The Choice Is Yours, Columbia
"All Eyes Are On You," original artwork by Cherry Tang, May 2, 2024.
Cherry Tang is a guest writer for CPR and an LL.M. candidate at Columbia Law School with special interests in public international law and constitutional law. She is from Sydney and graduated with a double degree in law (Hons) and criminology from the University of New South Wales. She thanks Professor David Pozen and Alison Lee for their helpful comments on earlier drafts as well as the editors at CPR.
The war in Gaza—distant enough for the University to tiptoe around, yet somehow too important to stop bankrolling.
On Monday, April 29, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik finally announced that “the University will not divest from Israel.” Early Tuesday morning, April 30, students occupied Hamilton Hall. Later that evening, police stormed Columbia’s campus in riot gear atop a military-grade mega truck after receiving authorization from the University.
Shafik “offered” some compromises on Monday, such as an expedited review of new investment proposals by the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing. Even a cursory glance reveals that her proposals are far more rhetorical than meaningful. For one, the Advisory Committee’s role is to “advise” and “make recommendations” to the University’s Board of Trustees on ethical and social issues—none of which are binding.
Shafik’s proposals ultimately fail to divert attention from the University’s war profiteering and contentious investments linked to “Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.” The University’s response, however, reveals a bigger problem: the drastic difference between university management’s and student activists’ central values. Whereas students have pushed for an ethical reevaluation of university policies, university management has prioritized the preservation of institutional harmony and public image.
In part, such a misaligned academic environment must be understood in the context of the universities’ entanglement with the military. It is an old story (e.g. Stuart W. Leslie’s discussion of the military-industrial-academic complex), but it must be retold in light of the increased militarism we see on campus.
Our private, not-for-profit universities are entangled with the nation’s extensive defense activities in three main ways. First, contracts and grants. Universities regularly receive research grants from the Department of Defense (DOD) that “research in areas relevant to the DOD’s mission and important to national security.” Reporters observed in 2022 that colleges “receive six- and seven-figure grants from Lockheed and other defense contractors—or even more massive sums from the Department of Defense.” This money is often spent on fields that produce defense-oriented technologies, such as materials science and biological research.
Second, the talent pipeline. Defense firms actively recruit STEM graduates from major universities through partnered internship programmes and sponsored research. Third, investments. Universities, especially the Ivy Leagues, have enormous endowments. A portion of this money, as we know, is invested in companies involved in war zones or with belligerents of wars, like defense contractors.
These long-standing military ties have cultivated an environment of partisanship in universities, effectively constraining their ability to embrace ethical debates on campus—in four interrelated ways.
First, military funding and talent partnerships lead to the prioritization of certain types of research—typically, those that are aligned with defense interests. Columbia University itself was a proud leading contributor to the critical research behind the Manhattan Project. After the university accepted a War Department contract in 1943, it substantially expanded the Special Alloyed Materials Laboratories which later employed almost 1,000 scientists and workers. The Manhattan Project—engineered to accelerate the mass slaughter of innocents—marked the beginning of the academy’s interests in defense initiatives.
The ties between universities and the military continued to deepen after the Second World War, driven in part by the growing importance of advanced technology in military success, the onset of the Cold War, and the government’s increased emphasis on military activities generally. Other schools like MIT, Caltech, and Harvard emerged as major non-industrial defense contractors, with MIT alone amassing contracts worth $117 million (see Leslie’s book at p.14). These partnerships only deepened after 9/11 and have since become integral to the financial structure of universities.
This kind of academic-military entanglement has rendered universities “de facto branches of the military.” It shapes the universities’ research agenda and priorities, leading to a focus on technological and strategic aspects of military science at the expense of studies into the ethical, legal, and humanitarian impacts of warfare.
Second, this academic-military entanglement makes it institutionally risky to challenge defense strategies. While student protests against unethical investments in conflicts have worked before, these efforts were often assisted by broader political and public sentiment. In 2006, students across the country organized massive protests for divestment from Sudan in light of the humanitarian crisis in the region. However, the U.S.-Sudan relationship had been strained since 1967, after Sudan went to war with Israel. The U.S. government itself condemned Sudan’s human rights abuses and provided humanitarian aid to those affected. Without much difficulty, the Advisory Committee convinced Columbia’s Trustees to divest from Sudan.
In 1978, after 21 days of protest over investments in the apartheid regime in South Africa, Columbia’s Board of Trustees voted to divest from South Africa completely. However, the apartheid had begun as far back as the 1940s, and the anti-apartheid movement had already kicked into high gear by the 1950s. Furthermore, in 1962, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution requesting that member states sever diplomatic relations with South Africa. In 1972, Congress introduced the first Anti-Apartheid Act. Across these cases, universities followed the nation’s lead in pursuing efforts toward divestment.
In contrast, the war in Gaza is unapologetically supported by the U.S. government. In response to calls for divestment from Israel, it seems that the university could not help but to consider what its defense friends thought. Thus, significant public resistance to unethical practices can indeed influence the momentum towards students’ calls for divestment. But without such external moral and political pressure, it seems fanciful to expect the university to overcome its inherent conservatism and risk-aversion cultivated by its deep-rooted ties to defense interests.
Third, these defense ties marginalize serious debates about questionable university policies.
“95% of the young people who are on these campuses are there because they believe there is a fundamental injustice being perpetrated in Israel,” as Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted. On the contrary, 95% of the university’s actions and statements are centered around fear, racism, rebellion, threat, safety, danger, and hostility. Student activists were described by Shafik as “creating a disruptive environment for everyone and raising safety risks to an intolerable level.”
Not once did Shafik mention the atrocities of the armed conflict. The most the President has said about the war was that “our campus is roiled by divisions over the war in Gaza.” By framing student advocacy as a fear-inducing threat, the University has sidestepped important discussions about the human costs of warfare—to which it is actively contributing.
Fourth, partisanship sets the perfect backdrop for universities to blend ethical discussions with racial and nationalist sentiments.
The University, alongside the U.S. government, has used serious accusations of antisemitism to invalidate recent student protests. However, criticisms of the Israeli government’s well-documented human rights abuses must not be hastily labeled as antisemitism. Such accusations have effectively masked the need for the University to fully embrace debate over questionable military policies.
By brushing aside these debates, then, the University can easily enforce double standards in its handling of student activism. Students have filed lawsuits and federal investigators have inquired into “extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment” on campus. Yet, not once has the University shared this same fear expressed by its students. Instead, these students have been lumped in with “all members of our community” or ambiguously categorized as “other students.” These double standards create a divisive atmosphere on campus and constrain the possibility of finding common values between students and administrators.
The University’s excessive entanglement with defense interests has produced a considerable disconnect between management and education. It has shifted from being impartial conveyors of knowledge to salient players in a knowledge economy that prioritizes partisan values over humanitarianism.
The academy has arrived at a critical juncture: it can either embrace the discomfort of debate or remain an instrument of the military.