Columbia Professor Slams ‘Gross Mismanagement’ By Uni Leadership After Cops Storm Campus
A faculty member at Columbia University told MSNBC that he places the blame for the escalation of anti-war student protests on campus squarely on the school’s administration.
NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton spoke with Professor Joseph Slaughter on Wednesday, a day after the NYPD stormed the campus to clear the encampment and arrest the protestors who took over Hamilton Hall. When asked about what he saw unfolding the previous night, Slaughter described a fraught scene:
Faculty near me, students near me were crying in despair over the fact that the administration has escalated to the point where they’re bringing in an assault team to shut down student protest. I can understand that the building occupation is a different matter than a completely peaceful, nonviolent encampment that had existed on the campus for the last ten days or so.
But the fact that the building can be occupied is partly, is due partly to the gross mismanagement of this administration. It has escalated consistently for the last seven months. These students have been attempting to get what they understand to be a human rights message about justice for Palestine out for seven months, and at every turn, they have been met with repressive actions to shut down their ability to speak, to demonstrate, to try to make their voices heard and what they see as the greatest human rights crisis of the moment. And this administration, in failing to listen to its students beginning in October and November and failing to hear the voices of its faculty, experts in the field, experts in the area, coming up with their kind of administrative decisions among a small cabinet of ministers at the top of the, underneath the president, they have consistently escalated and kettled the speech of the students.
Hylton brought up the statement released by the administration, led by Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, which claimed that “productive conversations” had taken place over the course of a week but were unsuccessful. The escalation of the building’s occupation “left them no choice” but to call for law enforcement to forcibly remove the protestors.
Hylton: They released a statement this morning, the president saying that they tried to have productive conversations with the students that went on for eight days, essentially saying they did their best to avoid what happened here. Do you do not believe them?
Slaughter: They may have tried to do their best over the past eight days. They did not do their best over the previous six months. If they had had those productive conversations with the students when they were clearly making their their statements in absolutely peaceful, vigil-like manners in November and in October, we wouldn’t be here today. If they had bothered to sit down with the students. My understanding is that this president refused to meet with the leaders of the two student groups that she unilaterally suspended in November, refused to meet to talk with them about their demands, about their concerns, refused to hear the vast majority of students, who see this as an unfolding, potentially genocide in Gaza.
Watch the video above via MSNBC.
