On Administration, and On Heroism
If you are going to give students a liberal education, you should not be surprised when they care more about what's right than about the university's reputation
As I write this, the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia has spawned solidarity encampments at colleges and universities across the United States. I’m following this especially closely because I am an alumnus of the university who has had over a decade to think about the potent admixture of admiration and revulsion that it inspires in me. On the one hand, Columbia has exactly the sort of curriculum that I think is most necessary in undergraduate education, and the protests of ’68 have made it sacred ground in the history of the American left. On the other hand, those educational resources are deployed largely to educate the children of the rich, a large portion of whom will go on to jobs in socially and spiritually damaging professions like management consulting and investment banking, and the university’s administration has, since the conclusion of the aforementioned protests, run the institution as a real estate trust that treats students like an ineradicable infestation that must be managed and curbed, lest the university’s ability to extract rental fees from its massive tax-free real estate holdings be endangered.
My own time at Columbia was largely happy: I had good friends, caring instructors, and I received one of the best classical educations available anywhere in the country. A big part of that education had to do with political and moral intelligence: I learned to think in structural terms, to appreciate the complexity of human motivation, and to read with both suspicion and generosity. I also learned that one must sometimes disrupt the normal modes of education, if there is worthwhile cause to do so, and that there are people who will plead the cause of order and the ordinary modes of education in order to prevent other kinds of education from happening. Much of the latter centered on advocacy for Palestinian rights, a cause that has long attracted more stalwart support and more vicious opposition at Columbia than at nearly any other university in the United States due to its large concentration of Palestinian students and scholars, the legacy of Edward Said, the university’s strong relationship with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and other institutions of mainstream Judaism, and its relationship with the IDF through the School of General Studies. If the present reckoning over the United States’s unconscionable support for Israel’s ongoing attempt at genocide was going to erupt anywhere, Columbia was one of the most likely places for that to happen.
Authoritarianism at Columbia is not new: it was a much-lamented fact of life when I was a student there. The administration has always seemed to live in a constant state of terror at the slightest signs of disorder on campus. One major symptom of this was the obsessive bureaucratic overregulation of student org meeting spaces: nearly all meetings and events had to be scheduled a full semester in advance, you could always be bumped for a paying outside customer, and losing your org’s booking privileges was a perpetual threat if you stepped out of line. Desirable spaces suitable for special occasions were technically available but hidden behind layers of bureaucratic red tape. If students were allowed even slightly too much freedom, it seemed, then all hell would break loose. Better to keep everything confined, ordered, thoroughly regulated, and utterly predictable.
There’s a problem with this attitude, though, which is that learning is an anarchic, unpredictable process, especially when it takes place under the kind of curriculum Columbia purports to value. I’ve gone on the record elsewhere as a thoroughgoing partisan of “great books” curricula, many of which are based on the Columbia model: reading primary sources of literature and philosophy (and studying their visual and musical equivalents) unbound by the constraints of particular academic disciplines is one of the best ways to get to the heart of the questions that occupy us all our lives. If you are fortunate enough to have such an education, and you take it seriously even for a little while, you will probably start to ascribe a great deal more importance to things like justice and truth and right action and a great deal less to things like career prospects and regular order and your university’s reputation in the press. If the former things require compromising or endangering the latter, you will be more willing to do that, because you will have seen that there is something important about acting rightly even at risk to oneself, especially when there are others risking far more for the same just cause. You will be more willing to take the risk of doing something heroic.
Columbia’s administration claims to value the kind of education that it offers, but I wonder if these administrators really know the kind of dangerous game they are playing. Their main interests are in keeping order and appeasing wealthy donors, but this was always bound to place them on the opposite side from their more serious and sensitive students: wealthy donors are not, after all, reliable sources of advice for sound moral action, as any serious ethical reading will teach you. Placating such people is always an exercise in dancing with the devil, in seeing how much you can wring from Old Scratch before he gets the better of you. The problem with this is that the devil, who has always made his home in the back rooms and closed meetings where wealth and power hide their dealings, will always come out ahead. Columbia’s President Shafik thought she had learned from the mistakes of her fellow Ivy League presidents, so she sold out her students and colleagues in a congressional hearing and called in the infamously lawless and brutal NYPD to detain her own students, thinking that this would keep the money flowing and keep the right wing outrage machine off of her. But the same congressional actors are already calling for her to resign, and her faculty is now in open revolt; she will probably not be employable as head of a world-class university again. It’s a perfect Faustian bargain: you sell out, gut your principles, and get absolutely nothing in return.
This should prompt very serious reflection from other university administrators, if their years in administration have not yet withered their critical capabilities. The contradictions that were perhaps sharpest at Columbia are nonetheless present in every American university: if you educate students toward moral freedom, you cannot expect that they will fall in line when it’s convenient for you. University presidents and rectors have sometimes understood this: good presidents have known that the communities they oversaw were by nature chaotic and, consequently, have governed with a lighter hand, understanding that large protests, too, are educational and that ensuring that students—both those involve in protesting and those not—can safely learn is the highest priority. Disruptive student protests are not a malfunction of the university system but one of its most laudable outcomes, because students can and should recognize that there are higher goods that might call for a break with normal order. They are frustrating and costly and they are also absolutely essential, a reliable barometer of an education system that is working. Plan for them to happen, keep everyone safe, speak seriously with protestors, and your university will flourish as a place that takes ideas seriously. Perhaps this will placate donors, or perhaps it won’t; the rich are not known to be especially receptive to philosophy. But you as an administrator will be able to sleep at night knowing that your students take what you have given them seriously enough that they are willing to turn it into action. You will have become part of a way of living; is that not what every teacher hopes for?