Columbia campus protests: as students occupy building, what next?
Pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University have occupied a building on campus in an escalation of their months-long demonstration against Israel’s war in Gaza.
The takeover of Hamilton Hall – named after one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton – followed the failure of talks with university authorities aimed at winning the protesters’ agreement to dismantle an encampment of about 120 tents.
The protesters’ move came after they had defied a 2pm Monday deadline to abandon the camp or face suspension. The university promptly began suspending participating students.
What were the students demanding?
Nothing less than Columbia’s divestment from companies they say profit from Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, echoing the 1980s campaign for economic boycotts against
South Africa. That precedent resonates with the current occupation of Hamilton Hall, which in 1985 was padlocked and chained by protesters demanding that the university divest from companies doing business with the apartheid regime. Although that protest ended inconclusively, Columbia’s trustees board voted months later to sell its stock in US companies involved with South Africa.
This time, Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, has rejected divestment calls. But the university offered an accelerated timeline to review student divestment proposals by the institution’s Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing, the body that considers such questions. In a febrile atmosphere, protesters dismissed it as insufficient.
What other factors are in play?
Pro-Israel Jewish students complain of feeling threatened and allege they have been subjected to antisemitic slurs. Similar complaints have been le
velled at other protest-hit campuses.
Protesters – some of whom are Jewish – counter that instances of antisemitism are being exaggerated and conflated with condemnation of Israel, and leveraged in an effort to snuff out legitimate criticism of the state.
What are the consequences of the antisemitism allegations for Columbia and other universities?
It is inviting the scrutiny of the US Congress, putting the universities’ ruling bodies in an invidious position.
At a congressional committee meeting two weeks ago – provocatively titled “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to AntiSemitism” – Shafik was grilled relentlessly by members, particularly Republicans, who pressed her to get tough with students and faculty members deemed guilty of antisemitism. Visibly uncomfortable, Shafik strove to avoid the fate of two other university presidents, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay of Harvard, who were forced to resign after giving what were condemned as weak responses to interrogations about speech judged antisemitic or “genocidal” in a previous hearing last December.
This week, the House is poised to vote on a bill that would codify a broad definition of antisemitism and could be used to crack down on anti-Israel protests.
Why is the issue complicated?
Because universities’ mission compels them to balance contentious language with a commitment to free speech. Additionally, what constitutes antisemitism can be hotly disputed. While blatant antisemitic slurs have been heard – and condemned – other statements are more contested. At the hearing, Shafik, who is Egyptian-born, hesitated when challenged on whether she considered calls for an intifada (uprising in Arabic) as antisemitic.
Some deny that it is, while others point to the consequences of the second Palestinian intifada in the early 2000s, which saw large number of Israeli Jews killed in suicide bombings.
Why are university heads sensitive to congressional oversight?
Although Columbia and other universities at the heart of the protests are private institutions, their buildings are exempt from property tax, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars or more. This tax-exempt status could be reversed by hostile legislators. Likewise, the universities receive significant sums in federal government funding, which Congress has the power to rescind.
How did Shafik respond congressional pressure?
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On April 18, a day after her congressional appearance, Shafik asked New York police officers to enter the Columbia campus to disperse the encampment. About 100 protesters were arrested, although the protests subsequently resumed. Similar law-enforcement actions have since been mirrored elsewhere. Nearly 1,000 arrests have been recorded at campus protests nationwide in recent days.
Shafik’s moves earned the rebuke of her academic peers after the university’s senate passed a resolution saying her administration had undermined academic freedom and ignored privacy and due process.
How much does this resonate beyond the university campus?
The spectre of enduring protests, creating the impression of chaos and disorder on America’s university campuses, could undermine Joe Biden’s reelection chances.
Fox News has already sensed the potential for a campaign issue, running round-the-clock footage of the scenes from Columbia in a switch of focus from the US-Mexico border, previously seen as the Republicans’ biggest potential vote-winner.
Worse still for Biden, the Democratic
party’s student organisation, College Democrats of America, has endorsed the protests, saying in a statement: “As representatives of youth across the country, we reserve the right to criticise our own party when it fails to represent youth voices.”
By contrast, the protests were denounced on Tuesday’s by Biden’s national security spokesperson, John Kirby, who called them “absolutely the wrong approach”.
The split could burst into the open when the Democrats gather in August for their national convention in Chicago – a venue that evokes a grim historical warning for the party. It was there that the party’s 1968 convention descended into pitched battles between police and students protesting against the Vietnam war. The Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, lost the presidential election to the Republican Richard Nixon, less than three months later.
Vienna’s landbank (Wohnfonds Wien), a quasi-governmental body that buys up land to build new neighbourhoods with a mix of private and subsidised housing.
Inspired by the Vienna model, Los Angeles launched its own landbank in 2022 aimed at setting aside city land for affordable housing construction. And the city passed a new measure increasing property taxes on homes over $5m. The hope is that this “mansion tax” will create a permanent funding stream for affordable housing. “A lot of people who worked on that measure visited Vienna,” says Jackson Loop from the Southern Californian Association of Nonprofit Housing. “But we’re getting push-back from the real estate lobby who are trying to overturn the tax increase in the courts, so it’s in a legal limbo right now.”
Property taxes, both residential and corporate, are comparatively low in California, said Loop. That’s because of proposition 13, he explained – a provision that passed back in the late 1970s and limited taxes to 1% of a property’s value, including for large landowning corporations such as Disney.
Another key difference is the way Vienna chooses to spend its annual housing budget. Most of it goes into subsidising construction, whereas in the US it mostly goes to directly subsidising residents through vouchers and housing benefit schemes. In other words, Vienna focuses on supply whereas the US focuses on demand. “I’d love someone to do a calculation of how much the US is spending on housing vouchers nationwide and see whether some of this money could be transferred into building new homes instead,” said Davis, the Santa Monica city councilmember.
One of the biggest cohorts in the delegation was from San Diego, where the number of unhoused residents has risen significantly in recent years. San Diego has seen dramatic increases in home and rent prices, making the county increasingly unaffordable for longtime residents. The median home sale price for an existing single-family home in the county clocked in at $980,000 in February, according to the local NBC affiliate, up from $925,000 the previous month and $878,000 one year ago.
“There’s about 10,000 people living on our streets” says Elyse Lowe, director of development services. “We have families living in their cars, tented communities, and open drug use. This is impacting businesses downtown. People don’t want to see that. We also have many people living from paycheck to paycheck which means they are at high risk of homelessness.”
Inspired by what she has learnt in Vienna, Lowe wants to start a discussion in San Diego about “re-evaluating” city land. “I’ve never heard anyone ask the question: is the small municipal airfield in the city centre that only serves small planes the best use of our land when we are trying to put people first?” she said.
Heidi Vonblum, San Diego’s planning director, said her biggest takeaway was the cleanliness and sense of stability in a city like Vienna. “Lack of affordable housing isn’t just an individual problem, it’s a problem for the whole community,” she observed. “What I notice here is that housing is seen as a means of providing social stability for lower-income communities, and it is very family-orientated. All their policies start from a base of how we best support children and families?”
All the visitors were surprised by how the subsidised housing has been dispersed throughout the city. “The mayor likes to say that you cannot tell if a person is rich or poor in Vienna from their address,” says Christian Shantl from the Vienna housing department. He said the city focused on creating mixed-income neighbourhoods with all the necessary services for the poorest as well as middle-class families.
They’re particularly keen on helping young people, so those between 18 and 30 still living with their parents can get on the housing list.
The last four California delegations were brought to Vienna by the Global Policy Leadership Academy (GPLA), which aims to educate leaders who want to tackle deep-rooted societal problems. Its CEO, LeSar, said she wanted “to get a conversation going back home about building affordable homes on a large scale”.
“I think that is happening,” she added. “We had two legislators from California who came here in the first delegation and they’re now sponsoring bills.”
Helmi Hisserich, a former GPLA executive who is now director of housing for Portland, Oregon, has accompanied all four delegations and says participants often get emotional. “We have had delegates weeping when they see what is on offer in Vienna. It tends to be the younger ones, the under 40s who can only dream of getting on the housing ladder in California.”
Beatriz Stambuk-Torres, a young GPLA researcher and city planner who moved to Vienna a year ago, told the group how she used to spend over 50% of her income on rent while living in Irvine, California. Now she has a nice apartment near Vienna’s city centre and spends 25% of her salary on rent and doesn’t need a car. “I had a good job and a master’s from one of our best universities, but I couldn’t save because of housing costs and my student loans. When I had a medical bill, I had to borrow from friends and family. I did everything right and I still was struggling to make ends meet.” As she spoke about doing “everything right” her voice cracked, and her eyes filled with tears. Discussing housing policy can be dry and technical but the impact on people’s lives is profound.
Unfortunately, in my city, some people think finding room for cars is more important than building homes for people
Gleam Davis, a Santa Monica councilmember