While the Speaker visited Columbia, police confronted Pro-Palestinian protesters at campuses in Texas and California.

Columbia University faculty say they are ‘furious’ at the arrest of students at pro-Palestine protests on campus

Columbia University shut down all in-person classes on Monday, and faculty and staff were encouraged to work remotely. “We need a reset,” President Minouche Shafik said, in reference to what she called the “rancor” around pro-Palestinian rallies on campus, as well as the arrest—with her encouragement—of more than 100 student protesters last week. Also on Monday, Columbia’s office of the provost put out guidance saying that “virtual learning options” should be made available to students in all classes on the university’s main campus until the term ends next week. “Safety is our highest priority,” that statement reads.

By moving its coursework online, the administration has sent an important set of messages to the public. In the midst of what it says is an emergency, the school asserts that it is still delivering its core service to students. It affirms that universities share the public’s perception that education, per se—as opposed to research, entertainment, community-building, or any of the other elements of the college experience—is central to their mission. And it implies that Columbia is carrying out its duties of oversight and care for students.

But those messages don’t quite match up with reality. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that “moving classes online” isn’t really possible. A class isn’t just the fact of meeting at a given time, or a teacher imparting information during that meeting, or students’ to receiving and processing such information. A university classroom offers a destination for students on campus, providing an excuse to traverse the quads, backpack on one’s shoulders, realizing a certain image of college life. Once there, the classroom does real work, too. It bounds the space and attention of learning, it creates camaraderie, and it presents opportunities for discourse, flirtation, boredom, and all the other trappings of collegiate fulfillment. Take away the classroom, and what’s left? Often, a limp rehearsal of the act of learning, carried out by awkward or unwilling actors. If the pandemic gave rise to hygiene theater, it also brought us this: pedagogy theater.

The pandemic emergency, at least, offered a reasonable excuse for compromise. A plague was on the loose, and avoiding death took precedence over optimizing teaching quality. But now, with COVID-19 restrictions lifted, the technologies that allowed for pedagogy theater remain. The ubiquity of Zoom and related software, along with the universal familiarity they built up during the pandemic, have made it easy for a provost or a teacher to just shut the doors for any given class—or on any given campus—on a whim, for any reason or no reason. If a professor should get sick or need to travel, or if there is a blizzard, meetings can be held on the internet. In 2023, Iowa State University moved classes online after a power-plant fire shut down its air-conditioning.

[Read: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

Columbia’s decision to go virtual because of campus unrest shows the breadth of emergencies that now justify this form of disruption. “Moving classes online” for everyone is a decision that universities can make whenever things go even slightly awry. A pandemic or a deranged gunman could be the cause, as could civil unrest, or just the threat of ice from an anticipated winter storm. Because this decision is portrayed as both temporary and exigent—because Zoom is treated as a fire extinguisher on the wall of every classroom, just in case it’s ever needed—schools are able to maintain their stated faith in the value of matriculating in person. In my experience as a professor who teaches at an elite private university, virtual learning is discouraged under normal circumstances. But as Columbia’s case shows, it might also be used whenever necessary. It’s the best of both worlds for colleges, at least if the goal is to control the stories they tell about themselves.

Online classes are supposed to occupy a middle ground. They are almost always worse than meeting in person, and they may be somewhat better than nothing at all. But that in-between space has turned out to be an uncanny valley for education. If online classes really work, then why not use them all the time? If they really don’t, then why bother using them at all? Answers to these questions vary based on who you ask. Accreditors, which enforce educational standards, may require courses to convene for a certain number of hours. Teachers want to stay on track—but also to take a sick day from time to time, without the pressure to keep working via laptop camera. Students want to be in class so that they can get what they came to college for—except when they want to live their lives instead. And now, amid political turmoil, university leaders want to control the flow of people on and off campus—while still pretending to carry on like normal.

Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X,  “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.

This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia. (Both men, as it turns out, are in favor of some quarter for “insurrectionists” who happen to be on the right side.)

Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’

What Cotton and Hawley are doing is simple demagoguery. When Donald Trump was inaugurated president, he spoke of an “American carnage” that he would suppress by force. Trump’s attempts to apply the maximum level of violence to every problem did not solve any of them. Migration at the southern border surged in 2019 until a crackdown in Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic brought it down; Trump’s presidency ended with a rise in violent crime (another likely pandemic effect, among other factors) and with widespread civil-rights protests.  

The protesters at Columbia and other college campuses around the United States are voicing opposition to U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas, which began in retaliation for a Hamas raid that killed some 1,200 Israelis last October. Since then, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, about 2 million displaced, and many driven to the brink of starvation. No sympathy for Hamas or anti-Semitism is necessary to believe, as I do, that Israel’s conduct here has been horrifically disproportionate; the U.S. government itself has acknowledged substantial evidence of human-rights violations by Israeli forces as well as by Hamas. There have been documented instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment surrounding the protests; a rabbi associated with Columbia University urged Jewish students to stay away for the time being, and the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, recommended that students not living on campus attend classes remotely for the time being. In the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters. As of this morning, the National Guard had not been called in, but hundreds of students participating in demonstrations across the country have been arrested.

If the campus authorities need to act to protect the safety of any of their students, including from threats, discrimination, and harassment, then they must. But the university is facing pressure from pro-Israel donors and elected officials to shut down the protests, less because they are dangerous than because these powerful figures find the protesters and their demands offensive.

Yet the kinds of mass violence and unrest that would justify deploying the National Guard are currently absent, and the use of state force against the protesters is likely to escalate tensions rather than quell them. The New York Times reported that after Shafik asked the NYPD to clear the protesters’ tent city located on a campus quad, the “decision to bring in the police also unleashed a wave of activism across a growing number of college campuses.” As for Columbia, NYPD Chief John Chell told the Columbia Spectator that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” The arrests did not end the protest.

The calls from Cotton and Hawley to deploy the National Guard are not about anyone’s safety—many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, against whom the might of the U.S. military would be aimed, are Jewish. As the historian Kevin Kruse notes, sending the National Guard to campuses facing Vietnam War protests led to students being killed, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, rather than to anyone being safer. The most likely outcome based on past precedent  would be an escalation to serious violence. Which might be the idea.

Conor Friedersdorf: Against the Insurrection Act

As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP. More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters. Social-media bubbles can suffice to maintain this sense of siege among the extremely online, but cultivating this perception among most voters demands constant reinforcement.

This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. Cotton and Hawley are demanding that Biden use force against the protesters not just because they consistently advocate for state violence against those who support causes they oppose as a matter of principle, but also because any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems, they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.

Demonstrators ordered to dismantle encampments on campus by 8am and warned of 'alternative options'.