The Importance of Protest on Campus

Of all the criticism lobbed at hunger strikers and their supporters these past few weeks, most troubling is the charge that strikers were myopically and hyperbolically obsessed about a few faculty hires and texts in light of the real world issues like the presidential campaign or the war in Iraq or the human rights violations in Burma. While the crises on this campus can in no way be equated to war or genocide, the suggestion to “go fight real battles” carries with it the implicit assumption that what is at stake carries few consequences for the community within our gates and even fewer for those outside.
Besides questioning the importance of the strikers’ four demands, many doubted that they were even related to each other. Further, many rebuffed the notion that students—not just the five on South Lawn, but any at all—should have a say in the way our University is run.

Skeptics insisted with words of ownership that strikers “hijacked,” “co-opted,” and “took over” to emphasize that the students were somehow interlopers, outsiders with no authority to talk about the University culture or experience. The overall critique seemed to be that the hunger strike was an overblown gesture to meddle in an affair that was both insignificant and out of the strikers’ province.

Of course, the unspoken tension has been about University curriculum and policy, but it is also a battle of vision: we are debating just what a university is and what it means to the world it occupies and affects.

Denying Columbia’s powerfully global role eschews the accountability, scrutiny, and responsibility we routinely ask of governments, big businesses, and other world players. Columbia, more than a place of learning, is the third largest landowner in New York City. It can bring in someone as notorious as the president of Iran and as controversial as the Minutemen and set the tone and attitude for worldwide dialogue. The kind of research and scholarship generated in our labs, libraries, and classrooms have a far-flung impact on how we live and what we understand. In its own mission statement, our University is brutally self-aware of its role in the world: we pledge to address “global issues,” forge “academic relationships with many countries and regions,” and “carry the products of its efforts to the world.”

This is why the way we introduce world leaders, react to nooses on professors’ doors, develop our curriculum, support our ethnic studies department, and expand into neighborhoods is vital enough to appear and linger on our intellectual and moral radar screens. Manacled to its ideological and political climate, the University, never a neutral or objective institution, quietly proclaims and perpetuates certain values—something we always forget when we mythologize free speech on this campus. As community members, we, like the strikers, should be staunchly devoted to critiquing and reshaping such values when they grate against what we know to be just and honorable. The strikers’ demands, far from being trivial or self-important, are about acknowledging the seismic reverberations we send from country to country, and taking part in defining the message we articulate and reinforce daily. The demands, then, are about us and about more than us: they will have real-life and wide-reaching effects past our four years and past our campus.

Take the Core Curriculum, for instance. The myth goes that the curriculum is some ideology-free gaze at literature, philosophy, art, and science chosen for its merit. But if you have looked at the Core’s Web site, you know that the Core was created in the early 1900s to answer our postwar anxieties about preserving Western culture: from its inception, it served a cultural agenda and was an assertion of ideology. It functioned as a careful arrangement of texts and lesson plans meant to send a message about values and perspectives. What the strikers propose is not to politicize the curriculum, but to shift the politics of an already political agenda. To examine race, colonialism, gender, class, and power is to answer our contemporary needs as a technologically connected and globalized world and to offer cultural literacy in the face of our most pressing questions of power, difference, and disparity—not unlike offering national identity as the Core founders did in the chaotic climate after World War I. When an academic institution can cut ties with its assumption of Western superiority and devote itself to scrutinizing and reassessing ways in which it engages in world issues, something gets said about a nation’s possibility to do the same.

Connected to that is our need to bolster ethnic studies. I cannot forget when I first applied to college and watched as Harvard’s brilliant and accomplished scholars in its African and African-American studies department fled, feeling that their work was unvalued. When we neglect and undermine our ethnic studies and Institute for Research in African-American Studies, we at Columbia are sending that same message that chilled me those three years ago: we refuse to have more than nominal diversity. If our students and faculty of color will mean nothing about the way we as a University relate, socialize, and educate, they will mean nothing, period, which is a consequence of values that will effect more than the students who will take classes in or collaborate with ethnic studies.

Which brings me to expansion. As someone who read Community Board 9’s 197-a and Columbia’s 197-c, I still am no expert about the economic market or city planning­—crucial aspects of dialogue on expansion. My concern comes from a different place and is just as crucial to that dialogue. This is about more than who will be displaced and how high the buildings will reach and how much space we need for research facilities. Perhaps expansion is tragically inevitable.

Nobody—including the Community Board—argues for that point, now moot. What is important now is how we will expand. If we do not make more of an effort to collaborate, respect, and uplift our Harlem neighbors as we undergo our project, we operate as just another corporation following the rules of business. But we aren’t just another corporation. We are a University, and that binds us to a higher, sometimes less practical, set of rules as we tell the world about our values and our building of a world community.

Candace Mitchell is a Columbia College junior majoring in English.
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