00:00 As you know very well, you're a Columbia junior.
00:03 Columbia University has garnered national attention over their on-campus protests
00:09 and protests right off the campus.
00:11 Can you tell us from your perspective, being on campus, what are you seeing?
00:15 Yeah, absolutely.
00:18 The past few days have of course been an incredibly emotional time for the Columbia community.
00:23 What truly has transpired is of course,
00:27 really beginning with the congressional hearing of Shafiq before Congress,
00:32 where that same morning that Shafiq was slated to show up in DC,
00:40 and actually myself and members of my team were there in DC,
00:44 student protesters had organized to set up an encampment at literally four in the morning,
00:52 so in the middle of the night/the morning.
00:55 And I think what really has spurred out of that,
01:00 out of the sort of clashing and intermix and interplay of these very public things
01:09 that are happening on our campus, which all eyes were on Shafiq in DC,
01:13 but then those eyes were very quickly diverted to what was happening right here in New York City,
01:18 right here on her campus while she was away, and then of course as she came back.
01:23 I think this has been really the culmination of since October 7th,
01:30 a lot of tension on campus, of course, a lot of protests,
01:33 a lot of back and forth between the university, the students, the faculty,
01:37 and then also among those groups, right?
01:39 Students who disagree with each other, faculty, etc.
01:44 But I think what we've truly seen in this phenomena right now
01:48 is a pent-up frustration from many, many groups, right?
01:53 It didn't necessarily, there are some senses in which this came out of nowhere,
01:58 or at least it was a surprise and it was intended to be so, right?
02:01 Such a large showing of protests, but in some senses it's not a surprise.
02:07 And so how I kind of look at those two things is actually very much before the start
02:14 of the encampment, there was actually like a drop in protest activity.
02:20 It was still active, but not as much as we saw in the very beginning stages
02:25 of university, of what our campus really looked like, and part of that had to do
02:29 with the crackdown on disciplinary action and policies that the university was taking
02:33 on some of these protests.
02:36 But this has been kind of like a resurgence, especially for sort
02:40 of the pro-Palestinian students on our campus in terms of coming together
02:44 and organizing this very massive, massive showing, which has then kind of inspired
02:50 and invited these outside protests to come outside of our gates and sort of join
02:55 in this really big now global arguably movement across universities in solidarity sort
03:01 of with what's happening on campus.
03:03 But of course, at the same time, there are these underlying tensions
03:07 that were crucial to the point of the hearing, right?
03:10 What is Columbia doing to address antisemitism?
03:12 How is Columbia juggling this act of how do we preserve free speech on our campus
03:17 and free expression along with the academic expression of faculty,
03:21 which is a very big topic in the congressional hearing, along with the safety concerns
03:25 that are arising out of Jewish students and faculty who are on our campus
03:29 who are navigating this space in sometimes very different ways, but for some of them are,
03:36 you know, afraid of certain sides of this campus or afraid
03:39 of navigating outdoor protests and have felt a sense of urgency from the university or wanted
03:47 to compel the university to feel more urgent about this issue.
03:52 And so really what this is a culmination of is months and months of building
03:59 and building tensions, obviously this political power
04:03 that had entered this arena for Columbia, right?
04:06 Putting Congress, putting Columbia on the map, like very purposely singling us out as they did
04:12 with Harvard, Penn, and MIT, of course brought this all sort of into one really big mix
04:18 that it became or it has become not just about the one experiences of, you know,
04:25 this university in New York City, this Ivy League institution, but also a microcosm
04:32 of what is happening at American universities across the nation,
04:36 but also what is happening at large in terms of our political conversations regarding anti-Semitism,
04:42 free speech, the right to protest, and all of these sort of intermixing things.
04:47 So I really do see this as it has been building over time and in a lot
04:52 of senses we could have seen where it was building to.
04:55 Of course, maybe we couldn't have anticipated the sheer scale, but it was clear that there was going
05:03 to be some flashpoint and that it was coming our way.
05:06 And I think the congressional heroing certainly propelled that way faster,
05:11 maybe on a timeline that was very quick, but also just the nature
05:14 of the fact that the semester is ending.
05:16 This is the last time to really, you know, force students to try to confront these issues.
05:23 And as we've seen, they're doing it in an incredibly public and expansive manner.
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