The University is the Crisis: On the Price of Columbia’s Soul

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

A young woman with a dog, absent-minded scarecrow, heartless tin man, and cowardly lion walk into a city of green seeking a singular wizard who stuns his constituency into obedience by convincing them of his omnipotence. After enduring many insults from the mulish and bigoted wizard, the motley crew of strangers eventually realize that his power is, in fact, far more limited than they imagined. In his truest state, he is a bully with an outsized ego, which, when put under pressure, puddles into a mess of fanatical self-doubt and inadequacy. They had sought grace and favor from a coward.

This story, depicted in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), is a parable of sorts for our current moment. The destructive, charlatan wizard ruling via fear and coercion is back while Columbia’s Board of Trustees, who are tasked with protecting the Lion brand and the bank account, are the would-be self-actualized in desperate need of sound judgement, compassion, and courage.

Though devastatingly analogous, this isn’t Oz and we won’t awaken from a bad dream. Our protagonists have not found their talents. Missing too is the valorous Dorothy who, reminded of and guided by her unchanging values, inspires everyone around her to rise up in defense of themselves and each other in order to expose the fraudulent wizard and live free from tyranny.

In real-life Trump America, critical thought, collectivity, and political debate and speech are shuttered in service of a belligerent agenda of narrative tailspin and radical social, economic, and political dispossession. Columbia has again become a scrutinized site: where its students once signaled global challenges to genocide, its administrative brokers are now a vanguard in the validation and enforcement of additional forms of extreme violence—from epistemicide to onticide—having sold the multibillion dollar university to the Trump Administration for pennies on the dollar.

Without any concern for the price of the university’s soul, Columbia’s Board freshly damned us all to subservience of one form or another. As semi-permanent, though increasingly precarious, members and representatives of the university, faculty are facing career-defining realizations that, up until this point, some have been able to avoid. Being in but not of a Columbia that has turned on its students, segregated itself from Harlem, and abandoned its duty to advance and defend free inquiry is becoming untenable. We are the workers of the university, which is now a muscular arm of the state.

In this there is a contradiction and conflict of interest. We still have latitude in how we perform our jobs but must, along the way, wrestle with an escalating series of despicable and alienating realities: words don’t mean what they mean; we are being surveilled and policed at all times; and we have no governing authority at this university and no expertise that the administration and its brokers are bound to respect.

We should recognize that the actions taken by the Board and enacted by the administration on March 21st were not purely reactive but spectacularly proactive—part of a long agenda to further discipline an unruly (read: diversely capacious of mind and action) Harlem and campus community. Their agenda and its implementation would not have been so swift and comprehensive—exceeding even the terms of what some have rightly described as “Trump’s ransom note”—if its designs were not on the tips of their tongues for some time. The discriminatory inspection of and withholding of resources for certain forms of thought are proudly publicized as progress.

The gates and police that last fall were announced by recently-ousted interim president Katrina Armstrong as temporary have calcified and grown. Let us not forget that the university eagerly performed its carceral function just under a year ago when former president Minouche Shafik laid her students and faculty at the feet of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce in violation of not only university policy but any previously held expectation of ethical standards. She lost faculty respect and her job—a splashy but, nonetheless, too easy maneuver of evasion for a university that never intended that she, nor any of its agents, act differently.

The university is not in crisis. For its active collusion with the designs of racial capitalism and empire, it is the crisis. If there is an alternative to the appalling and frightening present, those of us who remain must see the wizards for what they truly are, and face ourselves and one another in order to become something other than what we’ve been told to be. We have the brains but only time will tell if we have the heart.