Ever since a new Columbia president (Jennifer Mnookin) was appointed by the trustees back in January, many have been wondering if she would do anything to try and change Columbia’s reputation as “Vichy on the Hudson”. The reason for this reputation is obvious if you try to get on the Columbia campus, which historically has always been open. Nowadays to enter the campus you’ll need to show your papers (or QR code) to the guards at “Checkpoint Charlie”. This is because of the necessity of “keeping the Columbia community safe.”
If you try and figure out what “safety problem” the checkpoints and the large new security force are there to protect against, you’ll quickly realize that the danger is that you might hold up a “Free Palestine” sign and start shouting anti-Israel slogans. If that happened, people would take pictures and video, soon social media and the New York Post would be full of stories about “anti-semitic violence at Columbia”, and Steven Miller would again take away the university’s federal funding.
Since Mnookin was appointed, the question many people have been asking is whether she would take action to remove “Checkpoint Charlie” and restore free access to the campus. Most local politicians have now taken a stance against the closing of the gates, often pointing out that it was probably illegal (a city street, 116th street, runs through the center of campus). With a new mayor (Mamdani) and new local congressional representative (Darializa Chevalier) possibly applying more pressure, most people were assuming Mnookin would have to reopen the gates.
Today she gave her answer to the question, which could be summarized as “No Way”. More specifically she announced the following steps:
- Appointment of another committee, charged with advising her not on how to get rid of “Checkpoint Charlie” but with tuning how the QR codes work (i.e. “further increasing access”).
- As of 8am tomorrow, accompanied minors under the age of 12 will no longer need their own QR code.
- A new structure will be erected in front of “Checkpoint Charlie”, the “Checkpoint Charlie Kiosk”. The Kiosk staff will be responsible for dealing with the annoying small crowd that accumulates daily of people whose QR code isn’t working, tourists whose guidebook tells them to visit the campus, parents who want to accompany their child onto campus, children above the age of 12 without their own QR code, etc.
If you want to better understand how Columbia ended up where it is, you can read the 36 previous postings in this series. In retrospect, this is all about support for the ongoing Israeli campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, which continues with daily slaughter of civilians and demolitions of their homes and communities in Gaza, the West Bank, and now southern Lebanon. The Fascist regime now ruling the US both enables this and has effectively used bogus accusations of “antisemitism” to damage and exert control over prominent institutions they consider to be enemies.
The campaign to paint anti-genocide demonstrations as “antisemitic”, violent and threatening to people’s “safety” began not under Trump but under the Biden administration. For a clear explanation of the logic of these accusations, I can recommend the writings of Scott Aaronson, especially his essay on Deep Zionism. In his view, Palestinians want to murder him and his family. To him what’s going on in Gaza is not genocide but the necessary murder of the families of those who want to murder his family (for some reason he feels that this should be done with “middle-finger raised high”). If you chant pro-Palestinian slogans, you too want to murder his family. Hard to argue with the idea that allowing potential murderers on campus is a safety concern, so, here we are.
