Police and private security throng every entrance but one. Steel barriers line the streets. Students pack up belongings in their cars and leave for home - classes are cancelled, and exam plans are up in the air.
Everywhere there is gloom, and uncertainty about what happens next at Columbia University.
Students told the BBC that the university’s decision to call in police to clear a Gaza protest late on Tuesday, leading to a raid on the occupied Hamilton Hall and hundreds of arrests, has left the college community shattered.
The university president, Nemat Shafik, said that it was with great regret that she ordered the police raid against students and others she said had infiltrated the protest. It would “take time to heal”, she added in a message in the operation’s aftermath.
For students of this prestigious school in Manhattan, New York, how long is unclear.
Only authoritarian governments crush student protests
This is a private university crushing student protests.
With police, an apparatus of the state.
You have to work harder to come to that conclusion than just going “hey isn’t the police employed by the government?”
But the state itself is controlled by corporate interests.
This is a corporatocracy.
Its just capitalism in a terminal stage
The word you’re looking for is “Plutocracy,” and it has a long history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy
Yeah, but the relationship isn’t simply one way.
The apparatus of the state often includes corporations, such as Lockheed Martin, or the IMF/World Bank, or Elbit Systems, or Blackwater, or the Pinkertons.
The state also enshrines the rights of corporations and maintains the capitalistic and/or colonialistic relationships corporations have with people, and protects them from everyone else.
In return, the govt gets a small amount of taxes, and a surprisingly high degree of legitimacy if the line goes up.
I didn’t know that the university had control over the NY police force.
They don’t. That’s why they request police resources.
So you know and understand that the police force is controlled by the government, but still fail to connect the dots between that fact and them crushing the protests?
And why would the police comply with such a ridiculous request when they have more important things to do?
– Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion
For the same reason they will comply with such request from any private party? Try to pitch a couple of tents on your neighbor’s front lawn with your friends to see if the police doesn’t get you moving when they get called.
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Like they do with school shootings.
Now, now, this isn’t Texas.
Or like they do with right wing thugs, like the ones that attacked protestors at UCLA.
They tear gassed students at my old public university. The way they’re being treated is ridiculous and completely out of line with previous protests.
There’s a fucking sniper at my old university. On the roof of the student union building where my friends and I used to go smoke weed. That’s a head trip.
Cool. Now do universities like UCLA and IU.
Both universities are gonna have a real fun time explaining themselves in court, because I guarantee they’ll see lawsuits over this. Private universities get a lot of leeway over what they allow, but public universities are bound by the First Amendment. Any who are violating the protestors rights are gonna get fucked six ways to Sunday.
Name a government that doesnt do their damndest to crush student protests.
That isn’t the contradiction you imply…
There are plenty in Europe.
I struggle to think of a more authoritarian structure than the hierarchic state.
Stateless areas, such as Rojava and the Zapatistas are a good example of a “government” that doesn’t crush student protests, but they really don’t have them in the first place, since their bottom up structure makes it such that the students can directly use political power to prevent shit like supporting genocidal ethnic states.
There are no universities there for students to protest in :(
:(