The New Yorker:

Like other universities, the school has cracked down on activism among students. Some professors think it’s gone too far.

By Andrew Marantz

It was a bright morning two Wednesdays ago, and Manan Ahmed, a professor of South Asian history at Columbia, was rushing across Broadway, trying to find a print shop that could make a giant poster on short notice. As he walked, he texted a few colleagues—classicists, anthropologists, other historians—asking whether anyone knew where to get a megaphone. “We’re nerds, man,” he told me. “Tracking down a medieval scroll in some dusty archive? That we know how to do. We have no goddam idea how to organize a protest.”

Ahmed, who is fifty-two, wears chunky black glasses, several rings, a salt-and-pepper beard, and nail polish on his left hand. That day, he had on a charcoal-gray suit, a white scarf, and a green watch cap. “The colors of the Palestinian flag,” he said. “Well, most of them. I couldn’t find anything red that went with this ’fit.” On Broadway, he found a shop that could handle his request: a huge blue poster (“Faculty Protest for Academic Freedom”) and an even bigger black poster with the marquee headline “we, the faculty, demand.” (The five demands below were too wordy to be read at a distance. “I told you, we’re academics,” he said. “We don’t really do bumper stickers.”) In a couple of hours, he and several dozen other faculty would hold a rally—organized hastily, via semisecret text threads—on the steps of Low Library, at the center of campus. The administration, citing vague and protean rules, had recently ordered the Columbia chapters of two student groups—Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace—to disband for the rest of the fall semester. “They said it was for ‘student safety,’ and of course Jewish students, like all students, deserve to be protected,” Ahmed said. “But the way the university did it was totally shady.”

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