Gaza protests prove college leaders flunked crisis management

By Beth Kowitt

For anyone on the hunt for a job as a university or college president, just sit tight — there very likely will be a lot more openings when the protests embroiling US higher education are over.

Admittedly, the high-profile role of university president has lost much of its appeal over the last few weeks as pro-Palestinian student protests have erupted on college campuses, forcing administrators to publicly navigate myriad stakeholders with wildly different perspectives and interests.

But in some cases, those sitting at the very top of the ivory tower who want to keep their jobs haven’t done themselves any favors. I won’t pretend to know the blow-by-blow of what’s happening on the ground from inside my own ivory tower. But based on the communications coming out of presidents’ offices, the impression many are leaving is that pockets of higher education desperately need more crisis-management training — a surprising revelation considering a university president’s top responsibility is supervising a passionate group of young adults with still-developing prefrontal cortices that make them prone to risky behavior.

It all starts with Columbia University, where a jaw-dropping scene took place Tuesday night as police removed students who had barricaded themselves inside a campus building. (Full disclosure: I attended the university’s graduate school of journalism.) It was the latest escalation in a protest that the university president, Nemat Shafik, first attempted to shut down the day after her congressional testimony last month.

In her April 18 request to the New York City Police Department seeking assistance shutting down a protesters’ encampment in the center of campus, Shafik justified the move by referencing safety four times and security and danger once each. That kind of language is meant to raise alarms. But it’s also vague, and not once did Shafik define the terms she was using or give specific examples of what made the situation rise to the level of police action. If safety, security and danger are your red line for calling in law enforcement, you should probably be pretty clear about what you mean when you invoke them.

The lack of clarity opened up Shafik to criticism that the decision was performative, meant to placate her critics in Congress. No big surprise, the police presence only inflamed the situation and was a precursor to the events of Tuesday night. It also set the tense tone for the encampments that students have since established across the nation.

Fuzzy rhetoric and rules of engagement are pervasive in academia right now. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Jessica Karl pointed out on Monday, her alma mater Indiana University Bloomington made a last-minute change to a 55-year-old campus policy around the use of “temporary structures” in order to arrest students. Back at Columbia, Shafik appears to have broken protocols established in the wake of the university’s 1968 student protests; she authorized the initial NYPD sweep over the unanimous objections of the executive committee of the university’s senate.

“The problem all year has been that the administrations are making up rules as they go along, often without even announcing the changes,” Nadia Abu El-Haj, a Columbia and Barnard anthropology professor, said in a recent interview with The New York Review.

The situation at Columbia didn’t have to go this way. Brown University’s administration, for example, has come to an agreement with student demonstrators without reaching the level of turmoil we’ve seen on other college campuses. Protesters said they would take down their encampment, while university leadership said it would discuss and vote on divesting funds from corporations with ties to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

The university was willing to negotiate with its students and made real concessions, but also had its own red line. Brown President Christina Paxson made clear what conduct wouldn’t be tolerated, saying she wouldn’t drop the charges against 41 students who were arrested at a university sit-in in December.

“I respect the conviction and passion that prompted the students to make the informed choice to be arrested last December,” Paxson wrote in a letter to the protesters. But “the practice of civil disobedience means accepting the consequences of decisions on matters of conscience.” This might not be what the students want to hear, but she was exceedingly clear in her position and the logic underpinning it.

The University of Chicago has operated with the same kind of clarity. That might be one reason why the campus hasn’t yet descended into chaos. After hundreds of students set up a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus, the university’s president, Paul Alivisatos, put out a message laying out the institution’s values (“the greatest leeway possible for free expression”). He provided real-life examples that fell on both sides of the line: Gaining permission to cover part of the quad with a massive Palestinian flag, fine; occupying a building, which disrupts learning and the functioning of the university, not fine. “When expression becomes disruption, we act decisively to protect the learning environment of students and the functioning of the University against genuinely disruptive protesters,” he wrote.

What has likely helped the University of Chicago navigate this moment is its well-articulated principles, in which it operates under the position of “viewpoint neutrality.” The institution doesn’t make political or social statements of any kind, believing that doing so quells free speech. I won’t pass judgment on whether being neutral on everything is the right policy or approach, but I do think having a strong operating framework is. It allows for fast and clear decision making when things reach a boiling point. That’s what keeps everyone playing by the same rules, and during a crisis that’s what’s really needed to keep everyone safe, secure and out of danger.