Following over 100 student arrests at Columbia University’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, University President Minouche Shafik took the time to remind students that, yes, they are allowed to protest, but only if that protest is quiet and, more importantly, ineffective.
“Students’ right to protest is not only enshrined in our handbook, but also in their constitutional right to free speech,” said President Shafik, who authorized the New York Police Department to enter campus and arrest students peacefully protesting the university’s economic ties to Israel. “In fact, some of our best brochure materials come from silly little student protests that I think are just darling.”
President Shafik fears students have lost sight of the true value of protests: being seen and not heard and also not really doing anything.
“Students definitely have the right to protest, but only if that protest is cute, tiny, and pretty easy for us to ignore,” she continued. “I love to look at their little tents, but unfortunately, I hate to hear their deafening cries that we, as a university, are complicit in genocide.”
According to Shafik, any student protest that makes demands of the university that they don’t want to comply with or makes even one fellow student stop and think about their own relationship to systems of oppression is liable to be met with unreasonable force.
“Yes, the anti-Vietnam War protests on our campus in 1968 were also met with insane force and proven moral by the course of history, but this is different,” she continued. “Because this is now. And now, I just want to get to my office without having to hear about how we’re in cahoots with a government that has destroyed every single university in Gaza. I literally just don’t want to hear about it.”
