Speech and violence
Anumber of Columbia University students were sprayed with a chemical substance while attending a demonstration on campus Friday. Several of those affected had to seek medical attention. If your immediate or most pressing question here is what the students were protesting for or against and if you agree or disagree with the stance, that’s the wrong question — there is no circumstance under which a chemical attack on a group of protesters is justified.
As you can probably guess, the demonstration, like those that have roiled the campus for months, centered on opposition to Israel’s pursuit of Hamas in Gaza following the terrorists’ murderous Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The sprayers, who haven’t been publicly identified but are believed to be students themselves, allegedly heckled several Jewish demonstrators for being traitors before returning and spraying the group.
We have ridiculed the many attempts to represent political speech — not direct threats or incitements, but ideological positions and political preferences, abhorrent as an observer may find them — as violence, and will continue to do so. To refer to speech as violence obscures the severity of real violence, such as that inflicted by these students against their own peers, which in no way can be waved off as a just an act of disagreement. Whatever justification the assailants might eventually give for their actions matter little. They must be held to account.
University authorities say that the demonstration in front of Low Library was being held in breach of campus rules, but that doesn’t give counterprotesters license to assault the protesters with a noxious substance. Regardless of the exact composition of the spray — several victims and observers have preliminarily identified it as “skunk,” an foul-smelling Israeli-developed composition that is used by military and police forces — it was a clear and successful effort to cause harm.
The university says it is working with the NYPD to look into the attack, and moved to ban the suspected perpetrators from campus. That’s the right call; unless these students can prove that they were not responsible, they should be regarded as a clear and present threat to others in the Columbia community.
Columbia administrators’ approach here will reverberate well beyond the confines of their marbled Morningside enclave. Columbia has in many ways become a stand-in for the broader campus rifts over the war in Gaza and the ensuing struggle over the limits of academic freedom and the speech of students and faculty in institutions of higher learning all around the country.
Their decision late last year to suspend the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace student organizations — over claims that they had violated recently-changed campus regulations — was an indication that the administration was willing to endanger a longtime and hard-won reputation as a locus for ideological debate and organizing over some shortterm political pressure. This was true even if (perhaps especially if) we and others did not agree with these groups’ framing or objectives.
Now, they face this acute challenge. Unless there are clear, public and severe consequences for those involved, it’s not only going to happen again, it will get worse. It’s time to definitively draw a clear line: to disagree, even strenuously, is a prime mission of the school. This stops, unequivocally, at violence.