Columbia Students Are Getting the National Media Treatment. It’s Not Helping.
In a matter of days, Columbia University’s campus has become a flashpoint for the country’s political unrest—the site of impassioned youth protests over Israel’s war in Gaza and U.S. support for it, which has in turn fueled vociferous backlash, a flurry of national media attention, and more than 100 arrests. And since it all began, with a handful of student protesters pitching tents on the lawn at 4 a.m. Wednesday, university radio station WKCR has kept its coverage of the situation going all day and night.
“We’ve been covering in shifts,” Ted Schmiedeler, an undergraduate member of the station’s executive board, told me Saturday morning as we toured the small studio at Broadway and West 114th Street. It was a rare quiet moment during a week of nonstop action; out front, a dozen NYPD officers were setting up new metal barricades in anticipation of a surge of demonstrators.
In the studio, one student journalist was playing a field recording from that morning. Two others monitored the broadcast. Nearby, a folding table was strewn with snacks, and a futon and couch were piled high with pillows and blankets. “I just got done with a 3 a.m.–10 a.m. shift reporting from the lawn,” said Georgia Dillane, another undergraduate member of the station’s executive board. She pointed toward the couch. “And that was where I napped.”
Normally, WKCR is a pretty heavy on music programming—jazz is one of the station’s calling cards—but since Wednesday, just 19 student volunteers, field reporters, and studio producers have been racing around to broadcast 24/7 coverage of the demonstrations, mass arrests, crackdowns from the president’s office, and divisions heightening between professors, students, and other faculty over the students’ rights to protest and the chaos that has unfolded. Oh, and the mayor of New York and the White House weighing in.
The tents that popped up on the east lawn on Wednesday were timed to coincide with university President Nemat Shafik’s appearance before Congress last week; the students’ stated demands were that the university divest from its financial holdings in firms that profit from Israel’s war and occupation in Palestine.
But really, the anger on campus had been building for months. Just days after the deadly Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, dozens of students at Columbia were doxxed after they signed an open letter that stated that the “weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments.” In November, the university, facing sustained pressure from right-wing donor groups and conservative politicians, suspended the charters of student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine after they held unsanctioned demonstrations calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. Complaints of antisemitism and Islamophobia have been on the rise at colleges across the country. Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia, banned doorway decorations to keep political speech out of the dorms; both schools have tried to restrict protest to designated areas on campus.
There was probably no scenario in which Shafik’s appearance before Congress wouldn’t have blown up. Congressional hearings on the issue of antisemitism on campus have been led by Republicans eager to see leaders of so-called liberal bastions embarrassed and fired, no matter how far under the bus those college presidents been willing to throw their student activists (see: Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT).
Still, Shafik seemed eager to avoid the fate of university presidents before her, and “focused her message on fighting antisemitism rather than protecting free speech,” as the Associated Press put it.
One day later, with Columbia protests and the congressional hearing in the news, Shafik did exactly that, turning the protest into a true national news story by bringing in the NYPD to sweep the encampment and arrest more than 100 of her own students, deeming the tent city a “clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” That call seemed questionable even to the NYPD: As the Columbia Daily Spectator reported, police Chief John Chell noted that he had not come to the same conclusion. “The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” Chell said.
On Friday afternoon, when I first arrived at Columbia, the legal consequences of those actions were known, but the disciplinary actions were still trickling in. Some Barnard students had been suspended; the Columbia students were awaiting a similar fate. Those suspended face losing access to campus housing, health care, student dining facilities, and more, along with the inability to finish out the semester, all without so much as a hearing.
But the student protesters were undeterred; many were out of central booking and right back to protesting, and other newcomers joined their ranks. Gone from the east lawn, the demonstration had popped right back up on the adjoining west lawn, where there were hundreds of students less than 24 hours after the sweep, this time without tents. The university had attempted to lock down the campus to outsiders, requiring students to swipe in with active IDs. Columbia’s journalism school undercut that effort slightly, tweeting that any member of the credentialed press needed only to reach out to it to gain access to campus. The result was a handful of credentialed press, a battery of student journalists, and even more student protesters gathered, sitting on blankets, making signs, and typing on laptops.
The tentless encampment was largely calm, punctuated by occasional chants and speeches. There was a surprising bounty of snack foods, and various microcelebrities came through and made remarks, including Chris Smalls, of the Amazon Labor Union, and left-wing commentator Norman Finkelstein.
I ducked into an “onboarding” training in the northeast corner of the lawn, where a group of students was being briefed by organizers about the possibility of another wave of arrests, warning those students about the risks of participating in what was being called a “red role.” Only those students prepared to face the consequences should take part, the organizers warned: Legally, it would likely be a citation, “like a parking ticket.” But the discipline from Columbia could be more severe.
A drone hummed overhead; a helicopter circled. Everyone was instructed to download Signal and join various group chats. Markers were passed around, and the phone number for legal aid was blotted onto forearms. “I’m assuming at least as many people are willing to get arrested as yesterday,” one of the organizers marveled. “There are so many new people here.”
A perimeter was formed by students who held up blankets to shield the organizers and the volunteers from view, not unlike something you’d see on an NFL sideline when a player gets emergency medical treatment. Everyone was encouraged to wear a mask, not just to prevent disease transmission but also to help ensure personal safety. It isn’t uncommon for counterprotesters to come and chant, and film or photograph students. (There was guidance on that too: Don’t engage the counterprotesters.)
Blankets were also used to shield praying students from onlookers after a business school professor, Shai Davidai, who has been referring to the protests as “terrorism,” took a video of Muslim students praying, with the caption: “This is Columbia University right now. Please share to let the world know.” Based on the time stamp of his post, Davidai appeared to be on campus at the same time as me, and he came and left without any noticeable confrontation. Two days later, he would request an NYPD escort to walk around campus.
After the onboarding was complete, word began to circulate that no arrests would be made that day so long as there were no tents on the lawn. The organizers seemed inclined to observe this prohibition.
The mood was tense, and there was no small amount of paranoia. The sheer volume of press coverage of the event has compounded the stress and anger of student protesters on all sides. Some of those who were arrested saw their photos, their personal information, and details about their families written up in the New York Post. President Joe Biden and New York Mayor Eric Adams both issued statements condemning antisemitism on Columbia’s campus, in lockstep with a number of right-wing politicians, but made no move to condemn the arrests. Rep. Elise Stefanik, surely delighted that yet another university president had stridden into her trap, started calling for Shafik to resign. And throughout the weekend, clusters of tents began popping up at additional universities, as other college students followed Columbia’s lead.
I searched for a student organizer with “media training” who might talk with me on the record about the protests, and I kept getting handed off to different people. I eventually spoke with a student organizer named Sarah, who had been arrested the day before, and whose name I can say with almost total confidence was not actually Sarah. She emphasized that the encampment had expanded its early demands, not just for divestment and financial transparency but also for total amnesty for the students who had been suspended or otherwise punished for their role in organizing the protests.
I had a similar experience with a cadre of sympathetic professors who were part of the Barnard and Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, one of whom agreed to be interviewed after checking my driver’s license against my byline, only to back out moments later. The group later produced this statement: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms the Administration’s suspension of students engaged in peaceful protest and their arrest by the New York City police department. … We demand that all Barnard College and Columbia University suspensions and charges be dismissed immediately and expunged from the students’ records.”
The WKCR reporters were having fewer problems getting interviews, bedecked in legitimate press credentials, embedded in their community, and able to swipe in and out of campus at their own discretion. The crowd continued to grow throughout Friday evening.
On Saturday, when I returned, it was increasingly difficult for outsiders to get in. I ran into an old friend and J-school affiliate who helped spirit me into the campus, where the protest looked similar to the day before. Many of the students were drying out after having spent a rainy night on the lawn—the no-tents provision had been abided by—and the blankets were drying out in the sun.
The numbers grew throughout the afternoon. That night, there was a screening of Newsreel 14, Columbia Revolt, a 1968 documentary about the anti-war Columbia student strike that had occurred in the same place decades earlier. Comparisons to that year were being dropped quite a bit, from both protesters and reporters alike. The WKCR students were quick to mention their awareness of the history; the radio station then, too, had been a 24-hour fixture and an authority on the student demonstrations.
By Sunday, the environment was even more locked down. All faculty were required to get a public-safety escort to enter their own office buildings. Columbia announced that it would be doubling security personnel on campus, further restricting access to campus, and stepping up ID checks.
Even the student reporters were starting to feel the squeeze. Late Saturday night, the school’s safety guards entered the studio and directed all the student journalists to immediately vacate the building, thus busting up the 24-hour broadcast streak. It was announced live on the air. After some heated back-and-forth and the intervention of a faculty adviser, the campus police relented. The kids were allowed to keep broadcasting.
