
( Stefan Jeremiah / AP Photo )
Activists at Columbia occupied a building overnight as administrators threatened to start suspending students. Joseph Howley, associate professor of classics at Columbia University, talks about how he and other faculty are supporting protesters at Columbia and Hadeeqa Arzoo, vice president of CCNY’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and organizer at the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment, shares what activists at the City College of New York are demanding.
Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. You were just listening to Nuala McGovern on the BBC there, right? Hosting today from the WNYC studios. Nuala will be on with us live on this show in the eleven o'clock hour to talk about her reporting and hosting trip from London to New York. You heard that she was interviewing people about congestion pricing at the end there. We will definitely compare notes on congestion pricing. London has had it for 21 years now. We'll also talk about immigration policy and more, and maybe a little reminiscing because Nuala was the lead producer of this show from 2001 to 2009 before going to London and becoming a global BBC anchor there.
That's coming up next hour, but we'll start here. You've been hearing in the news about the many campus protests, of course, taking place around the country right now calling, depending on the campus, for a ceasefire in Gaza, divestment from businesses or academic pursuits connected to Israel or the Israeli military, transparency in university finances to assess those ties, and sometimes other things. Again, there are differences at different schools. You've been hearing about the latest developments at Columbia, specifically the 2:00 PM deadline yesterday for students to leave the encampment on the school's main lawn or be suspended, and then overnight a smaller group of students breaking into and occupying one of the academic buildings, Hamilton Hall.
On this show, we've been continuing to try in good faith to get multiple points of view on the protests, including discussion of what they're calling for, the use of the NYPD and other law enforcement against the protestors, the effect on the presidential race, involvement of Republican members of Congress calling for the use of the military to clear campus encampments, the demands from both protestors and anti-protestors for the President of Columbia to resign, the expressions of anti-Semitism that have been documented at some of the protests and the fear that many Jewish students are experiencing and more.
On the phones, we've invited participants, supporters, detractors, and others to call in. Today we will hear for the first time as actual guests on the show, a student protest leader and a faculty member supporting student protestors. The student is Hadeeqa Arzoo from City College, CCNY, the CUNY campus at Broadway and 137th Street in Manhattan. She's vice president of the City College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. She is studying political science and international relations with a minor in human rights. She's an organizer with the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
She's been a registrar for a Democratic Party voter registration initiative on Long Island and worked for political candidates Anna Kaplan and Reema Rasool there. Also an intern with the International Rescue Committee and more. Her top-line bio on LinkedIn also says changemaker, activist, leader, empathy enthusiast, City College student. Hadeeqa Arzoo, thank you for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.
Hadeeqa Arzoo: Thanks so much, Brian. Thanks for having me.
Brian Lehrer: The faculty member is Joseph Howley, a professor of classics at Columbia, who tells us he's been active in campus organizing this year against the war and in support of students, as he put it. He's also a member of a group of Jewish faculty members at Columbia who sent a letter to the university's president, Minouche Shafik, a letter called Jewish Faculty Reject The Weaponization Of Anti-Semitism. In his day job as a classics professor, his Columbia Bio page says he teaches Latin, the history of the book, and literature humanities in Columbia's core curriculum.
Has published articles including Book-Burning and the Uses of Writing in Ancient Rome in the Journal of Roman Studies, and he's working on his own book to be called Slavery and the Roman Book: A History of the Roman Book Seen Through the Lens of the Enslaved Labor on which it Depended. Professor Joseph Howley, thanks very much for coming on. Welcome to you to WNYC.
Joseph Howley: Thanks so much for having us, Brian.
Brian Lehrer: Hadeeqa, would you like to start and just describe what's happening at City College? Paint the visual picture as you see it for our radio listeners and describe what your goals or demands are.
Hadeeqa Arzoo: Hi. Yes, for sure. I think I should start with Gaza, because we're watching students and workers just like us being massacred and CUNY is complicit and we cannot go on with business as usual because in the last 206 days, the Zionist state has massacred over 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and the Zionist military has systemically destroyed every single university and institution of higher education in Gaza and Palestinian universities in the West Bank are being sustained and attacked. Our school, being a funder of these deaths and this genocide, it just has me thinking, "How am I supposed to feel at this point?"
As students and workers at CUNY, we are devastated and furious that our university funds and profits off of the companies that create weapons used to kill our peers in Palestine. CUNY has no business profiting off of weapon manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, and we know this. Our encampment is a part of the national and international student uprising to demand an end to genocide for full liberation of the Palestinian people.
We're standing strong together to disrupt university operations, to force administration who either cut ties with the Zionist state and Zionism, and finally be on the right side of history. We're launching the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment to demand that the CUNY system disclose and divest now, and we won't move until our five demands are met.
Brian Lehrer: I'll just acknowledge on the use of the word genocide that there are people who say that doesn't apply here no matter what atrocities may be taking place, but that's just a debate acknowledged not to be had. How many tents or participants would you say there are actively involved with the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment at City College at this point?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: The number fluctuates. I've noticed that since we started last Thursday, every day the numbers just keep going up, which is really cool to see. I think we started off with around a hundred-tens and now we are at-- I don't want to give an exact number because I didn't go around counting, but-
Brian Lehrer: Sure.
Hadeeqa Arzoo: -we're definitely at more than a hundred. In regards to people and members there, on average we have like 300, 400 a day and that number keeps increasing.
Brian Lehrer: There are of course many CUNY campuses throughout the city, as our listeners know. My understanding is that the CCNY Encampment there on the Broadway 137th Street campus has been designated the one for all of CUNY and that students from different CUNY schools are coming to participate at different times. How close to accurate is that?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: Yes, that's definitely accurate because we are keeping a centralized CUNY front. We all function with each other and we just chose CCNY specifically to have a designated spot to have our people united. We chose CCNY as our encampment location because we're standing on a lot of revolutionary history actually of what came before us, because in 1969 student protests, the occupied campus buildings right here at CCNY. The students in '69 had another five demands. We're reflecting that in our protests today. They had five demands advocating for racial and economic equity within CUNY. It is definitely symbolic as well to be united at CCNY specifically, but we're, of course, CUNY-wide.
Brian Lehrer: On the demands, I mentioned in the intro that demands vary from school to school, and I read the mission and demand statement from the CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and assuming I saw the real document, the demands include not just the divestment from and boycott of Israel generally, divest specifically from companies that make weapons used by the Israeli military, you mentioned some of them, but also more locally, making CUNY tuition free.
Again, removing the name Colin Powell from the CUNY School of Civic and Global Leadership, no training of campus security by the NYPD, among other things, assuming that's all accurate, why expand to that extent rather than focus more narrowly for the moment on the war?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: For sure. I think it would be quite the injustice to trivialize an issue into just an issue of one region, or one place or one genocide, because we know that the same beast that creates the genocide that's happening in the Gaza, that has created colonization in Palestine, is the same beast that is colonization in Puerto Rico or in the Philippines. It's the same beast that has imperialism all over the Middle East. It's the same beast of capitalism that oppresses and exploits the working class and every part of the world.
We know that not only is it important to talk about the intersections between Palestine and so many other movements of liberation, but it's in fact interconnected, and the liberation of Palestine will not happen unless we have the liberation of the Philippines, the liberation of Kashmir, the liberation of the people globally. In the belly of the beast, we know that it's important to talk about these intersections and give the true full story of what is happening.
Brian Lehrer: I'm going to ask you one more question for now, then we'll bring in Professor Howley from Columbia, then we'll go back and forth. Listeners, I see that some people are starting to call in already, and you are of course welcome. We can take a few phone calls or questions via text as well as phone calls if you want to ask something of our guests, City College student Hadeeqa Arzoo, vice president of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at City College, and Columbia classics professor, Joseph Howley, among other things, a signatory to the letter from various Jewish Columbia faculty called Jewish Faculty Reject the Weaponization of Anti-Semitism.
As in all our segments, folks, but usually I don't need to remind people, no name-calling and keep the questions respectful, even if you may disagree with their points of view, even strongly. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. The one additional question for you for now, Hadeeqa, I see in the mission and demand statement the words Israel and Israeli are used in quotation marks and with the letter I at the beginning, the word not capitalized, and the demand for not just a cease fire or divestment from Israeli military-linked businesses, but also for what the statement calls an academic boycott, which includes relationships with Israeli universities of various kinds.
Those kinds of things strike some Jewish people as where one of the lines is between protesting occupation and anti-Semitism, demonization even of Israeli academic relationships. How do you see that issue?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: In regards to Zionist institutions, we know that the broader definition of Zionism is the "right to a Jewish homeland," which necessarily has required the genocide of Palestinian people and the colonization of Palestine. There is no way to create a state out of thin air, which only embodies one group of people without ethnically cleansing another that was already there.
We know that Zionist ideology and Zionism is in fact colonialism, and so with that being said, we condemn all Zionist institutions and we demand that colonialism, that form of colonialism and ethnic cleansing is removed from our institutions and is not burdened onto our students, onto our CUNY community members to be enabling the ongoing colonization of Palestine. [crosstalk] We know that [unintelligible 00:13:19]
Brian Lehrer: Is that to say that those who the mission statement and demands represent would not be in support of a two-state solution, where one to be agreed to by Palestinian leadership and Israeli leadership?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: We believe in complete Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea, we say it all the time, which is a full one-state Palestinian solution.
Brian Lehrer: When you say full-- Sorry, I have to follow up because of the way you put it. One-state Palestinian solution, does that mean a pluralistic democracy where everybody is equal or something like-- I saw one sign at Columbia that I don't know how many people it represents, but it made the news. Rather than from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea Palestine will be Arab. I'm just curious about that distinction since you said Palestinian and I don't want to mischaracterize you, but you were saying something along those lines.
Hadeeqa Arzoo: Prior to 1948, the full land that you know today that people refer to as the Zionist state, excluding Golan Heights, was all Palestine and is still Palestine, but is just being called something else. We want all of it back, rightfully so, because that was all Palestinian land. In regards to governance, post-liberation, that is a conversation that I leave to the Palestinians living within Palestine because I am, one, not there, and two, I am not Palestinian.
All I know is that it is morally and ethically inhumane to colonize a land and to oppress the people. When it comes to governance, that should be a conversation reserved for the people in Palestine after liberation, but as of right now, we need to reach a point in which we are liberated
Brian Lehrer: All the people in Palestine, because it's about half and half at this point, I think, roughly, right?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: There is a large amount of settlers within Palestine that are currently continuing occupations within the West Bank as well, and of course, we know the open-air prison that is Gaza. We 100% believe in humanity. That's why we do any of this and all of this for all people. We know that human rights are not something that we play around with. In fact, the reason why we do any of this is for the sake of human rights. Indeed, we would not be contradictory in advocating for human rights for Palestinian people and not advocate for it for the entire global community.
Brian Lehrer: Turning to Professor Howley from Columbia. Professor, would you like to describe in a little more detail your role as a faculty member supporting protesting students and the context of what kind of faculty group you belong to?
Joseph Howley: Sure. Brian, I belong to a few different faculty groups. I'm a member of our Columbia chapter of the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors. Since the fall, I've been a member of faculty and staff for Justice in Palestine, and I've also, as you said, been a member of this loose coalition of progressive Jewish faculty who have been writing to administrators, trying to speak out about the weaponization of anti-Semitism and its role in the larger national attack on higher education in this country.
Brian Lehrer: The letter you and others signed, Jewish Faculty Reject the Weaponization of Anti-Semitism. This was published just before the encampment was built, and in anticipation of President Shafik's testimony before Congress, if I'm reading the timing right. Would you like to describe what you mean by weaponization and who you think is doing that?
Joseph Howley: Sure. Well, I think we're in a very specific and dangerous moment now because the false and mendacious charge of anti-Semitism applied to any criticism of the state of Israel or its actions in order to suppress that criticism is a longstanding technique. We all know it very well. We're in a dangerous moment right now where the folks who are interested in suppressing criticism of Israel in that way have made common cause with a broad swath of the American Right, the MAGA Trump [unintelligible 00:17:56] who are just interested in attacking higher education in general.
We've seen this at public universities across the country, people going after curricula, removing tenure, shutting down centers, making it so that you can't teach about race or you can't teach about gender. Those folks, I think, have identified common cause with the folks who want to suppress any criticism of Israel or any speech on behalf of Palestinians, and we're now being faced with a kind of attack from a much broader coalition than we normally were.
When we talk about the weaponization of anti-Semitism, we're talking about, for example, right-wing lawmakers having the chutzpah to interrogate university presidents about anti-Semitism. Members of the Republican party whose supporters just a few years ago were marching through the campus of University of Virginia chanting about the great replacement theory.
These are people where none of us really think that there's a credible interest in the well-being of all Jews or of all minoritized communities on university campuses, and also lawmakers and pundits, where frankly, we don't believe anyone has a sincere interest in universities as context of learning or the pursuit of knowledge. When we talk about weaponization of anti-Semitism, we're talking about taking a very important idea.
In order to combat anti-Semitism, which is a real thing in the world, we need to have an understanding of what it is. We need to be able to identify and know what is anti-Semitism, what isn't anti-Semitism. What we're faced with right now is a really bad faith attempt to pervert that definition for short-term political gains, and it just makes everyone unsafe and also opens us up to these really dangerous, bad faith attacks. I hope that makes sense.
Brian Lehrer: I see the letter says anti-Semitism, along with racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and other forms of hate exist at Columbia as they do everywhere, and when anti-Semitism rears its ugly head, its perpetrators should be held to account, it says. You say it's absurd to say that is rampant on Columbia's campus. I want to ask you, given some of the instances that have been recorded on video and are being seen online, has your view of that changed at all or how would you describe the extent of anti-Semitism? We know, just as a given, that there's so much Islamophobia in America, that's all the time. How would you describe the extent of anti-Semitism that's become apparent in the last few weeks at Columbia as you see it?
Joseph Howley: I'd like to say three things about this. First, as a Jewish faculty member, I recognize that I am not, as some people like to say, visibly Jewish. I don't wear a kippah, I don't wear jewelry that proclaims my Jewishness. I think we would all acknowledge that each of us has a different experience of this, and I understand that other Jewish members of our university community are having a different experience.
Second, as you say, there have been incidents all year and ramping up in recent weeks of really disgusting attacks on Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim members of our community and they are going under-reported, they are going unaddressed by the university. I think you need to really be mindful of the extent to which the videos you're seeing are both selective and are being amplified to serve a certain narrative, because I do not think that-- in the recent weeks, we have seen an increase in systematic or cultural widespread anti-Semitism on our campus.
I will say this, when the university leadership called in police on our student encampment, less than 24 hours after their disastrous appearance in front of their congressional hearing and without even-- our university leaders did not even have the decency to come back to New York City before they had called the cops on our students. When they called the cops on our students and arrested over 100 students, including, let me say, dozens of Jewish anti-war student activists, not only did they endanger all the students in that encampment, but they made our campus a flashpoint.
They made us a target for outside protesters, radical elements from all over the city. The things you've seen online have been the result of the university's failure to take anti-Semitism seriously and instead try to police student behavior. We've had protesters outside the gates screaming really ugly things on all sides of this issue. We've even had people on campus saying and doing unpleasant things. I think what this shows is that if you want to take anti-Semitism seriously or take any form of prejudice seriously, you don't treat it as a law and order problem. You can't discipline and punish your way out of prejudice.
These are actually educational problems, and at every step of this entire disastrous year, our university leadership has completely ignored those of us who are educators and completely [unintelligible 00:22:45] any kind of educational solution, and instead, they have made things worse, they've dialed up the temperature. I think they've shown really the error of approaching problems like this in that way.
Brian Lehrer: Some Jewish students say they no longer feel safe on campus, and I will add again for context, besides that I've seen reporting on some pro-Palestinian demonstrators saying what seemed like anti-Semitic things, that absolutely, I've seen the reporting on pro-Palestinian demonstrators being physically attacked this semester with some kind of chemical spray in January, and not to downplay lack of safety for Arabs and Muslims in the United States always and on college campuses, including Columbia now, but do you argue that the campus is very safe for Jewish students or for anyone today or no different from the past for those families I've been hearing from who say, individually or maybe their children who were the students, do not feel safe?
Joseph Howley: I'm not going to argue with someone who says they don't feel safe. One of the most important things we have to do as educators is take the feelings of all of our students very seriously. I would encourage everyone to think very carefully about where your concerns about safety are coming from. Have you been on campus? Have you walked across campus? Have you interacted with other people on campus? Because I have been on campus every day since the student encampment went up and it has been calm, it has been peaceful, the protesters in the encampment are very disciplined and organized and on message, campus is very quiet right now.
I have really not seen an environment of any kind of danger or unsafety. I really do think that there are bad faith actors off campus who are accelerating and exaggerating the idea of danger for Jewish students in order to push the university and push lawmakers in certain directions like this. You cannot treat the feelings, use the feelings of some Jewish students as a fig leaf for suppressing the speech of everyone or cracking down on everyone, not least because it doesn't actually do a service to those students who you think you're trying to protect or you claim you're trying to protect. When we are educating young people, we think very carefully about what we would call their social-emotional development.
At Columbia, we do a great job of admitting a diverse freshman class, and that means that people come to Columbia from all over the country, from all over the area, from lots of different environments and the most common defining experience of that is that you find yourself in a classroom or a dorm room or a dining hall with people who aren't like you, maybe people you-- you've never met someone like that before or they're expressing ideas or politics that you've never heard before.
I have to tell you that it's a very common experience for young people in those situations to experience the discomfort or confusion of encountering new ideas or different politics and turn that experience or express that experience as fear or say that person is threatening me or they're discriminating against me and sometimes they're just disagreeing with you. Our job as educators is to help young people learn what to do with those feelings and how to experience those feelings of discomfort, how to become citizens, how to be in a room with someone who disagrees with you, and where necessary, to recognize when something they've done or said is prejudiced and they really need to re-examine what they're saying and the consequences of their speech.
That is all crucial work that I and my colleagues do when we are educating college students. When the university comes along and says, capitulating to outside forces, says, "But no, in this one case, no speech about Palestine is acceptable because it's always threatening to Jews," that does enormous damage to our ability to actually educate our students how to be with one another.
Brian Lehrer: Well, that's if that's what they're really saying, no speech about Palestine. I don't know that that's what they're saying. Let me ask you one--
Joseph Howley: Well, look, Brian-
Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.
Joseph Howley: -I have to tell you this, back in the fall, the first calamitous step the University took, they suspended in November, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine and they sent out a press release at the same magnitude of press release that we use for Nobel Prize winners. They said the groups are suspended because they violated the new events policy, which by the way, had been rewritten in secret, and they said that the student groups had engaged in threats and intimidation, intimidating rhetoric at one of their protests. No one has been able to substantiate that accusation of threats and intimidating rhetoric at a protest.
It only makes sense if you accept the idea that speaking on behalf of Palestine or criticizing Israel is somehow dangerous or threatening to Jews and that's a really extremist ideological position. It was very dangerous for the university to say, "That's now university policy." We're just going to believe it when anyone tells us that political speech about Israel or Palestine is dangerous to Jews. That's what I'm talking about here and that I think created a real breach of trust. You look at the students now, people will say, "Why are the students following the rules?"
Well, back in November, the university de facto declared that we would be imposing speech codes around speech about Israel-Palestine, and I think that no one has really trusted anything that's happened since.
Joseph Howley: On what you say about no threatening speech, I'm going to play a clip from something being widely viewed. The clip of one of the students described in the New York Times and elsewhere as a leader of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in Columbia, Khymani James, a 20-year-old undergraduate from Boston, the New York Times says he, "Emerged last week as one of the leaders of the coalition group that is organizing the school's pro-Palestinian encampment." Here's the 24-second excerpt from the Instagram video of his.
Khymani James: Zionists, they don't deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don't deserve to live. The same way we're very comfortable accepting that Nazis don't deserve to live, fascists don't deserve to live, racists don't deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn't live in this world.
Brian Lehrer: I'm confident that you and most of the people in the encampment do not support that statement, but what has some Jewish students and others concerned is, if he is accurately identified as a leader of the encampment coalition, that his views represent something beyond himself and that that language as applied to any group in a diverse campus setting, as you were just describing, would make members of that group feel threatened. What's your reaction to that?
Joseph Howley: Well, I have a few reactions. First, I want to say I'm not in the encampment. I'm a faculty member and I've been working for months to support our students and their right to protest and speak on campus. Second of all, I'm here to talk about faculty and the work we're doing and what's going on on campus. I'm not going to defend or talk about things that the students are doing. That clearly is not a thing that we would want students to be saying about one another on our campus and I leave it to the students to deal with that. I think that they've already taken responsibility for those sentiments, and they've already expressed the way those sentiments don't accurately reflect the mission of the protest encampment.
I think anyone who's actually paying attention and not just looking for sound bites or muckraking in the mainstream media would recognize that the students have responded to this incident the way I would want them to. They have said this doesn't represent us, and they have distanced themselves from it. I think that this is another example of, really, the failure of the institution to deal with this situation accurately or productively.
They have over responded to the mere presence of political speech on campus by claiming there is a threat and claiming that an acquiescing to outside actors who say that this political speech represents anti-Semitism, and they've turned up the temperature. Now we have people screaming ugly things outside the gates, now we have people going through the old social media accounts of 20-year-old college students finding stupid things that they said. Look, I think this is just what you get when the university leadership mishandles something like this so disastrously.
Brian Lehrer: We will continue in a minute with City College student Hadeeqa Arzoo, who's been very patient while I interview Professor Howley from Columbia. Hadeeqa is vice president of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter there. If you're just joining us, we spoke to her at some length to begin the segment. Our other guest is Columbia Classics professor, Joseph Howley, among other things, the signatory to the letter from various Columbia faculty called Jewish Faculty Reject the Weaponization of Anti-Semitism. We'll continue with more follow-ups and some of your calls and texts right after this.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with two guests representing the student encampments at, in one case, City College at-- well, let me be very accurate. One guest from the student encampment at City College and a faculty member from Columbia who has been in support of protesting students. As I said at the beginning of the segment, this is one of the many point of view segments that we have on the Brian Lehrer Show.
This is the first one that actually involves a leader of a student protest in these last few weeks when they have become encampments and a faculty member involved with supporting those. Again, they are City College student Hadeeqa Arzoo, Vice President of Students for Justice in Palestine, the chapter there, and Columbia Classics professor, Joseph Howley, among other things, a signatory to the letter called Jewish Faculty Reject the Weaponization of Anti-Semitism. Let's take a phone call. Laura in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Laura. Thank you for calling.
Laura: Hi, thanks for taking my call. Thank you very much. What I told your screener is first of all that I think that protesting any university's investments in corporations goes not very far because some other entity is going to purchase those investments, those stocks. I think that where these students are going wrong is they really should be in front of Congress on the Department of Defense in Washington, because if the United States were enforcing its own laws about not furnishing weapons of war to entities that are actively denying human support and aid, we shouldn't be doing this.
We should not be furnishing arms to the State of Israel while it is in a humanitarian disastrous state, while it's fomenting a humanitarian disaster. I mean, let's enforce our own laws, then Columbia would not have to be doing this. That's the source. That's one thing. Second of all, about weaponization of anti-Semitism, I am glad to hear this gentleman say that how one feels about an issue is not an excuse for what I see happening among Jews.
By the way, I'm a Jew. I feel threatened is the same horrible smoke screen that right-wing conservatives have been using to do things like banning books that they don't like because they don't want their children exposed to the horrors of slavery in this country. This is disgusting that Jewish people are known for education and information and for teaching. We should want Black history taught, we should want information about gay and lesbian lifestyles to be taught. At the same time, we should be having conversations about difficult subjects.
Brian Lehrer: Laura, let me leave it there. Thank you for your call. I think there's a follow-up question there for each of you. Hadeeqa, I put the first half of her call in a question like this, I hope this is an accurate reflection, but that politically, one could argue, when she says the focus instead of on Columbia and divestment should be on our state department for providing weapons, politically, one could argue that the movement was starting to win before the encampments, public opinion was turning against how Israel was conducting the war, and President Biden started being openly critical of the way Netanyahu is conducting the war. Not that he did anything, but he was moving in that direction.
Now that it's escalated on campus to ongoing encampments that threaten graduation ceremonies and demand a broad boycott and divestment, the controversy has landed on the students rather than Biden and Israel, and maybe, maybe it's backfiring. The street demonstrations and following Biden and members of Congress everywhere was maybe much more effective. I'm curious how you see this turn in effectiveness terms.
Hadeeqa Arzoo: Well, I have a couple thoughts. First, I was thinking through the question, which was implying that we should do one approach instead of another. Whereas I always say that activism should not stop at voting, it should not stop at a boycott, it should not stop at donating, it should not stop at protesting. There are so many different ways and approaches towards achieving justice, and I think it would trivialize the issue if we were to just focus on one form of that activism because we know that this issue is not just one issue.
There's so many moving parts, so many gears turning that allow for such a gruesome and overwhelming colonization of Palestine. We know that it's important to take this approach on all fronts, and our front respectively is right now in this protesting and on the university level. I don't believe that this is slowing down or backfiring. I think that we knew exactly the climate in which we were at before we started all of this in regards to politics, and that's what allowed us to take this platform.
It gave us the room and the space to have so many people mobilized because if we didn't have hundreds of thousands of people already aware of the issue, we wouldn't see our numbers. We wouldn't have so much support as we do right now, because right now we are going strong and we see hundreds of people showing out every single day on every single one of our campuses. The last point that I wanted to make I am blanking on right now, actually.
Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's okay.
Joseph Howley: Can I speak to the divestment issue as well?
Brian Lehrer: Professor Howley, go ahead.
Joseph Howley: Look, I'm really glad that this divestment issue came up. I certainly would love it if our students could be in front of Congress making this case, but we've already seen how much interest Congress has in sincerely addressing this issue. Very little. Our students, journalists always like to ask me about this thing a student said or that thing they saw on Instagram, but all that does is detract from the actual demands of the protest encampment that our students have set up on campus. Those demands are very specific, they want Columbia University to divest from companies that sell military equipment to countries that violate human rights law.
They want Columbia University to sever its ties with the Israeli government, including our not yet built global center in Tel Aviv and our dual degree program with Tel Aviv University. The boycott and divestment movement is a very straightforward, principled call from Palestinian civil society for supporters around the world to use non-violent political pressure on the State of Israel to improve conditions for Palestinians in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
People like to say, "Oh, this protest movement is dangerous. Oh, they're threatening violence, they're calling for violence." No, boycotting divestment is the apex of nonviolent political protests. I was sitting in the room the other day with a senior university leader who said, "Look, we've actually done the math on the students' demands for divestment, and it's not very much money."
Brian Lehrer: I think I'm going to go to line 1 now. [crosstalk]
Joseph Howley: The leader was being dismissive. They said, "None of this is going to save any lives in Gaza," but my question is if divestment is not a big deal, then why is there an enormous political apparatus and machine trying to stop our students from asking for it.
Brian Lehrer: I'm going to follow up with you, Hadeeqa, on what he just said, because your CUNY students' mission statement says, when people are colonized, resistance is justified. That's a quote. When people are colonized, resistance is justified. Does that mean that the statement speaking for the group supports Hamas or the October 7th attacks? If not, what does when people are colonized, resistance is justified mean?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: The quote, when people are colonized, resistance is justified, means that when you have an ongoing regime of occupation, when people are murdering your families every single day, when children are being buried under the rubble, bombs dropping on their heads every single hour, when every university has been bombed, all the hospitals are being bombed, when there's no more institutions, no more resources being let into Gaza, resistance is justified. We are not meant to sit idly by and allow for oppression to happen, but stand up for ourselves. That is what resistance means. That comes in so many different forms. That's all I'm going to answer in regards to this question.
Brian Lehrer: You wouldn't make a distinction between Hamas style, violent resistance, October 7th style, violent resistance, and other forms of resistance?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: I said that was all I'm going to answer in regards to this question, but thank you so much, Brian.
Brian Lehrer: Okay. Artie in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Artie.
Artie: Good morning. Thank you everyone for having this conversation. I just want to introduce the fact that I am a staff member at the university and I want to thank Professor Howley for laying out some facts about what's going on, and I want to introduce some other facts about just the layout of the campus so that people can get a sense of how this escalated. One, in front of Butler Library is a closed-off space, a gated area that does not impede with anyone's ability to get to and from any buildings, including the ability to pass through campus.
There's a walkway between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues and there were ways around the initial encampment, so it wasn't obstructing anything, just so that people get that image in their mind. The actions of the administration, the escalation that they unilaterally took into their own hands led to the occupation of Hamilton Hall. This is not just a ratcheting up, but a soaring of the escalation.
Just to add to that, for staff members all throughout the university who are looking after the health and safety of the students, the administration is undermining all of our work as they're undermining the safety and health of these students by having these situations where-- When I visited on the Friday after the initial police raid, there were barriers all around the campus. When you exited at 116th Street at the one on Broadway, you were basically funneled between barriers and competing protestors.
To make your way onto campus, you had to get through an ID reader so you can get onto the campus itself, which is set up like a fortress basically, so that as soon you exit the subway station, as you make your way into the campus, you are immersed in the most intense form of the protest, which is the protest outside the gates. I've never seen the university set up like such a fortress before. [unintelligible 00:43:55] depends on the administration.
Brian Lehrer: Yes. I'm sure Professor Howley agrees with you about all of that. You could tell me if you don't, but let me ask Artie a follow-up question. As we start to run out of time, how do you see this ending? As you would describe it, the university escalated, now the students, one could argue, have escalated by taking over a building, Hamilton Hall. It's highly unlikely that by occupying the campus or a building or the lawn of the campus and a building, that the university is suddenly going to agree to divest. How does this end?
Artie: The way things have been going with the callousness that the administration has been treating the students with their disciplinary practices that have been over the top from the beginning in suspending students and kicking them out of housing very abruptly, I think that there's going to be a very massive crackdown. They're completely uninterested in the health and well-being of the students, and unfortunately, I do think there's going to be another police raid initiated by the administration. I think that there's going to be actual real drastic police violence to clear the building and to crack down on any subsequent protests.
Joseph Howley: Can I speak to this?
Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry to hear that dark prediction, but yes, and very briefly, Professor Howley. Then maybe as part of this answer, you could say what you think the appropriate action for the university administration at this point would be, especially if they want to see the May 15th scheduled graduation ceremonies take place for the class of 2024, which it keeps coming up. This is the same high school class of 2020 for a lot of the students who lost their graduation because of COVID. Now maybe they'll lose their graduation because of this. What's the appropriate action at this point for the administration to take in your view, if any?
Joseph Howley: Brian, we're definitely at a point now where people keep asking me, what is the university thinking? Why would they do this? We are at the point where the decisions are being made by folks who see reality in a way, I think, very differently from how me and my colleagues see it. I really can't understand what they're thinking. The students occupying a building last night was the very predictable result of the university escalating yesterday with these really strong disciplinary threats against the students.
It's outrageous to me that no one calling the shots at my university right now seems to have studied the history of protest movements in this country or on this campus because our students certainly have. Hamilton Hall is a historic site of occupation and protest. Anyone could have predicted that if you keep provoking the students, something like this is probably going to have happened.
I'm amazed that the university let this happen. I think that graduation, anyone who's paying attention would've surmised at this point that the university is by now making plans for an alternative venue for graduation. The danger in signaling that so clearly to the students is that they then understand that they've lost their leverage in occupying the lawn to interfere with graduation. Again, the university provoked them to escalate. You're asking where does this go? I think part of the problem is that across the two campuses, both Barnard and Columbia, we've really lost confidence in our leadership, whether in the congressional hearing or calling the police.
A little breaking news, I can tell you, I just got a message that yesterday, Barnard College faculty voted by something like 70% vote of no confidence in the Barnard College president. We're not there yet with Columbia leadership, but I think it's very clear that there's very few actors left on the Columbia campus with any credibility. I think that if there's a way forward for this, it's probably going to have to involve turning to the faculty in a much more substantive way. Last week was the first time anyone in university leadership asked me as a faculty member what I think should be done. The university has had months to involve faculty in this. They've refused to at every step of the way.
I am also very concerned that someone is going to get hurt if the university keeps taking the hard-handed approach that they've been taking. I'm just really hopeful that we can find a way through this where no one gets hurt, but also where we can start to rebuild our university. When I say our university, I'm speaking as a faculty member because we have been cut out of this for months. I think that the only way forward is for those of us who are actually doing the day-to-day work of teaching and running the university and being with our students to try to start building some of these bridges that university leadership has just been burning every chance they get.
Brian Lehrer: I'll give you the last word, Hadeeqa, the same question. If you assume, and maybe you don't assume that an encampment continuing is actually going to get CUNY to divest from Israel in the way the mission statement is asking, how does this end?
Hadeeqa Arzoo: I genuinely believe because of what I've seen, that if one approach gets ignored or swept under the rug, people will always find another. Just as the encampments at one point felt really impossible, I think some things that we may be blindsided towards now that may be seen as an escalation or a different approach or a different strategy, I think that-- I don't want to be naive to think that anything is impossible anymore, because knowing how passionate our community feels, I think that they will achieve divestment and liberation by whatever means it is necessary to achieve it.
Brian Lehrer: With that, I want to thank our guests and our callers and the people texting in. Once again, as I often say at the end of segments on this topic, we won't solve the Middle East or strife in this country over it today, but we will keep talking and keep listening in the spirit of dialogue, not diatribe. Professor Joe Howley, CUNY student, Hadeeqa Arzoo, thank you both very, very much.
Joseph Howley: Thank you, Brian.
Hadeeqa Arzoo: Thank you so much.
Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We turn the page. Much more to come.