At Columbia University, administrators and pro-Palestinian students occupying the main quad on campus are in a standoff. President Minouche Shafik has satisfied neither those clamoring for order nor those who want untrammeled protests. Yet a different leader may not have performed any better. The tensions here between free-speech values and antidiscrimination law are unusually complex and difficult, if not impossible, to resolve.Shafik presides over a lavishly funded center of research, teaching, civic acculturation, and student activism. Such institutions cannot thrive without strong free-speech cultures. Neither can they thrive without limits on when and where protests are permitted—especially when protesters disrupt the institution as a tactic to get what they want. As Shafik told Congress in recent testimony, “Trying to reconcile the free-speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months.”That is a formidable challenge. The best protest rules are viewpoint-neutral: They constrain equally, rather than coercively disadvantaging one side in a controversy. How strictly should they be enforced? Whatever the answer, it must apply equally to all students. Yet consistent support for viewpoint neutrality is rare inside and outside academia, especially on an issue as fraught as Israel-Palestine, which has divided Columbia’s faculty and students for decades.All of that context informed a flash point that occurred at Columbia last week: As Palestine-aligned protesters occupied the quad, where many activists covered their face to obscure their identity, Shafik declared, “I have determined that the encampment and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University.” After repeatedly warning students to leave and suspending them when they refused, she called the NYPD to remove them from campus, citing vague safety concerns.[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]Yet soon after, student activists reappeared on the quad. More activists gathered outside the school’s gates. Observers speculated about whether calling the cops unwittingly escalated the situation. Faculty critics who say Shafik went too far in contacting police held a walkout to show dissent. Some want to censure her for “violation of the fundamental requirements of academic freedom and shared governance, and her unprecedented assault on students’ rights.” Equally vocal critics believe that by not calling police back to campus, she failed to protect Jewish students and let Palestine-aligned activists break sound rules that must apply to everyone in order to be fair. Amid ongoing tumult, Columbia went “hybrid” for the rest of the semester. “Our preference,” Shafik said, “is that students who do not live on campus will not come to campus.”Columbia’s options are severely constrained because, for better or worse, it cannot merely start applying the viewpoint-neutral ethos that free-speech advocates prefer to these protests. Administrators must weigh the possibility that failing to more tightly regulate these protests could cause the school to be deemed in violation of antidiscrimination law because of their duration, their intensity, and their tenor, as well as pressure from state and federal officials concerned about anti-Semitism.In a social-media post referencing Columbia, Governor Kathy Hochul put it this way: “The First Amendment protects the right to protest but students also have a right to learn in an environment free from harassment or violence.” As if to underscore the challenge Columbia faces, Hochul misstates Columbia’s legal obligations. As a private university, it is not bound by the First Amendment.It is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which states that no person shall, on grounds of race or national origin, “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” a program receiving federal funds. To comply, Columbia needn’t be free of harassment. But it must address behavior of sufficient severity or persistence that members of a protected class are denied equal access to education because of their identity. Per current federal guidance, “students who are or are perceived to be Jewish” are covered, and national origin groups are explicitly protected, so Israeli nationals are covered too.In most campus free-speech disputes that I encounter, the relevant facts are easily grasped in a couple of days, if not a couple of hours. For example, I am confident that the University of Southern California transgressed against viewpoint neutrality when it canceled the valedictorian speech of a Palestine-aligned student, Asna Tabassum. I thought, let her speak. (Protests followed her removal, and USC has now canceled its entire main commencement ceremony.) But at Columbia, I cannot say with confidence whether, in my own free-speech-friendly interpretation of Title VI, Shafik is doing enough or too little to adhere to it.An example helps clarify the uncertainty here.If every day protesters on Columbia’s quad were blocking the path of all Jewish students as they tried to walk to class, or shouting ethnic slurs at any student they perceived to be Jewish, Columbia would clearly have a legal obligation to intervene in those protests. Whereas if one time, one protester acting alone blocked the path of one Jewish student, or shouted a slur at a Jewish student, Title VI would not compel Columbia to intervene in ongoing protests. So in between those poles, what is required? The answer is up for debate. Shafik is required to meet a murky legal standard amid protests that she can observe only in part, where a single violent act or viral clip of one charged moment could instantly alter public and official perception about six months of events.Even insiders charged with analyzing the matter are unsure about Columbia’s legal obligations. In March, a task force convened to study anti-Semitism at the institution released the first in a series of reports, titled “Columbia University’s Rules on Demonstrations.” After studying what antidiscrimination law might require, the report stated, “We urge the University to provide more guidance on the meaning of ‘discriminatory harassment,’ including antisemitic harassment.” It speculated that “at some point, courts and the Department of Education are likely to offer additional guidance.” Until then, it urged that “the University’s legal team should provide more guidance”—but Columbia’s legal team doesn’t have the answer either. Bureaucrats at the Department of Education regularly take extreme liberties in interpreting what antidiscrimination law means, with some conclusions shifting dramatically under different presidents.In theory, Title VI could be construed in a matter that reinforces the need for viewpoint neutrality: Israel- and Palestine-aligned students would each get no more and no less latitude to protest than Columbia would extend to any other group, regardless of how urgent or pointless, enlightened or abhorrent their position. In practice, counterfactuals cannot guide administrators or regulators, and as the Duke professor Timur Kuran observed on social media, students on both sides of the issue plausibly feel discriminated against by their universities, because “identity politics has inevitably led to arbitrariness and inconsistencies in applying rules.”In fact, it may be the case that Columbia is both failing to provide its Jewish students with equal access to its educational experience and (as the Knight Foundation has argued) engaging in viewpoint discrimination against Palestine-aligned students.Those who believe Columbia is overpolicing the Israel-Hamas protests should rationally desire reforms to Title VI, so that more campus speech is deemed acceptable. In reality, most social-justice-oriented faculty and students are either highly selective about whose controversial viewpoints they want protected or loath to recognize the long-standing conflict between tolerance for free speech and antidiscrimination law. Vilifying Shafik without acknowledging the regulatory environment she confronts is much easier.On the ideological right, meanwhile, is sudden zeal for draconian Department of Education enforcement of antidiscrimination law. “This is what’s known as a Title VI violation,” Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute posted Monday on social media. “Send in the National Guard and otherwise put Columbia and its morally bankrupt leadership into federal receivership.”[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]That is terrible advice, but stakeholders seem to disagree radically about the overall tenor of protests to date. Have they violated the Civil Rights Act as they’ve actually unfolded? The American Association of University Professors doesn’t seem to think so. In a recent statement, it declared that “Shafik’s silencing of peaceful protesters and having them hauled off to jail does a grave disservice to Columbia’s reputation and will be a permanent stain on her presidential legacy.” In contrast, as protesters flooded back onto campus Sunday, Jake Tapper of CNN reported that an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia sent a WhatsApp message to almost 300 Jewish students urging them to leave campus and go home because the institution “cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.”Calls for Shafik to resign have come from people on both sides of the conflict. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson piled on. But under a new president all of the same challenges and constraints on resolving them would remain. Debate about Columbia would improve if it focused on the thorniest, most contested conflicts between protest rights and antidiscrimination law rather than imagining that a better leader could reconcile the most expansive versions of both projects.

Why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

The difference between a private yard and a public forum

Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk’s office. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up,” Mark Rudd, the student leader and future member of the terrorist Weather Underground, wrote in an open letter to Kirk, who resigned a few months later. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?Perhaps because the structure of protest reflects the nature of universities. They make good targets because of their abiding vulnerability: They can’t deal with coercion, including nonviolent disobedience. Either they overreact, giving the protesters a new cause and more allies (this happened in 1968, and again last week at Columbia), or they yield, giving the protesters a victory and inviting the next round of disruption. This is why Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, no matter what she does, finds herself hammered from the right by Republican politicians and from the left by her own faculty and students, unable to move without losing more ground. Her detractors know that they have her trapped by their willingness to make coercive demands: Do what we say or else we’ll destroy you and your university. They aren’t interested in a debate.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance. At the heart of this spirit is free speech, which means more than just chanting, but free speech can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who tried and failed to mediate a peaceful end to the Columbia occupation, wrote afterward: In a community one cannot regain authority simply by asserting it, or by using force to suppress dissidents. Authority in this case is like respect. One can only earn the authority—the loyalty of one’s students—by going in and arguing with them, by engaging in full debate and, when the merits of proposed change are recognized, taking the necessary steps quickly enough to be convincing. The crackdown at Columbia in 1968 was so harsh that a backlash on the part of faculty and the public obliged the university to accept the students’ demands: a loss, then a win. The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters: another loss, another win. But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.That university claimed a special role in democratic society. A few weeks after the 1968 takeover, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a wounded institution. “A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.The lofty claims of the liberal university exposed it to charges of all kinds of hypocrisy, not least its entanglement with the American war machine. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who became a guru to the New Left, coined the phrase repressive tolerance for the veil that hid liberal society’s mechanisms of violence and injustice. In this scheme, no institution, including the university, remained neutral, and radical students embraced their status as an oppressed group.[Charles Sykes: The new rules of political journalism]At Stanford (where my father was an administrator in the late ’60s, and where students took over a campus building the week after the Columbia revolt), white students compared themselves to Black American slaves. To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors–the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”A Columbia student, writing to one of his professors in a letter that the student shared with me, explained the dynamic so sharply that it’s worth quoting him at length: I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen. The muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university’s survival, has long since atrophied. So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]And when the shrewd and unscrupulous Representative Elise Stefanik demanded of the presidents of Harvard and Penn whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct, they had no good way to answer. If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?” So they said that it depended on the “context,” which was technically correct but sounded so hopelessly legalistic that it led to the loss of their jobs. The response also made nonsense of their careers as censors of unpopular speech. Shafik, of Columbia, having watched her colleagues’ debacle, told the congresswoman what she wanted to hear, then backed it up by calling the cops onto campus—only to find herself denounced on all sides, including by Senator Tom Cotton, who demanded that President Joe Biden deploy the United States military to Columbia, and by her own faculty senate, which threatened a vote of censure.The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.