I’m trying to not get distracted from finishing writing up notes on some new ideas about Wick rotation, but here’s some news from Vichy-on-Hudson.
Jonathan Cole, who was provost from 1989 to 2003, has written an excellent letter to the president, provost and trustees. It makes specific recommendations about how they could start showing some courage and stand up to the dictatorship.
It is time for Columbia’s acting President Claire Shipman, Provost Angela Olinto, and the board of trustees to demonstrate their courage and empathy. It requires courage to stand up to President Donald Trump’s administration and its efforts to destroy our greatest institutions of higher learning; but courage can also be shown in admitting that you’ve made a mistake.
I don’t think they’ll take his advice, but would love to be wrong about this.
The campus remains locked-down, with highest administration priority ensuring that there is no protest of Israeli government policies on the campus. While there were two days of memorials on the central campus for Israeli victims of the October 7 massacre, no such memorials for Palestinian victims of the Gaza conflict have been allowed.
On the question of what faculty members are allowed to say about the Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide, we’ve been told that we can attend an in-person only event on Monday, where a university lawyer will tell us what we can say and what we can’t say.
Scott Aaronson was recently on campus, delivering a talk on Computational Complexity and Explanations in Physics, an experience he describes here. I was out of town then, but in any case this sort of approach to fundamental physics doesn’t intersect in any way with my interests in the subject.
Scott was very pleased to see the lockdown and that Columbia now shares his highest priority of putting a stop to pro-Palestinian student protests at any costs. I’m glad to see that he’s now satisfied and, unlike in the past, will no longer tell Jewish students not to come to Columbia.
There are a couple things in Scott’s post that simply are not true:
- About the idea that “the measures seem to be needed, since every time the university has tried to relax them, the “intifada” has returned, with non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching”, this is delusional nonsense with no basis in reality.
- He writes that I have called him “a mentally ill genocidal fascist.” I’d like to make it clear that I think he’s not a Fascist, but a Fascist collaborator. And quite a successful one at that: allying with the destruction of US democracy to get what you want has worked out well for him and others who are intensely disturbed by any support for the Palestinians in their conflict with the Israeli government.
About recent developments in Gaza, I’m very pleased to see that Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire, and the number of people getting killed each day has been reduced dramatically. Such a ceasefire is very welcome now, should have taken place long ago, back when the students were allowed to protest in favor of it. It seems to me that two factors have been responsible for stopping the killing (at least for now):
- The genocidal nature of the Israeli campaign, which was clear to the student protesters early on, has become clear to the rest of the world. Besides the awful facts on the ground, reading things like this from Scott (where he argues that Zionism is now fundamentally about being willing to kill Palestinian children while giving the finger to the rest of the world), has opened most people’s eyes to what has been happening.
- Trump and his administration deserve credit for doing something no other US administration has been willing to do: apply pressure on Netanyahu to stop killing Palestinians. Whatever the motivation for this is, it’s great that it has finally happened.
I have no idea what will happen next in Gaza, and don’t want to host a discussion of what has happened, is happening, or will happen there. Insightful comments about the Columbia aspect of this story are welcome though.
Peter: It is impossible not to be moved by your genuine concern and authentic involvement with (and impact on) “The Situation at Columbia”. My personal sense — for what it is worth — is that you might perhaps inadvertently exaggerate the relative importance of “The Situation in Gaza” vs “domestic” considerations as being ultimately determinative. More precisely, if it is indeed your sense that we are in the grip of “encroaching dictatorship”, the reversal is apt to come not as a consequence of whatever might possibly take place in the Middle East but rather at the ballot box — in 2026/8.
“It makes specific recommendations about how they could start showing some courage and stand up to the dictatorship.”
But, from what I understood by following the situation at Columbia through this blog, it has never been about a lack of courage. The real reason behind the situation at Columbia has already been spelled out clearly many times in this blog: it is simply that the president, the provost and the trustees are happy with the way things are currently at Columbia, that that’s what they always wanted to achieve, and that they achieved it by taking advantage of the advent of the current dictatorship in your country. Therefore, to me, the letter of Jonathan Cole is useless and it just shows how naive the guy is.
Chomsky understood that free speech is an all-or-nothing proposition.
My sources inside Columbia told me there’s a *massive* sense of relief after getting back the coveted Scott Aaronson Special Seal of Approval, as part of his Exclusive National Review Tour of Problematic Blue State Universities.
That should improve Columbia’s Antifa/Intifada Score enough to appease the T-Regime even more.
What a time to be alive!
AG,
I really should emphasize that the focus of these blog posts is very much on Columbia, with our dictatorship and the genocide in Gaza getting discussed because of their specific impacts at Columbia. A main reason for the focus here is that this is something I have first-hand and other pretty direct and accurate sources of information about, while at the same time there has been a massive and highly successful campaign to spread lies about this. This is ongoing, a good example is Scott Aaronson’s “the measures seem to be needed, since every time the university has tried to relax them, the “intifada” has returned, with non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching”. This is a bald-faced lie, pushed by people who want to maintain the highest priority of the university as stopping anti-genocide protests. I see that on his blog someone challenged Scott about this, and he claims that he’s spreading these lies because some people he talked to at Columbia told them to him.
On the larger issue of our democracy collapsing into dictatorship, I don’t know where this is going, my main thought is that people need to do everything they can to try and stop or slow down the process. Here what the Columbia trustees did is a model for what people should not be doing. The way things are going, at the moment I don’t see a functional democracy with free elections in November 2026, much less 2028. Again, this is something people need to fight for, not wait for.
On Gaza/Israel, again I have no idea what will happen. I’ve unfortunately started to understand the point of view that Scott embodies and seems to be shared by a majority of the Israeli electorate: the Palestinians want to kill me and my family, so starving and killing them on a massive scale is morally just, and all their fault. The ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank shows that this is not just about Gaza. People need to do whatever they can to help stop the killing.
Thoughtful,
The situation with the trustees at Columbia is more complicated than that. The campaign to discredit anti-Israel demonstrators as violent anti-semites and attack the University for not stopping them was intense and driven by single-minded people who would do anything to get their way (this is about stopping people who want to kill you and your family, after all…). Some of them were trustees, some were donors, many were just faculty, staff, alumni orstudents. I think many of the trustees did not support this campaign, but were unwilling to challenge it, specifically, unwilling to defend the institution and its community against bogus charges of antisemitism. To do so would have made them targets, and they did not have the stomach for that.
When the Trump administration joined forces with this campaign and launched its attack, the trustees again had to decide whether to fight back. For some of them, yes, what Trump was demanding was what they wanted (they may even have been feeding his people the list of demands). But they had a very specific decision to make: do they challenge the illegal dictatorial means used? A large part of this decision was fear: they were being told by their lawyers that challenging the dictatorship would lead to a difficult and painful fight, exactly the one that Harvard has been now fighting (with some success) for months.
My understanding is that their decision was based only partly on “this is something we would do anyway”, but also largely on “going to court to try and uphold the law will be a difficult fight we very well might lose. We don’t want to get hurt, our fiduciary duty is to keep the university from getting hurt.” There is a large component here of cowardice and moral failure. As Harvard and other institutions have fought and everyone sees that this is a crucial battle that can be won, what the trustees did looks worse and worse. Cole is a highly respected former leader of the institution. Him telling the current leaders that they need to repair the self-inflicted damage they have done is going to have some impact. Yes, probably not enough to get a change though.
anon,
I don’t think it’s so simple: free speech is not “all or nothing” (crying “fire” in a crowded theater and all that…).
What is remarkable here is that this is about not allowing speech criticizing a government’s actions (weirdly, a foreign government). There has been an intense campaign to outlaw criticism of Israel or of Zionism under the grounds that it is “antisemitic”.
To what extent will the university stand up to this campaign? I’ll try and go, we’ll see what the lawyer says.
It seems to me that your reply to Thoughtful indicates that you might in fact be in broad agreement with the point I tried to make: it is the awesome power of the US Federal Government brought to bear to bully the US elite universities that is ultimately responsible for the Trustees decisions leading to “The Situation at Columbia”; and — at the end of the day — it is only by successfully challenging the current President on the battlefield of the US electoral politics that this predicament can ultimately be reversed.
AG,
Until now the US has operated under a constitutional system specifically designed to constrain the “awesome power of the US Federal Government”. This is in the process of being dismantled, replaced by unconstrained dictatorial rule by decree. That the Columbia trustees went along with this was a disgrace. Trump is now ruling through blatant illegality. If the Republicans are in danger of losing control of the Congress in the 2026 elections, I see no reason to believe that the dictatorship we’ll be living in by then will allow a free and fair election. Just take a look at what the Republicans did to fight the 2020 election result and extrapolate to the present day.
Peter:
I followed your link to Aaronson’s post, and he indeed writes, “I heard a range of perspectives: some were clearly exasperated with the security measures; others, while sharing in the annoyance, suggested the measures seem to be needed, since every time the university has tried to relax them, the ‘intifada’ has returned, with non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching.”
I guess he can add me to the “clearly exasperated” category! Regarding his other statement, “every time the university has tried to relax them, the ‘intifada’ has returned, with non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching,” I don’t know what he’s talking about!
First off, I don’t recall the university ever having relaxed the security measures: they started during covid and then got worse. I guess there have been tiny changes, e.g. in how many outside visitors we’re allowed to approve per day or in which entrances are open, but pretty much the security seems to have been constant for the past couple of years. So if the university ever really tried to relax the security measures, they didn’t relax them in any serious way.
Second, I haven’t experienced any non-university agitators once again disrupting research and teaching. That said, I teach classes in statistical methods, so maybe I’m just not a target of these agitators.
My personal preference would be for the university to be unlocked, as with just about every other university I’ve ever seen (including Columbia before covid), and then if any agitators (whether within or outside the university) disrupt research and teaching, security could arrest them. It seems ridiculous to lock down all of campus at a huge expense in dollars, convenience, and potential research exchange (that’s right, it’s harder to get people to come to campus given that you have to plan it, get them their QR codes, etc.), not to mention the university’s image of a place for open inquiry, just as a way of avoiding the task of arresting people who disrupt classes and research.
I scrolled down the comments to Aaronson’s post where he writes, “many people would reply that it’s right to disrupt research and teaching over this, since Israel is unique in its bloodthirsty, baby-killing evil, and that consideration overrides everything else.”
This seems weird on a number of levels, first in that I don’t think the critics of Israel are saying that Israel is unique in its behavior. Indeed, the term “genocide” is generic enough to encompass many historical examples, so there’s no claim of uniqueness. Second, I think Aaronson is missing the point, in that it should be possible for the university to maintain order and stop disruption of research and teaching without locking down the campus by paying a few zillion people from private security firms to be checking everyone’s ID at all the entrances to campus.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your comment. Yes, Scott’s claims about the security situation here are obviously nonsense with no relation to reality. When challenged by someone on his blog about them he attributes these claims to multiple people he talked to at Columbia. What’s striking is that this implies that this kind of delusion and complete lack of interest in what is true and what isn’t is not just his craziness, but shared by others.
The thing about Scott’s craziness though is that he explains it all in detail publicly. He has a new blog posting (“On keeping a packed suitcase”).
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9285
He’s in a bad mental state:
” I walked all day around in a haze of fear and depression, unable to concentrate on my research or anything else.”
caused by the fact that Tucker Carlson interviewed a far-right open anti-semite, and the possibility that NYC will elect a Muslim progressive as mayor:
“Barring a miracle, New York City—home to the world’s second-largest Jewish community—is about to be led by a man for whom eradicating the Jewish state is his deepest, most fundamental moral imperative, besides of course the proletariat seizing the means of production. And to their eternal shame, something like 29% of New York’s Jews are actually going to vote for this man, believing that their own collaboration with evil will somehow protect them personally—in breathtaking ignorance of the millennia of Jewish history testifying to the opposite.”
He explains precisely why he is so upset: in his mind, he and his family need to, at least figuratively, keep their bags packed and be ready to move to Israel to escape a coming new Holocaust in the US. But, Mamdani’s support for the Palestinians means the destruction of Israel, so there will be no way to escape.
The depressing thing for us here at Columbia about this craziness is that it’s why we’re living under security lockdown. There’s no sane reason for this, to understand it you have to understand Scott and those who share his delusions. They have collaborated with the Trump regime to stop anyone from chanting “Free Palestine” on the Columbia campus. Like Scott, they feel extreme measures are necessary to achieve this, since otherwise the Palestinians will slaughter the Israelis and those fleeing a new US holocaust will have nowhere to go.
Peter:
Yes, I think it should be possible for people to disagree about Middle East policies and even about the facts regarding what’s happening on the ground there, without Columbia being locked down.
I’d say I find it frustrating for a professor from another state to come to Columbia and tell us why we should be locked down, but to be honest I’d be annoyed to hear that from a professor from New York state or even a Columbia professor! But in that last case maybe there’d be a good reason that would be offered.
The only plausible good reason I’ve heard is that if the campus is not locked down, that non-students will come in and disrupt classes or impeding free passage through the campus, but to me the obvious solution is to keep the campus open (as is the case of every other university I’ve ever been to in my life!) and just stop people from disrupting classes or from blocking the campus, arresting them if necessary. That’s gotta be much less expensive and invasive than a 24-hour perimeter security presence, even beyond the negative message that the lockdown is sending.
My guess is that the reason for the lockdown is that, if there were class-disrupting protests, and if the protesters did need to get arrested (i.e., if no reasonable negotiation were possible), that this would result in bad publicity. And maybe from a public relations standpoint this is correct. But from my perspective the lockdown is worse.
I guess I’d prefer that if people wanted to argue in favor of the lockdown, they’d do so explicitly on the grounds of public relations–but I understand that it’s the nature of such arguments that the can rarely be given as the public reason for a decision.
P.S. I’ve posted elsewhere on Columbia’s lockdowns and attempts to minimize dissent, so let me say here what I said there, which is that I myself have not ever been hassled by Columbia for expressing my dissent on this and other issues. I do appreciate that in many ways–most ways, I think–the university has been tolerant of dissent and recognizes that this is one of the university’s key values.