July 10, 2025
Columbia University by Nina Berman
"For more than fifty years, I have been studying and writing about political repression and higher education, with a special emphasis on McCarthyism, long considered by historians to be the most serious assault on academic freedom since the emergence of the modern university. But, as Nina Berman’s photographs of Columbia University show, what has been happening to the American academy these days is incommensurably worse. Berman, who teaches in the journalism school at Columbia, has spent decades documenting protests and the like, and naturally did so again in 2024, when pro-Palestinian demonstrations unfolded on the campus where she teaches. In the year since, she has continued to photograph with an almost diaristic discipline, and has amassed a visual narrative of Columbia’s painful transformation. In these haunting images of a locked-down campus bristling with surveillance cameras and security guards, we see autocracy revealed in the form of a restive yet silent space under control. Because Columbia’s leaders have capitulated to the Trump administration, a once-proud citadel of higher learning and independent thought is losing its credibility." --click for full article
Related: Podcast - Nina Berman: A Lens on Consequence
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