[[link removed]]

HOW THE MEDIA FAILED THE COLLEGE STUDENT ENCAMPMENTS  
[[link removed]]


 

Sarah Baum
June 6, 2024
he Progressive Magazine
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The focus on Columbia University has overshadowed the extent of
protests—and police brutality—at public schools. Those charged
with occupying a Columbia building are facing misdemeanors, while
those charged with occupying CCNY buildings face felonies _

A Palestinian flag billows in the wind on the outskirts of the CUNY
pro-Palestine encampment, across the street from City College's iconic
Shepard Hall building in the background, New York City, April 28,
2024, (Photo credit: Sarah Baum)

 

The night the riot police came to Columbia University, those of us
still standing at the City College of New York (CCNY) pro-Palestine
encampment watched in horror, in real time via live stream, as police
brutalized students en masse. I’d spent the week oscillating between
the two camps documenting the movement. CCNY  is a mere twenty-minute
walk, or a couple subway stops, from Columbia. 

Word somehow got back to us that the thick, dark wall of police, with
their riot gear and paddy wagons, were making their way uptown. We
knew CCNY’s encampment would be their next stop.

Sure enough, just minutes before midnight on May Day, the NYPD burst
through the gates, lights flashing, batons ready to meet the few dozen
unarmed protestors left—throughout the night, the police had
reportedly deployed tasers
[[link removed]] on
anti-war demonstrators, shattered their teeth, and broke their bones.
Iqra, a recent Hunter College graduate and organizer in her twenties,
recalls how protestors were dragged to the precinct and left for hours
without proper food, water or medical attention.

But what shocked her most were the headlines the next day. 
 
A freelance videographer from Al Jazeera English, who had been pepper
sprayed by police while filming the demonstrations, lays on the grass
outside the CUNY encampment, April 30, 2024. A medical student and
volunteer street medic for the protests treated his injuries by
flushing the pepper spray from his eyes with water.    (Photo:
Sarah Baum / The Progressive Magazine)
From the May 1 cover of the _New York Daily News_
[[link removed]]:
“Cops Crush Columbia Takeover.” From the _New York Post_
[[link removed]]: “Hundreds of NYPD officers
stormed Columbia University.” From the front page of _The Wall
Street Journal_ [[link removed]]:
“Police Move to End Protests at Columbia.”

Notably absent from every one of these front-page spreads is any
mention of CCNY—even as the encampment saw the largest amount of
single-day arrests of any pro-Palestine encampment at the time, with
more than 170 people detained. This surpassed the number of students
arrested on the same night from Columbia and its sister school,
Barnard College, by dozens. (Only the University of California-Los
Angeles has since topped
[[link removed]] this
record.)

“We were arrested the same night [as Columbia students], from the
same neighborhood, taken to the same jail,” Iqra tells _The
Progressive_. “However, the media coverage [of CCNY] was so vastly
different. And by vastly different, I mean almost non-existent.”

 Although anti-war organizers had camped out on the lawn of City
College, calling it “the City College encampment” is misleading.
Organizers from across the City University of New York (CUNY) system
stood at the helm. CUNY is the largest public higher education system
in the country, hosting more than twenty-five individual colleges
(including Iqra’s alma mater, Hunter) and serving more than 250,000
students per year. 

“CUNY is the key to the city of New York,” Jordan, an organizer,
Ph.D. student, and adjunct professor at CUNY, says. “Students come
out and they go into a lot of unionized jobs, a lot of jobs in the
city that have a lot of people power attached to them.”

 
Student-made signage at the heart of the encampment at City College
in New York, April 27, 2024.  (Photo: Sarah Baum / The Progressive
Magazine)
Colloquially known as “The Harvard of the Proletariat,” CUNY
celebrates its working-class roots and predominantly Black and brown
student body. Of course, many students at Columbia and Barnard are
also people of color, first-generation, or low-income. But on average,
the median family income of a Columbia student is more than $150,000
per year
[[link removed].].
At CUNY, that number is around $36,000
[[link removed].].

Moreover, Columbia resides in a tightly guarded and gated campus in
the middle of Morningside Heights, an affluent enclave on the
outskirts of Harlem. CCNY, in contrast, has an open campus that blends
seamlessly with the immigrant and working-class communities of West
Harlem. 

Iqra, Jordan, and other organizers emphasized that the point of the
encampments is, first and foremost, to draw attention to the genocide
in Gaza; they are not particularly concerned with “getting
credit.” Rather, they are concerned about the ways such disparate
attention cascades, shaping the material conditions of frontline
organizers.

As Iqra put it, “The emphasis of the media on only Columbia only
[further] highlighted the differences in privilege and in protection
for Ivy League students versus public school students.”

Days before the midnight raids, the Associated Press reported
[[link removed]] that
“what started at Columbia has turned into a nationwide showdown.”
An April 29 NBC
[[link removed].] article noted
[[link removed].] that
“Columbia was the first institution struck by protests in support of
the Palestinian cause.” And in May, _Fortune_ asserted
[[link removed]] that
“the encampments [...] first cropped up at the prestigious
Ivy-League school.”

The problem: None of that is true. 

For starters, the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, whose
principles and tactics inspired the  encampments, were crafted
[[link removed]] by Palestinian scholars before
many of the contemporary protesters were even born. While student
organizers’ demands may vary by school, the most common goals
include the disclosure of schools’ endowments, university divestment
from companies supporting the occupation of Palestine, amnesty for
student protesters, and an end to U.S.-Israeli academic partnerships,
such as study abroad programs. 

Even the vigor of student protests following the October 7
attacks—including the practice of erecting pro-Palestinian
encampments—does not originate at Columbia. It was not the first to
occupy a school building, which California State Polytechnic
University, Humboldt
[[link removed]],
and Smith College
[[link removed]] had
done prior. It was not the first to see the mass arrest of protesters,
which activists at Pomona College
[[link removed].] and
the University of Michigan
[[link removed]] had
been enduring for months. Nor was Columbia the first to establish a
Gaza solidarity encampment; Tufts University
[[link removed]] and Vanderbilt
University
[[link removed].] had
long established their own encampments by the time Columbia students
pitched their tents on April 17.

On the one hand, Hebh Jamal, a 2019 CUNY graduate and a Palestinian
American journalist, understands why the mainstream media might
hyperfixate on Columbia. “There is prestige associated with
[Columbia and] therefore it is more in line for them to keep the
status quo,” Jamal says. “Seeing these very students challenge
this is what is intriguing.” 

But CUNY, too, occupies a unique space in the political ecosystem,
Jamal says.  “I believe that’s where the true power and unity
lies—in the hands of the working-class students, who have the most
to lose.”

 
Protesters at the CUNY encampment, holding up flares, gather at the
camp's center for a rally of chanting, song, and prayer, April 28,
2024.  (Photo: Sarah Baum / The Progressive Magazine)
Mainstream media institutions have often failed to acknowledge the
contributions from student organizers at public institutions like
CUNY. One of the most glaring signs of this disparate coverage comes
in _The New York Times_. It wasn’t until the CUNY camp was
destroyed that the _Times_ bothered to write a story focusing on it:
a mere 164-word dispatch
[[link removed]].
There were no interviews.

In other words, on the night of the raid, CUNY’s hometown paper of
record relegated the largest single-day arrest of any student
encampment at the time—not only in the city but in the country—to
fewer words than there were protesters detained during said raid.
(There were more than 170 total arrests at CUNY that night versus 112
at Columbia, respectively.)

The _Times_ did follow up with a more comprehensive report of about
1,200 words—three days later. In that same time, the outlet
published at least ten pieces focusing primarily on Columbia. A
spokesperson for _The New York Times_ did not reply to a request for
comment.

While there were incidents at Columbia not seen at CUNY—the presence
of the Proud Boys, the discharge of a gun—students at both
encampments suffered similar forms of police brutality, including the
use of pepper spray as well as violent arrest tactics that resulted in
protesters being hospitalized.

The Manhattan district attorney also largely charged students at
Columbia and CCNY protestors for the same alleged crimes. However,
those charged with occupying a Columbia building are
facing misdemeanors [[link removed]], while those charged with
occupying CCNY buildings were hit with felon
[[link removed]]ies.
The penalties for the latter are far more severe. 

“I do not think there was a substantial difference between the
conduct that was occurring at CUNY and the conduct that was occurring
at Columbia,” says Moira Meltzer-Cohen, a National Lawyers Guild
attorney and CUNY adjunct. “I can't speculate about why that
happened, but what I can say is, we all know how it looks.”

The Manhattan district attorney did not reply to a request for
comment.

Despite this differential treatment, both campuses found themselves at
the center of a skewed narrative about the Palestinian liberation
movement. New York’s Mayor Eric Adams alleged that campus protests
were organized by “outside agitators,” especially those at CCNY,
based on an NYPD report
[[link removed]] which
found that “60 percent of arrests” at that encampment were
“unaffiliated with these schools.” It was accompanied by a pie
chart comparing “students arrested” versus “non-students
arrested.”

What the mayor (and the NYPD) did not do is define “unaffiliated.”
Alumni, faculty, and staff appear to have been dubbed “outside
agitators” by the police report’s standards. And law enforcement
at CCNY, where the encampment was a broad coalition of activists from
across the CUNY system, appear to have counted only City College
students as “affiliated”—which meant students and faculty from
the other twenty-four CUNY schools were cast as fodder for the
“outside agitator” narrative. 

 
A member of Columbia University's Gaza solidarity encampment walks
through the rows of tents on the campus lawn in New York City, April
26, 2024.  (Photo: Sarah Baum / The Progressive Magazine)
A member of Columbia University's Gaza solidarity encampment walks
through the rows of tents on the campus lawn in New York City, April
26, 2024.

On the flip side, Columbia organizers both benefited and suffered from
the droves of outsiders that came to its gates. National and
international press arrived every day by the dozens, allowing students
to spread their message and document critical events as they happened.
Columbia students could summon hundreds of protesters to protect the
campus and support their cause with a single Tweet. 

National political figures also flocked to Columbia, such as Green
Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. She told _The
Progressive_ at the scene that the U.S.-backed war on Gaza is
“against the overwhelming opinion of the American people . . . [and]
a real commentary on how far afield our government has gone from the
will of the people.”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and U.S. Representatives Alexandria
Ocasio Cortez, and Ilhan Omar (whose daughter was arrested at
Columbia) also made an appearance at Columbia’s encampment; the
former to deride the protesters, and the latter two to show their
support. 

Not one of the national lawmakers seem to have found the time to make
the trip a few minutes north, to the rapidly-growing encampment at
CCNY.

Zionists and rightwing commentators have honed in on Columbia coverage
as ammunition, dubbing all student protesters “entitled rich kids
[[link removed]].” 

“One of the reasons why Columbia has been a focal point is the fact
that it fits into a narrative that’s very common among far-right
media outlets,” said Allie Wong, a Ph.D. student at the Columbia
Journalism School who studies extremist propaganda in media. Wong was
among those arrested during her school’s raid. 

This narrative, she says, paints all student pro-Palestine organizers
as “privileged” and “overeducated” youth who are out-of-touch
with the reality of most Americans. Columbia—an Ivy League
institution in the heart of New York City—upholds confirmation bias
for such claims. 

Matriculating Columbia sophomore Dalia Darazim, who is Palestinian and
lost family from the bombings in Gaza, said coverage of American
student activists (and the brutality they face) is important, but that
more attention needs to be paid to the heart of the matter: Right now,
Palestinians are being indiscriminately maimed, slaughtered, and
starved by Israeli forces, including the 600,000 Palestinian children
who are seeking refuge in Rafah. 

“When we make this one-school specific, then we're allowed to
nitpick what this certain school does . . . making this about one
school,” Darazim says.

She and other activists emphasize the fact that there are no college
encampments in Palestine—because there are no universities left
standing.

“This narrative that this is a certain group of ‘privileged’
students—it’s trying to delegitimize just how far-reaching this
is,” Darazim says. “Overwhelmingly, the student body does stand
with Palestine.”

—

_Editor’s Note: _The Progressive_ agreed to use pseudonyms for
Iqra, Jordan, and others at the encampment, who cited concerns about
implicating themselves in pending legal cases as well as avoiding the
doxxing and harassment experienced by fellow activists._

* pro-Palestine protests
[[link removed]]
* Student protests
[[link removed]]
* Colleges
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Gaza protests
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Hostages
[[link removed]]
* Hamas
[[link removed]]
* Benjamin Netanyahu
[[link removed]]
* Genocide
[[link removed]]
* police repression
[[link removed]]
* New York City
[[link removed]]
* Columbia University
[[link removed]]
* CUNY
[[link removed]]
* City College
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]