Columbia University has a doxing problem
University of Southern California Campus Protests against the Israel-Hamas War. Separated from the Protest: University Students’ Final Exams Are Moving To Quiet Places
In the span of a day on Thursday, almost 100 people were taken to custody at the University of Princeton, while dozens were arrested at the University of Atlanta for protesting a police training facility. Arrests were also reported at The Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota, among others.
93 people were arrested for being on the campus of The University of Southern California. The department did not say what the weapon was, only that one arrest was made for assault with a deadly weapon. The Los Angeles Police Department did not report any injuries.
Also on Thursday, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles announced it would cancel its main commencement ceremony, citing the need for additional security measures. It had already canceled its valedictorian’s speech because of safety concerns stemming from the backlash she received over her social media posts about the Israel-Hamas war.
At The University of Texas at Austin, almost 60 people were arrested Wednesday for loitering, but charges have been dropped for most of them. On the day of the rally, faculty members gathered and called for the school’s president, Jay Hartzell, to step down after he praised law enforcement for exercising restraint against the protesters.
Students from other universities and area activists clashed with city, state and university law enforcement on the Emory University campus. Videos on social media show police detaining protesters and using tasers and tear gas.
“Now let me emphasize, there is nothing threatening your safety that’s going on at this moment,” she said. “But yet you are our primary concern. To protect your safety and the integrity of our academic program we are relocating student final exams.”
In a video message on Thursday, dean Dayna Bowen said that the school is trying to move the law students’ final exams to quiet more and safer places because of the protests.
A second day of protests is taking place at George Washington University despite a 7 p.m. deadline for clearing the camps.
The Disruption of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest Campus in Harlem: Students in the Context of the Israeli-Hamas Conflict
She is deeply sensitive to the fact that graduating seniors spent their first year of college at a different school. “We all want to see these students celebrate their graduation with family and friends.”
The deadline to reach an agreement with students was 10PM, and it was announced later that day by Shafik. Amid negotiations with student representatives from Columbia University Apartheid Divest — the group behind the encampment — Shafik threatened to call both the National Guard and the NYPD, the student group said in a statement. The few hundred students who stayed on the lawn started preparing for arrests, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator. In the end, neither the police nor the National Guard were called: instead, Shafik extended the deadline until the early hours of Friday.
Columbia officials said Thursday that protesters had agreed to take certain steps, including removing a significant number of tents, limiting the protests to Columbia students only, complying with fire department requirements and prohibiting discriminatory or harassing language.
The deadline to dismantle the setup was originally set at midnight on Tuesday, but the administration said it was due to constructive dialogue.
Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack killed 1,200 Israelis and resulted in another roughly 240 being taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities, while Gaza’s health ministry says Israel’s military response has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women and children.
Still, student activists nationwide appear determined to show their support for people in Gaza and push their universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel or who otherwise profit from its war with Hamas.
Some, including the Society of Afro- American Students (SAS), were upset that Columbia University was moving ahead with plans to build a gym that critics said would give only limited and second-class access to the local community.
Eleanor Stein said that the building had been in one of the few green spaces in Harlem. “And we felt that it couldn’t be business as usual, that the university itself was engaging in an indefensible takeover of Harlem land and an indefensible participation and complicity with the Vietnam War effort.”
White and Black students coordinated a protest against the gym — and then hundreds of students moved from there to take over office and classroom buildings, enforcing a strike against the school.
The troubles on Columbia University’s campus began over six months ago, long before last week’s protests. The pro-Palestine protest by Columbia students began circling after the attack on Israel, when a box truck covered in screens displayed the names and photos of dozens of students. The truck, paid for by the conservative nonprofit Accuracy in Media, called the students “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.”
Her testimony followed months of debate and argument over free speech on campus. The House Education Committee investigated the school’s response to antisemitism.
The radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) also opposed Columbia’s links to the Institute for Defense Analyses — a think tank researching and analyzing weapons and strategies to use in Vietnam. The CIA and military services were banned from on-campus recruiting.
For many Columbia students in 1968, their protest was motivated by anger over the Vietnam War — and changes to the military draft that were chipping away at students’ deferments, particularly in graduate schools.
There are parallels between the two high-profile events, most starkly the proliferation of similar protests around the country, as students call for an end to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The New York Police Department was urged to remove protesters from the area one day after the decision was made.
Hundreds of students were arrested using nightsticks and horses in a chaotic scene at the Police Department on the campus in 1968.
Police and city officials said last week that no injuries were reported when the demonstrators were removed from Columbia’s campus.
Is my name a liability? A case study of a black student encampment at Columbia College and its connection with the covid-19 war
Reporters for Columbia’s college radio station WKCR (including longtime NPR host Robert Siegel), were present when Henry Coleman, acting dean of Columbia College, sought to confirm his status as he stood among a crowd of students in the lobby of Hamilton Hall.
“SAS leaders later explained that the spontaneous, participatory, and less-defined politics of SDS-led white students interfered” with the Black students’ goals that centered on racial justice and equity, according to an online history exhibit assembled by the Columbia’s library system.
“In fact, when the police entered barricaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, the occupying students avoided struggles with the police, calmly marched out the main entrance of the building to the police vans waiting on College Walk,” according to the library’s online exhibit.
But some divisions emerged among the students: Black protesters asked their white counterparts to leave a building due to their different approach and focus, for instance. The women who were part of both groups said they embraced the feminist movement because they were frustrated with being left out of positions of power.
Throughout the week, the students I speak to redirect the conversation back to the war. They ask why their chants are considered violent while counterprotesters seem to get away with spraying students with hazardous chemicals and sending death threats to students who have lost relatives in Gaza. Thursday night, hours before the deadline was due to expire, a group of Christians outside of Columbia stood in support of Israel. Show your face! Show your face!” the demonstrators chanted at students on the other side of the fence. Some of them tried to get through the gates.
Like most of the other people who filtered in and out of the encampment, the student stayed masked as we spoke. Students covered their faces with surgical masks, sunglasses, and kaffiyehs, both to prevent spreading covid-19 in close quarters and to shield themselves from the prying eyes of outsiders who they feared would target them over their involvement in the encampment.
The first and last name of a student in a college are not usually top secret. But when placed into a certain context and disseminated through certain media streams outside the confines of the university, a name becomes a liability — and for bad-faith actors, a weapon that can be wielded against students.
Canary Mission, which describes itself as dedicated to exposing antisemitism, featured a Columbia graduate who was the first student to be featured. Since its inception, Canary Mission has conflated antisemitic hate speech with pro-Palestinian activism; Avila Chevalier was posted on the database for her involvement in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement. The Israeli government has used Canary Mission to bar political activists from entering the country, Haaretz reported in 2018. Canary Mission has doxxed protesters in the country.
The numbers are the power of a protest. In singling out the demonstrators, the people who are trying to impede the movement seem to be trying to undermine it.
The university has designated hours for media that are 2 to 4PM and I have seen the most tense of hours during that time. The area surrounding the campsite is at its most chaotic during the brief media window, with reporters milling about looking for students to talk to, student volunteers scrambling to coordinate interviews, and right-wing agitators trying to lure undergrads into giving them inflammatory quotes. By 5:30 or 6PM, once the camera crews are mostly gone and the media frenzy has died down, campus life — the encampment included — regains a sense of normalcy.
On Wednesday, he said that it was just a bunch of nerds. I hear that the pro-Haze mob has taken over Columbia, as I check the social networking site. There’s a huge disparity between what’s going on here and how it’s been portrayed by the media.”
“I think what we’re seeing is that many faculty are afraid to speak up for their students who have faced harassment, doxxing, arrest, or even eviction over the past several months because their employment at the school is so unprotected and precarious,” the faculty member, who wished to remain anonymous, told me. More than half of Columbia instructors are so-called “contingent” faculty. Over 160 professors at Columbia signed an open letter in support of the students who were arrested, suspended, and protesting.
At a Tuesday afternoon press conference on the edge of Morningside Park, an acclaimed Holocaust studies professor said the university had fostered an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in which some people were too afraid to tell their names.
By Wednesday the media circus was in full swing. As I spoke off the record with two members of the encampment whose faces were covered by sunglasses and scarves, a man approached us and asked why we weren’t in class; off to the side, I noticed provocateur and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. A few hours later, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) held a press conference on the other side of the quad. This is a risk. This isn’t the First Amendment. There was a lot of booing and chants of “Mike, you suck” when Johnson said this was not free expression. Then he urged President Joe Biden to call in the National Guard.
