Terms like “quislings,” “Thermidor,” “Vichy,” and “submission” have circulated widely in articles denouncing Columbia’s surrender, zeroing in on betrayal as the proper note to strike. But it is not really betrayal when those committing the action have no investment in the principles betrayed. Their whole mission, in fact, has been to explode Columbia’s hard-won aura of gritty New York trendsetting evident in its long line of antinomian originals. These populists and progressives were much more than star professors. They managed to turn the public conversation in enduring ways toward the rights of immigrants, women, the poor, and embattled points of view; some questioned the hierarchies and irrationality of capitalism itself — among them, John Dewey, Franz Boas, members of the Frankfurt School in exile (such as Paul Lazarsfeld and, for a short while, Theodor W. Adorno), Karl Polanyi, Margaret Mead, C. Wright Mills, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
To that list, of course, should be added the absent presence behind each of the recent government demands on Columbia: Edward W. Said, the most important Palestinian critic and scholar and one of the most influential left public intellectuals of the 20th century. Put another way, the assault on Columbia was a deliberate attack on Said’s legacies. It was neither indirect nor occasional, but a personal assault designed to undo the world that Said made visible.
Writing to his sister Joyce in December 1967, Said captured what a lot of Columbia faculty no doubt feel today:
I now think that one might be better off, if one is intelligent and has his wits about him, remaining [in the Middle East]. America is so utterly crazy now, and exactly those people who should be guiding its collective life — i.e., people with intellect and mind — are so totally alienated from its collective life, that it’s pretty horrible to watch the national life go down the drain.
It’s one of those moments, to borrow an image from Giambattista Vico, when history spirals forward and downward — repeating the past but with a difference. In May 1968, Herb Liebowitz wrote Said a letter that could easily be mistaken for an account of the brutalization of the encampment protests by New York City police in 2023: “Students you’ve taught bloodied in the head, or bumped and banged along the ground as they were thrown out of the buildings and into paddy wagons; tactical police dressed like stormtroopers, their faces contorted in sadistic rage.”
There have always been two Columbias vying for control. The hot center of radical student revolt and the East Coast snobbery of those products of Ivy League “feeders” and finishing schools. The center of postcolonial critique and exposés on the “power elite” and a real-estate empire busy gentrifying neighboring Harlem. Columbia, it turns out, also has a long history of expelling students for nonviolent protest. In the 1930s, these included students opposed to offering Nazis a platform; in the 1950s, anyone labeled “communist”; during World War I, faculty pacifists.