Jameel Jaffer

I'm Jameel Jaffer and this is "War & Speech," an exploration of the free speech fallout of the war in Israel and Gaza. The conversation you're about to hear was not one we'd planned to have. In the early hours of April 30th, a group of pro-Palestinian protesters, mainly Columbia students, broke into an occupied Hamilton Hall, a building that was also at the center of Columbia student protests during the Vietnam War.

Crowd Chanting

Hey hey, ho ho, occupation has got to go, hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go.

Jameel Jaffer

As they did half a century ago, Columbia's leadership called in the New York City Police Department, the NYPD, to expel the protesters from the building. Hundreds of police officers descended on Columbia's campus, arresting dozens of people, including the students who had been occupying Hamilton Hall.

Newscaster 1

Breaking news from Channel 7 Eyewitness News. What a dramatic night tonight on the campus of Columbia University.

Newscaster 2

Hundreds of New York cops mobilized to remove protesters who vandalized and barricaded themselves in a campus building.

Jameel Jaffer

People who were on campus when the police raid began, including journalists were ordered to leave and told they'd be arrested if they didn't. After the raid, the university shut down access to Columbia's campus almost entirely, and access to campus is still restricted today.

NYPD

As of right now, this campus is secured by NYPD personnel. This is how we get it done.

NYPD

This is not a [inaudible]-

Jameel Jaffer

Meanwhile, the NYPD has released that short video, a sizzle reel showing its officers in action with a dramatic movie soundtrack. The video was recorded in Hamilton Hall even as journalists including student journalists were being threatened with arrest. Here's a clip from WKCR, Columbia's Campus Radio Station.

WKCR Student Reporter

We're now being escorted off the premises, both press, spectators, anyone else. Frankly, no one here is left to document whatever might go down at Hamilton Hall as we are now being told to leave the premises.

Jameel Jaffer

All of this raised a lot of really big questions, but one immediate question it raised for the Knight Institute was whether we could go forward with the symposium we've been planning for many months focused on the future of press freedom. The symposium was slated to take place in three days on Columbia's campus. One issue for us was just logistical. If Columbia's campus was essentially closed, we needed a new venue and we needed it very quickly. But another issue was more fundamental. The Knight Institute is a free speech organization based at Columbia and deeply connected to Columbia. We wondered whether we even had standing to host a conversation about the future of press freedom at that particular moment. I mean, how could we focus on the future of press freedom when there were serious questions about whether press freedom was being respected right now in our own backyard?

WKCR Student Reporter

Yeah, I just want to reiterate that the amount of people I see around me right now with student press on their backs or on stickers of whatever kind, someone in the crowd here was saying, "Who is going to document this if they're not going to let us stay?" And I think I just want to leave listeners with that.

Jameel Jaffer

The conclusion we ultimately came to is that the event had become even more urgent. We also decided it would be a betrayal of our mission to cancel the event since a large part of our mission involves protecting spaces for the shared exploration of ideas. So we scrambled to find a new venue. We also decided to add a session to the symposium to focus specifically on the crisis at Columbia, and that's the conversation you're going to hear now.

My first guest is Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia's Journalism School and a member of the Knight Institute's board. Jelani also represented Columbia's administration in negotiations with the protesters. My second guest is Isabella Ramirez, the editor-in-chief and president of the Columbia Daily Spectator. They're both incredibly inspiring people and I'm really grateful they agreed to talk with me.

I guess the first thing I want to say to the panelists and Isabella, to you in particular is thank you. All of us who have any connection to Columbia have been relying so heavily on the work that you and your colleagues have been doing, and I think I speak for certainly everybody at the Knight Institute. We're really grateful for the hard and difficult work that you and your colleagues have done over the last few weeks.

Let me start with you, Isabella. Can you tell me what have been the most challenging aspects of doing your work at Columbia over the last months since October, but in particular over the last few weeks?

Isabella Ramírez

I mean, of course October's 7th took everyone by surprise, and it was certainly shaking for our newsroom to suddenly mobilize around an issue that otherwise as young students we wouldn't have had much exposure to reporting on. And so there were both issues inside and outside of the newsroom and trying to keep up with a rapidly expanding storyline that really again, sprung up on us at a time in which we were also in a period of leadership transition for our newsroom. I was in my application process for editor-in-chief. I was university news editor. And so, it was sort of my time to also in some ways prove the capabilities of our newsroom, and I think many of the challenges have come from, especially internal to the newsroom as students is something that undeniably everybody is usually very deeply connected to.

As students who have direct stakes in their coverage, how do we practice the degree of professionalism and objectivity necessary to separate ourselves to do the reporting on the issue while being deeply affected by the policies Columbia was enacting by the police presence on our campus, by all the different elements of this, the protests, the incidents, as well as reporting directly on our peers.

We also rose very quickly into the national spotlight and were competing directly with a lot of people who were, I think, jealous of our territory in a funny way. We had a lot of funny jokes external to our newsrooms about the New York Times and trying to really keep up because there was a national interest in what was happening at Columbia, and that has obviously remained and that has put such a pressure on us as student journalists who are trying to balance our course load, trying to balance our academics, but are often having to drop everything to cover something that not only do we want to break for the sake of our community, but we have external pressures to do.

Especially in these past few weeks, that has only escalated maybe 200 times more with of course the commencement of the encampment as well as the exterior protests that came around with that. And then now this sparking of a national movement across college campuses. There is so much interest in our university and what we're doing here, and therefore so much interest in our journalism, which is fantastic, but it also means the demands on us are greater than they've ever been.

Jameel Jaffer

Jelani, one of the things you have been doing is trying to ensure that press can have access to Columbia's campus. Can you talk a little bit about that challenge?

You wanted me to lead up to that question?

Jelani Cobb

I'll start by asking if there are any employers in the audience that might be interested in the dean? First off, New York is a global city. Correspondingly, Columbia is a global university, which means that crises that seem far away geographically are not. They find their way to our doorstep. And so on October 8th, we had students who were beginning to hold vigils. By the end of that week, we had Israeli and Palestinian students who were having counter vigils slash demonstrations, and then the terror just kind of continued to increase throughout and because of security concerns, which were valid. My view from the inside of it was that there was a lot of criticism of Columbia for shutting down campus at varying points and only allowing people with Columbia IDs to come in. We got warnings from, well, I'll just say that we got warnings from the FBI about potential threats that we took very seriously, and so I understood that part of it.

The corresponding part of it though was that the overwhelming majority of the press outside of our internal press, like the spectator and the students at the journalism school and the radio station, the overwhelming majority of the press does not have a Columbia University ID. So that meant that people would not be able to get in. Previously, in the various other iterations of campus being closed, someone would just text me or send me a message or whatever and I would go to the gate and get them or have someone go get them. But it was a kind of ad hoc thing. And then after the encampment, it became a kind of lockdown policy where press would not be able to get into the campus. So I heard about this, someone tweeted, "The university that administers the Pulitzer prizes is now banning press from campus," and that was about 11 o'clock at night.

So then I reached out to my chief of staff and I was like, "Is this true?" I didn't know what was happening where. And he was like, "Yeah, it is." And so there's always a thing that you're doing on social media that you don't give a lot of thought to, but those are the things that register the most. I was just like, "Oh, we'll send out a tweet that says, for any press that has been denied access to DM us and we'll bring them in."

Seemed like a simple solution, except people above me didn't see it that way, but we stuck to our guns. One of the things that people grumbled about was that we said, "Anyone who had credentials as a journalist," and the reason that we specified that was precisely because we had gotten those FBI warnings. We didn't want to just bring anybody onto campus who might actually pose a threat, but we did want to maximize the access that journalists could get. Then the question came up of, "Well, what if it's a person that is a freelancer, a person who's just starting out and they don't have a credential?"

I said, "Well, tell them to DM us their clips." If you have a clip, if you've done anything that we can use as a validation that you are a journalist, we'll send someone out to the gate to get you. And that was how we have operated more or less since then.

Jameel Jaffer

Jelani, I don't know how much you know about this particular symposium since we pulled you into it very late, but the central question of this symposium is really, or a central question of this symposium is who counts as the press? Who should count as the press? So it's really interesting to hear about how you thought this through in this particular context.

Isabella, what did you encounter on Tuesday night when you were trying to provide coverage of the police action to expel the students who were in Hamilton Hall, and how was that different from what you encountered when the first police action, which was about a couple weeks earlier?

Isabella Ramírez

I was actually with a team of reporters and we had groups of reporters around campus at different points who were kind of all feeding us information. Some people who were outside campus, some people were on campus. I actually managed to get on campus by pleading with the Office of Public Affairs because I had left at 5:30 in the morning to just get some sleep in my warm room. And then 6:30 in the morning complete lockdown, which included myself and included everyone who could have possibly left. And so we were able to facilitate access for some people, but not all of our reporters of course. So we had teams across to be able to feed us information. And so we were right in front of Hamilton when we get the news that the police had already, they were encircling our campus, but they finally went through the gates.

And so as soon as that happened and we saw them marching towards Hamilton, we kind of got exasperated. We were like, "We need to clear out as much as possible. We need to get out of the way." That was something that we had kind of briefed our reporters on. It was like, "This is a potentially very dangerous situation for us. The best thing we can do is not interfere with obviously the police and the protesters. We need to figure out a way to be this third party." And so we backed off into this other dorm area, Hartley, and as they were marching, they actually started coming towards us, which the crowd of press, onlookers, it was not just Spectator. I saw plenty of people from the journalism school. I saw WKCR, which is the student radio station, and there was eventually a line of police officers wielding batons, pushing us all back towards John Jay, which is one of the other dorms and pushing us back and back and back and saying, "You need to leave. You need to go into the buildings."

People started rushing into the buildings, getting pushed into the buildings. Protesters were also still chanting throughout this period, and so it was an incredibly intense time. I'm literally holding my laptop out because as editor in chief, I don't report, but I was obviously live editing and doing the live updates of the story I was publishing as I was walking backwards, facing the police and also taking video so that I had a record of all of this happening. And so they continuously pushed us back towards John Jay. We're trying to run off and sneak into a little place, trying to find a place where we could get a vantage point but not be in their way. We really wanted to emphasize that, but it really wasn't enough for them. They didn't care that we were press, they didn't care that anybody there was press. I saw CNN there with Anderson Cooper in fact, and nobody cared, or at least the police didn't care.

That was incredibly shocking to us. We wanted to go back in because we actually left all our stuff there, my backpack with my wallet, government ID, my food, all was left in that building, and they locked those doors or they blockaded those doors, shoved the batons into those handles, completely locked us out of there, and then also locked the gates to leave that space. So we were trapped. It was super confusing and we didn't know what to do. They were shouting at us to leave, but we literally had no exit. It was just so shocking until eventually they were able to open those gates and as we were leaving, they threatened us with arrest. They said, "You either need to leave or we will arrest you." And that was just unacceptable, of course, in my view. And as we were live messaging with other reporters, some of them were pushed off campus as well, some of them lasted a little bit longer.

Our core photographer was somehow able to really navigate and get some really great pictures before also being cleared off campus. And that was so strange because in the first police action only two weeks earlier, that had not been the case at all. The police had come in, they had taken away the protesters, but there were hundreds of people watching, and notably, it was also a lot more peaceful in that first police action. I would say that this second one, there seemed to be a lot more force, and it was just so shocking to see that comparison of no onlookers versus onlookers and the immense amount of force versus less.

Jelani Cobb

I have a description from my vantage point. So we had a newsroom set up in the Brown Center, which is the main floor of the journalism school. For a minute we had students from the radio station who couldn't get into the building and they were using our space. A ton of our students at the journalism school were in and out of there. I think some Spec people came through there. So it was a hub. And in addition to being dean, I was one of four faculty members who were coordinating negotiations with the students. Up until maybe 45 minutes before the police entered campus, when there were about a thousand cops surrounding the campus, we were still in negotiations. We were trying to hammer out something at the last minute. And when that didn't work, when that fell through, I was like, "Okay, the police are definitely coming on campus."

So I'm thinking, my next thing is I need to go make sure that the students are safe. So I go down to the Brown Center and this is how foolish I am. I'm a parent, so I should have known better. So I said, "Listen, you all have acquitted yourselves amazingly, and the whole country recognizes the work that you've done as journalists, but the police are going to be on this campus. They're going to come in very significant numbers, and I need you to fall back. You can report the rest of this story from Pulitzer Hall, but there's no need for you to get into the middle of the fray. You've done enough and you should be applauded and you will be applauded."

And they're like, "Thank you, thank you." And they're all in agreement. And then I walk away and everyone grabbed their cameras and flew out the door. It was funny. I have four-year-old twins. It was as if I had told them, "Yeah, there's a birthday cake in the living room, but I need you to not go into the living room." And they're like, "Yes, Dad, we won't go into the living room."

Jameel Jaffer

So Jelani, I really do not want to get you fired, but I also want to ask you this question. You mentioned earlier that you thought that you saw a legitimate security justification for limiting access to campus, and I see that. I see that too. But I'm wondering, was there a legitimate security justification for clearing all the journalists out on Tuesday night before the raid?

Jelani Cobb

No, I don't think so. In the conversations that we had about this, I was just trying to maximize the access that the press had, both for idealistic reasons and then for completely practical pragmatic reasons. And so I was like, "Ideally, we stand for freedom of the press. Practically, you will do terrible reputational damage to this institution that you asked me to lead if we go along with limiting access to the press. On neither one of those levels, can I participate in this."

And then the other part of it was that I was like, "We might as well let the press in because I have 50 students who are roaming the campus reporting, so the call is coming from inside the house." So it was like, we're still doing this. And the other part of it is, as with a kind of metaphor or microcosm of the bigger national security questions, it was literally that on the campus we did have to take care of the threat. So we did have to respond to the threats that we had been warned about. We had to take them seriously, but we also had to do that while not unnecessarily infringing upon other liberties and freedoms. And that's what that discussion really was.

Jameel Jaffer

Now that the NYPD has released a five-minute sizzle reel, it's more obvious that the press is not necessary.

Jelani Cobb

So here's the thing that I just found out. At one point, when Hamilton was locked off and they were filming the video about how heroic they had been in liberating Hamilton Hall, first of all, it wasn't a good video. That was the part of it. I have some students in the doc program at the journalism school that could really fix that for you. But the other part of it was that if there are journalists around, are you going to film that video? Probably not. There were lots of things including as we just saw the city report, the gunshot that happened in Hamilton Hall from the police officer as well. No one was hit, no one was injured. But anytime a gun is fired, there's a potential for grievous injury or worse.

Jameel Jaffer

I read the national press about Columbia and often reading the stories in the national press makes me especially grateful for the kind of reality-based coverage that I see in the Spectator. I'm wondering, what do you see when you read the national press? I'm sorry, this is now a leading question, but do you feel like the national press is doing its job in reporting on what's taking place at Columbia?

Isabella Ramírez

I definitely think I have encountered a lot of press in which I feel it is a misrepresentation of our campus. And I think part of that reason is because at Spectator we cover every single development, from something as boring as maybe the latest development of the negotiations just extending a little bit more or smaller events such as a dance performance that occurred at the encampment or other smaller things. And I think what national press is going to be interested in are these big, maybe more shocking stories that have a lot of importance and that we have also been covering. But when we cover a hundred stories and five of those are the shocking and the violence and the abhorrent, and maybe 95 others are about the smaller developments and the very intimate portraits of the many different students on this campus and what they're feeling and how the faculty are responding and the administration, it does paint something a lot more full and a lot more complete.

I get a lot of messages from my own parents, my family who are deeply concerned, and sometimes I think that's valid. I am more in the front line than maybe some of my average student, but at the same time, it's hard because so many of the people that are depicted are peers, are friends, are people that I live and work and sleep and eat with. I think that type of community connection is what also sort of elevates, I think Spectator or student journalism like it to a more local level. We have a direct stake in what we're reporting on, the people that we're covering. And so we care a lot about maintaining those relationships. We care about the sources we report on, and so we have a vested interest in representing it as fairly and as complete as possible.

I really implore a lot of people to, of course read our coverage, but also to try to unpack all of those smaller details and try to find a picture that isn't just sort of this idea of a warring campus in which everybody disagrees with each other and there is no resolve and there are not people who are actively fighting for the unity of our community. I would argue that many of the journalists here are, and so are so many other faculty, administrators, students who we've spoken to.

I think that obviously gets to be a missing piece is, who are the people fighting for this to come to resolve? Or how can we come together and where are the moments that that is happening, where people are joining and finding community in each other?

Jameel Jaffer

Jelani, I want to ask you one more question. So you've been really at the inside of all of this. You have been talking to the protesters, the representatives of the protesters. You're also part of the administration. You are talking to all the journalists who are covering it. So you're an insider in so many different ways here. I'm curious to know, in what respects do you think the narratives that are taking hold either at Columbia or more broadly in the media, are inaccurate or have become disconnected from the actual truth?

Jelani Cobb

There are three things that I'll say that I think are really important. One is that the students were a lot more justified in their concerns than has been reported. When you walk through the very specific reasons why they felt the way that they did, it makes a lot of sense. And we had students out there, one of whom had lost 14 family members in Gaza and another of whom had lost eight family members. And one of the leaders was a Palestinian young man who grew up in a refugee camp. And so, there was the kind of narrative of the impatience, all these bratty kids who are whatever. You lose 14 members of your family and what would be your response to it? The other part of it is the young people who I talk to vigorously denounced anti-Semitism. You have a kind of heterogeneous movement that pulls in a lot of people that you don't necessarily have control over.

It was a narrative where I believe that the nucleus of the people involved in that protest were as disgusted by the anti-Semitic behavior that they saw as the other parts of the campus were. And that narrative hasn't gotten out. And the last is that I've been implicitly critical of Columbia in my comments, but I will say that the other thing that hasn't gotten out was that Columbia was far more flexible and far more open to hearing and listening than has been reported.

When we came back from negotiations, we were like, "What can we do? What can we bring to the table in this conversation that would be legitimate and meaningful?" And what I got was a open reception, that people really wanted to think about where the university could make a difference, the validity of the concerns that some of the students had raised. In the midst of a fog of all these things going on and people chanting and the lunatic fringe outside the campus, which was a whole other thing. All of those things that became difficult to actually see what those human interactions were that we got to see on the inside.

Jameel Jaffer

Isabella, I'm going to give you the last word. So you got a room full of First Amendment scholars, First Amendment lawyers, some journalists. What can we do to help you do your work?

Isabella Ramírez

I think part of this answer is going to be sort of not a cop out, but for us, Spectator is a financially independent institution. We're a nonprofit. We've been independent since 1962, established since 1877. The best thing you can do for student journalists is donate. We have a work study program internal to Spectator, which aims to eliminate barriers to participation in journalism. We are able to compensate the journalists who work at Spectator for the work that they do if they are heavy financial aid recipients or if they're on some level of financial aid. That's something that we're incredibly proud of, but also as the journalism industry at large, of course is impacted financially, so our student journalists. Our revenues have gone down as have across the industry.

And as our revenues have gone down, the need of our students have gone up. And we're forever working to try to patch that gap in terms of being able to support as many students as possible. Obviously that's one fragment of it. And then we're always looking for mentors, people who can really take us under their wing, show us the ropes. A lot of us go into the journalism industry or adjacent to it, or maybe other industries as well, but the people who have really supported us, given us the resources, whether it's instruction panels, even certain seminars, to be able to teach us how to do a FOIA request and how to do these skills that are considered basic, but that we're still building out in our own newsroom is also incredibly valuable to us.

Jameel Jaffer

Jelani, Isabella, thank you so much for making time us.

Isabella Ramírez

Thank you.

Jameel Jaffer

On the next episode of "War & Speech," we discuss censorship on social media platforms with Evelyn Douek of Stanford University and Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch.

Evelyn Douek

What happens on social media platforms is we're sitting here having this conversation of just trying to even work out, what is Meta doing? What is TikTok doing? Are they elevating pro-Palestinian content? Are they censoring pro-Palestinian content? And we don't have reliable answers to those questions.

Jameel Jaffer

"Views on First" is produced by Ann Marie Awad with production assistance and fact-checking by Isabel Adler. Research and fact-checking by Hannah Vester. Candace White is our executive producer. The art for our show was designed by Astrid Da Silva. "Views on First" is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We'd love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website Knightcolumbia.org and follow us on social media. I'm Jameel Jaffer. Thanks for listening.