shafik approached her predicament by citing disciplinary action and “pledging there would be consequences”:
Shafik said the university was facing a “moral crisis” with antisemitism on campus, and it had taken strong actions against suspected perpetrators. It had suspended students who participated in unauthorised protests, for example, and terminated a professor who supported the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel [sic] by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, she said.
There was a presumed urgency, in Columbia’s eyes, to remedy the narrative by punishing its student body. Minouche Shafik walked a tightrope — to outsiders, Columbia was to seem stern and heavy-handed, and to students and faculty, it must seem sympathetic and almost human. After the encampment began, Minouche Shafik started to send out daily emails titled, among other variations, “Update for Our Community” and “Addressing Unfolding Events on Campus”:
The University is launching this daily note to update you directly on campus developments, including the ongoing dialogue with our student protestors, and provide resources for your safety, security, and wellbeing. Keeping our community safe and informed remains our top priority.
These emails provided reports on campus status — that is, to whom (if anyone at all) the campus remained open — as well as bland yet ominous statements such as “the talks have shown progress and are continuing as planned” and “we remain in constant contact with the New York Police Department”. Additionally, a new section, “Campus Updates”, was added to Columbia’s website, to “keep the press and community updated on a timely basis”. After a joint post made by Columbia University Apartheid Divest and other organisations claimed that “Columbia is considering a complete lockdown of campus, evicting thousands of students by shutting down dorms weeks early with no notice”, Ben Chang, Vice President of Communications, utilised the “Campus Updates” section to assert that there was “no truth to claims of an impending lockdown or evictions on campus”:
“Today was a quiet day on campus,” Chang wrote. “Dialogue between University officials and student organisers is ongoing.”
Across the street at Barnard College, evictions had started to happen the day before this update. Some students reported being given only 15 minutes to pack all of their things and leave; several reported that they had started sleeping at friends’ houses.
The primary reason that Columbia University largely failed to subjugate the student ear, as it could with other parts of the body, is because of student-run reporting avenues such as the Columbia Spectator and WKCR (Columbia’s FM radio station). In particular, WKCR worked tirelessly to provide live and field coverage, at times working 18-hour days. At WKCR, “any person on campus can be a source, whether a student in the encampment protesting for the liberation of Gaza, another waving an Israeli flag on the perimeter of the lawns or a member of local government”.
In a time when more traditional reporting avenues were shut out by the Columbia gates, WKCR was there — just as it was back in 1964-68, when the station was the only live coverage source of student protests against university ties to the Vietnam War and the gentrification of Harlem. At these protests, students occupied five buildings, and the police made 712 arrests.
The official Columbia Libraries site looks back on the 1968 protests, providing the exact amount of arrests at each hour of every day. Columbia attempts to give the impression that it remembers this moment with shame. The last section of the Columbia Libraries’ “Columbia in Crisis — 1968” page describes subsequent “changes in University policy”.
At how many decibels does such an archive shout? Is its chant louder than that of the “community email”, or must it be relegated to a mere afterthought, an Instagram story highlight, something forgettable and almost unreal?
In Contemporary Civilisation, a class in Columbia’s signature Core Curriculum, students read famous works of philosophy to understand different strains of thought. Due to the encampment, which happened to coincide with the Michel Foucault section of the course, our discussion of Discipline and Punish took place over Zoom. Our professor even cracked a joke at the beginning of class: “It’s thematic that the interface Columbia uses to store Zoom recordings is called Panopto”. Only 2 people raised their hand to contribute during that Zoom lecture, both staunch Zionists who seemingly had no reservations about their opinions on the carceral system being stored in Columbia’s database.
My professor was right — Foucault is undoubtedly relevant to Columbia University’s conduct regarding student protests and campus safety. A body strolling through College Walk or slumped by the Butler Library ashtrays or tapping its ID at the checkpoint is nothing short of the Foucauldian ‘carceral body’: a body controlled not with physical force but indirectly, “at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules”.2 Foucault argues that the body, punished through this new distance, acts as an intermediary:
If one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property.3
While Foucault focuses on the prison system specifically, he clarifies that the shift from physical punishment and execution to mere deprivation of liberty also applies to “doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalists”;4 they, too, perpetuate the systems of control that the prison warden does. In the case of Columbia, the educationalist and the prison warden are not necessarily two separate yet similarly-functioning entities: one may (and, as April and September have shown us, does) freely report to or summon the other, further reducing both physical and verbal liberties of the student. The term student body truly is fitting for an investigation of the predicament of Columbia University — the vast populace summed up into a singular, homogenous, controlled unit of organs, flesh, bones, and blood.
Such mediums of control and policing are not exclusive to Columbia University, of course. While the solidarity encampment started on Columbia’s campus, hundreds of universities have followed its lead. The carceral body, dissected and separated into its subjugated parts, has ramifications that pervade institutions in Great Britain and beyond.
In response to student protests occurring across British universities, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak organised a meeting with university vice-chancellors and Jewish student union representatives. In a statement released ahead of the meeting, Sunak claimed, “A vocal minority on our campuses are disrupting the lives and studies of their fellow students and, in some cases, propagating outright harassment and antisemitic abuse. That has to stop.”
On May 4th, 2024, four days before Sunak issued this statement, four protestors were arrested at the University College London protest camp under the Terrorism Act for holding a pro-Palestine banner. On the banner was a dove holding a key while breaking through a wall — presumably representing the walls separating ‘Israel’ from Gaza and the West Bank. At the center of the banner, above the dove, read one word in green, cursive text: Free.
This blatant suppression of speech, under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’, is representative of the same bodily control that Columbia exercises over its own student population. In this instance, it is not the foot, eye, or ear, but the hand that is under threat. The hand, in its collegiate captivity, must hold up the institutionally accepted opinion or it must hold nothing. It must stay wary of symbols that will, no matter how peace-oriented they are, be purposely misconstrued as ‘terrorist’ dogwhistles. It is lodged too deep in its confinement to even gesture the word “Free”.
The “Disagreeing Well” page on UCL’s website asks a timely question: “How do we collectively approach the fact that being a diverse community means being a place where a wide variety of conflicting opinions and ideas exist and are expressed?” There is nothing ‘collective’ about arresting protestors. Relegating vital antiwar organizing to institutionally regulated avenues of cordial agreement and disagreement is not only done in bad taste, but is outright violent. Disagreeing ‘well’, through this violence, has become synonymous with disagreeing ‘compliantly’ or even ‘conditionally’, and this is evident in Columbia’s aforementioned idealization of Greco-Roman discourse. The object of discourse becomes far removed from the injustices of reality: an untimely and inapplicable anachronism curated to give students the impression that they are allowed to ‘disagree’ with the overarching establishment. Columbia, UCL, and other institutions, transitively, position themselves as far removed from the unpalatably strong feelings and bodily reactions — sensations of the ears, hands, eyes, and feet — that are catalysed by those injustices. Behind the ruse of this detachment lies just one command addressed straight to the student body, in both meanings of the phrase: avert your gaze and obey.5
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Raymond Williams. [1973] 2016. The Country and the City. London: Vintage Classics, pp.178-9. ↩
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Michel Foucault. [1975] 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, p.11. ↩
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Foucault. Discipline and Punish, p.11. ↩
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Foucault. Discipline and Punish, p.11. See also, the discussion of “institutions of subjugation”, one of whose functions “was that of controlling not the time of individuals but simply their bodies”. These institutions include factories, hospitals, psychiatric or not, schools and prisons. Michel Foucault. [1973] 2020. ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’. Translated by Robert Hurley. In Power: Essential Works 1954-84. Edited by James D. Faubion. London: Penguin, p.81. ↩
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See Kant on the use of public reason in ‘What is Enlightenment’: “The officer says, ‘Do not argue, drill!’ The tax man says, ‘Do not argue, pay!’ The pastor says, ‘Do not argue, believe!’ (Only one ruler in the world says, ‘Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!’) In this we have [examples of] pervasive restrictions on freedom.” The public use of reason, in the tastefully constituted university space, is free; but the drawing of any consequences from that use of reason would represent a debasement into a ‘private’ use. ↩