Why Columbia University Dismantled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment

Abstract: How should we think about the choice, made last spring by Columbia University’s president, to call on the New York Police Department to dismantle the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and arrest its residents? That decision, I argue, can teach us much about the American academy’s basic constitution of rule as well as the antieducational end it now serves. Like other universities, public as well as private, Columbia is legally organized as an autocratic corporation whose foremost imperative is to guarantee the security of the property held in its name. As the encampment jeopardized this identity, it had to go.