There will not be a course about the Occupy Wall Street movement offered for Columbia students during the spring semester, officials say.
Earlier this month, a listing for a course entitled “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement” appeared on the anthropology department’s directory of Spring 2012 classes, setting off a media frenzy. According to the syllabus, the course would have provided students the opportunity to conduct fieldwork about the Occupy movement in New York, but the online listing appeared before the Committee on Instruction approved the course officially.
“The course came in very late,” School of General Studies Dean Peter Awn, who serves on the COI, said. “The last COI meeting just came and went, and it never hit the directory of classes.”
Awn added that the course would have contributed to the “marketplace of ideas” at Columbia, but the syllabus needed to explicate the class’s purpose and outline what fieldwork students would be doing at protest sites.
“There were structural issues, and the goals of the course just needed to be clarified,” he said. “The department clearly wants to get involved in the issue, and given the time and that we’re in the middle of a political campaign, it’s even more interesting.”
Professor Jacqueline van Gorkom, who also serves on the COI, said in an email that “very briefly, nothing has changed” since the last COI meeting on Dec. 7.
The next meeting is Feb. 3, well after classes start, “and I have no idea whether we will discuss the course,” she said.
Discussion about the course within the COI has been minimal so far. Van Gorkom said she thought that if the course were approved for a future semester, it would be more of a research seminar.
“It sounds like a very good idea—it’s something very interesting that is happening now, and it’s kind of crazy not to analyze that,” she said last week. “Aren’t we supposed to do that?”
Awn stressed that the role of the COI is more “procedural.” He said that the content of courses is mostly up to their respective departments and that the COI is not “the thought police.”
“You can’t have a professor of sociology telling a professor of chemistry what to teach,” he said. “The departments will send a course to the COI—however, the first line of police is the department itself.”
Last week, Associate Vice President for Public Affairs Brian Connolly said in an email: “A course does not appear in the official directory of classes and cannot be offered in advance of required approvals,” he said.
“The study of contemporary political, economic and social issues is entirely appropriate and has a long history here,” Connolly added.
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