A pro-Palestinian protest on Columbia University’s campus this spring
Credit: Mark Mark Peterson
May 29, 2024
"When private universities set rules for what speech they allow, including when, where and how students can protest, they can impose more restrictions than the First Amendment allows in public spaces. But for decades, they have claimed free speech as a central value, and that promise has a particular history at Columbia. In 1968, the administration called in the police to evict student demonstrators from Hamilton Hall, which they had occupied in protest of the university’s involvement in military research and a new neighborhood-dividing gymnasium project in Morningside Park. For more than half a century now, campus activism and universities’ responses to it have mostly occurred within the paradigm shaped by 1968. But the upheavals on campuses across the country this spring were different. The campus war over the real war in Gaza did something no issue since Vietnam had done. It seemed to have prompted an abrupt rethinking of free-speech principles that many in academia assumed to be foundational.
For the first time since the Vietnam War, university demonstrations have led to a rethinking of who sets the terms for language in academia." ---full article
