Because of my time at Columbia, I’ve had a special window into the anguished faculty conversations unfolding around the Gaza protests on both the Columbia and Barnard campuses.

I’ve heard the pain in former colleagues’ voices, seen the erosion of trust and sensed the deep disillusionment that has taken hold. What’s happening there isn’t abstract to me—it’s personal. This isn’t just another campus controversy; it’s a rupture I feel in my bones, because I know what that institution once was and what it still aspires to be.

During my years at Columbia, from 2007 to 2012, the campus felt much like Yale did in the mid-1970s: as one of the most intellectually thrilling places on the planet. But Columbia had a unique advantage—its location in the most culturally and intellectually dynamic city in the United States.

The incredible diversity of its student body—so different from the campuses of my own undergraduate years—infused the university with an extraordinary range of perspectives and energies. Its Harlem-adjacent location further enriched the institution, encouraging outreach efforts and partnerships that sought to connect academic life with the surrounding community in meaningful, reciprocal ways.

All of this made Columbia feel vital—alive with argument, creativity, ambition and conscience. And that’s what makes the events of the past two years so painful. The vision of Columbia as a place where diversity, dialogue and public engagement flourished has been visibly eroded. What remains is something more brittle, more fractured—and urgently in need of renewal.

Why Columbia Became the Epicenter of a Reckoning

Columbia’s symbolic and historical weight—its activist legacy, its intellectual stature, its place at the heart of New York’s civic and cultural life—has made it the epicenter of a much larger reckoning.

When the Gaza conflict ignited protests on campuses across the country, it was Columbia that drew national attention, not just because of the scale or visibility of the demonstrations, but because the issues at stake—academic freedom, institutional neutrality, moral responsibility—converged so powerfully there.

Gaza became a flashpoint not only for what it represents geopolitically, but for how it resonates with the deeper tensions roiling elite universities. At Columbia, those tensions have been magnified: the divide between activism and administration, between faculty and trustees, between the university’s ideals and its institutional responses.

The protests did not create these conflicts; they exposed them—making visible the fractures in how we understand the mission, the identity and the moral obligations of the modern university.

Remembering the 1960s, Confronting the 2020s

To anyone my age or older, the protests that rocked elite campuses during the fall of 2023 and the spring of 2024 brought back haunting memories—of chants, demands, building occupations and disciplinary hearings.

But something about those events felt different—more fraught and more foundational.

The protests over the Hamas-Israel conflict—like those over Vietnam—were about more than expressions of outrage over a distant war. They have exposed a profound reckoning within the American university itself: a crisis of identity, authority and moral purpose.

From Columbia to Harvard, the war in Gaza became a lightning rod—not simply for views about the Middle East, but for deeper, long-simmering tensions over race, colonialism, academic freedom, institutional neutrality and the evolving role of the university.

At stake is not just how the most prestigious universities manage dissent, but whether they still possess the moral and civic capacity to hold space for principled disagreement in a time of political polarization and moral urgency.

Campus leaders now find themselves caught in a legitimacy trap: between calls for moral clarity and the imperative of pluralism, between activist expectations and bureaucratic constraints, between preserving open inquiry and responding to profound, often incompatible, ethical demands.

The result is paralysis—or worse, institutional overreach followed by backlash. Trust erodes. Dialogue breaks down. Protest becomes identity. Governance turns reactive.

What the Gaza protests have revealed, more than any other issue in recent memory, are generational and ideological fault lines: between those who still view the university as a neutral arbiter of knowledge and those who see it as a space of political struggle and moral responsibility. The university, in this view, is not merely a forum for ideas—it is an actor, an institution that either upholds or resists systems of injustice.

This is why Gaza has become such a flashpoint. Because it is not just about Gaza. It is about who the university is for, what it stands for and whether it can survive this moment as a community of learning—or whether it will fracture, like so many other institutions, under the weight of unresolved grief, rage and difference.

The Crisis Beneath the Conflict: Gaza as Catalyst for Institutional Reckoning

The Gaza-Israel conflict has become a uniquely volatile flashpoint on elite college campuses because it intersects with a web of unresolved issues—colonialism, identity, justice, trauma, political power, academic freedom and the contested mission of the university.

No other recent issue has activated so many overlapping, deeply held and often opposing convictions. Here’s why.

1. The legacy of empire and the lens of colonialism. For many students and faculty influenced by postcolonial theory, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not just a regional dispute—it is a paradigmatic case of settler colonialism. Israel’s founding in 1948 is seen not solely as a refuge from antisemitism but as part of a larger 20th-century pattern of Western powers redrawing borders, displacing native populations and establishing states on contested land. In this view, Gaza symbolizes unfinished decolonization—akin to struggles in South Africa, Algeria, India and Indigenous movements in the Americas. Within elite universities steeped in critical theories of race and empire, Palestine is not just a geopolitical cause; it’s a moral litmus test.
2. Zionism, Jewish identity and progressive tensions. Zionism—central to Jewish nationalism and identity for many—is increasingly contested. To supporters, it represents Jewish self-determination and survival. To critics, it is a nationalist project tied to displacement and inequality.

This conflict places Jewish students in complex and painful positions. Some feel that criticism of Israel veers into antisemitism or threatens their identity. Others reject Zionism altogether as inconsistent with Jewish ethics. These divisions within Jewish communities—between solidarity and dissent—have surfaced forcefully in the protests, adding emotional intensity and internal fracture.

3. Left politics and the reawakening of student radicalism. Solidarity with Palestinians has long been a cause within leftist, anti-imperialist and anticolonial movements. On today’s campuses—where many students are animated by the post–George Floyd reckoning, climate justice and critiques of capitalism—Gaza is a powerful symbol of resistance. The protests reflect deeper ideological rifts: between liberal gradualism and revolutionary critique, between institutional reform and structural overhaul. They also mark a generational shift in how power and injustice are understood—challenging university leaders who operate in older, more procedural political frameworks.
4. Democratic Party tensions and generational realignment. The Democratic Party is fractured over Israel-Palestine. While establishment figures continue to back Israel strongly, younger progressives have grown increasingly critical—pressing for a re-examination of U.S. policy and military aid.

Elite students—many of whom will enter politics, policy or media—are at the forefront of this realignment. The campus protests are thus not only about Gaza; they preview future battles within the Democratic coalition over foreign policy, identity and moral responsibility.

5. Academic freedom, protest and the mission of the university. Gaza has exposed a fundamental tension within the academy: Is the university a neutral forum or a moral actor? Protests, encampments, speaker controversies and administrative crackdowns have reignited long-standing questions about who gets to speak, what constitutes hate speech and how universities should respond to political pressure. The stakes are higher now—intensified by media scrutiny, donor influence and federal investigations.

The result is a legitimacy crisis: Universities are being asked to reconcile free inquiry with student safety, institutional neutrality with moral responsibility—and many are failing to do either convincingly.

Why This Conflict? Why Now?

Unlike most global crises, Gaza carries a uniquely dense symbolic burden. It evokes the memory of the Holocaust and the trauma of the Nakba; it raises questions about statehood, refugee rights, religious identity and global injustice. It invokes both antisemitism and Islamophobia. It demands moral clarity in a context that defies simple binaries.

In an age of social media, where instant alignment is expected and ambiguity is suspect, the conflict has become emotionally unbearable—and publicly unmanageable.

A Perfect Storm

The Gaza-Israel conflict became a flashpoint not simply because of its geopolitics, but because it sits at the crossroads of the deepest fissures in campus life: between liberalism and radicalism, identity and ideology, tradition and transformation.

On elite campuses—where worldviews are being urgently formed and tested—Gaza has become not just a policy issue, but a crucible for competing moral visions.

To understand the depth of this conflict on campus is to confront not only Middle East politics, but also the shifting terrain of higher education itself: how students find meaning, how universities manage pluralism and whether institutions can still be trusted to hold space for hard, honest conversations—without breaking.

The Roots of Campus Conflict

The Gaza-Israel protests have exposed deep, long-simmering tensions within higher education—surfacing changes that have been unfolding for years, but never with such intensity or visibility. While headlines focus on encampments, disciplinary battles and political pressures, the deeper story is about competing visions of what the university is, what it’s for and whom it serves.

Here are some of the most significant fault lines the protests have revealed.

1. The rise of the activist-scholar: An increasing number of faculty—especially in fields like ethnic studies, gender studies and postcolonial theory—view scholarship as inseparable from political commitment. These disciplines often emerged from activist roots and rest on the belief that knowledge is never neutral. Many scholars see their work as advocacy, resistance or decolonization.

This marks a shift from traditional norms of academic detachment. To some, it’s a welcome acknowledgment of the moral dimensions of knowledge; to others, it raises concerns about bias, dogma and intellectual conformity. The protests made these tensions visible: Is the university a space for dispassionate inquiry—or a platform for political action?

2. The campus as commons, sanctuary or stage: For many students and faculty, activism is not peripheral to university life—it’s central. Institutions like Columbia and Berkeley are shaped by protest legacies that are treated not as disruptions but as moral milestones. Demonstrations, sit-ins and encampments are often seen as educational experiences in themselves. Administrators, by contrast, often view protests as logistical and reputational challenges. The protests reignited this divide, forcing a reckoning: Is the campus a classroom, a sanctuary, a public square—or all three?
3. The globalization of student identity: Elite campuses are now among the most globally diverse spaces in American life. Many students—whether international, immigrant or part of diasporic communities—bring geopolitical perspectives shaped by histories of violence, displacement and resistance.

Issues like Gaza are not abstract debates for these students—they’re personal, urgent and morally charged. Yet most university policies, and many administrative instincts, remain U.S.-centric and procedural. This mismatch has fueled frustration and revealed how unprepared institutions are for the globalized moral consciousness of today’s student body.

4. Judaism, Zionism and the question of belonging: The protests have also surfaced painful questions about Jewish identity on campus. Some Jewish students experience anti-Zionist rhetoric as antisemitic and existentially threatening. Others, including many progressive Jews, are among the most vocal critics of Israeli policy and active participants in protest.

The university is caught in the crossfire. It must navigate deeply contested boundaries between antisemitism and legitimate critique of Israel—boundaries that differ not just between groups, but within them. The protests shattered any illusion of consensus and forced universities to confront how difficult it is to define “safety,” “solidarity” or “harm” in morally fraught contexts.

5. Donors, trustees and external influence: Elite universities depend heavily on private donations and are increasingly vulnerable to political scrutiny. The protests brought these pressures into full view: Statements and actions were dissected not for their intellectual coherence, but for their alignment with donor expectations or political optics.

This raised urgent questions about institutional autonomy: Who gets to define university policy? Whose interests are prioritized in moments of crisis? And what happens when the ideals of the university come into conflict with the imperatives of governance and fundraising?

6. A crisis of identity and trust: The protests have laid bare a deeper fracture: There is no longer a shared agreement about the university’s fundamental mission. Is it a haven for free inquiry? A site for political struggle? A space for healing and safety? A battleground for speech rights? The coexistence of these views, once celebrated as pluralism, now threatens to pull institutions apart. Without a unifying sense of purpose, every controversy becomes existential—about not just what the university does, but what it is.

What the Protests Revealed

The protests did not create these tensions—they revealed them. What we’re witnessing is not merely a dispute over international affairs, but a collision of narratives about the identity and future of higher education.

If universities are to move forward, they will need more than new policies or better messaging. They will need moral clarity, pedagogical courage and a renewed commitment to their most vital and embattled promise: to be places where learning and dissent, conviction and complexity, can not only coexist—but strengthen one another.

University Stewards Without a Strategy

Campus leaders at elite universities have struggled to respond effectively to the current wave of protests—caught in a perfect storm of moral urgency, institutional fragility and political volatility. Several interlocking challenges have made decisive, consistent and credible leadership difficult to sustain.

1. The nature of the protests: Today’s protests differ from past campus movements. Many involve sustained encampments, masked participants and disruption of daily operations—tactics meant to dramatize moral urgency but which also strain institutional norms and public patience. University leaders are caught in a bind: tolerating encampments alienates trustees, donors and legislators; dismantling them risks images of police intervention and accusations of repression. Neither response builds trust.
2. The stakes for immigrant and international students: Many protesters are international students, DACA recipients or on temporary visas. Arrests or disciplinary actions could have life-altering consequences: detention, deportation or loss of student status. Administrators must weigh the legal and ethical risks of discipline—particularly under heightened federal scrutiny in an election year.
3. Deep divisions among faculty: Faculty responses are fractured. Some unequivocally support the protests; others see them as disruptive or even discriminatory. Many feel caught between defending free expression and preserving community norms. This lack of consensus weakens the moral authority of faculty governance. When the academic core of the institution is divided, administrators lose a critical source of legitimacy and guidance.
4. Administrator ambivalence: Many administrators sympathize—privately or publicly—with the protesters’ concerns: Gaza, state violence or U.S. complicity. But their roles demand neutrality, order and risk management. The result is mixed messaging: statements that try to balance empathy with authority and satisfy no one.
5. Inadequate disciplinary frameworks: Most universities lack up-to-date policies for protests that blur the line between speech and conduct. Codes of conduct are often vague, inconsistently enforced or untested in today’s digital and political landscape. This leads to both legal exposure and perceptions of bias—especially when similar actions, like the climate and anti-apartheid protests, were treated differently.
6. Overwhelming external pressures: Administrators face mounting pressure from all sides: Donors threaten funding cuts, lawmakers call for investigations, media coverage escalates quickly and alumni demand public stances. Every decision is judged not just for substance but for optics—across multiple, often hostile, constituencies. This environment leaves little room for reflection or careful response.
7. The impact of social media and surveillance: In the digital age, protest images, chants and student identities circulate instantly—often stripped of context and amplified for outrage. Protesters face doxxing, while universities face backlash from both sides. Institutions no longer control the narrative—and are often reacting to viral moments rather than leading through them.
8. A crisis of mission: Underlying the chaos is a deeper identity crisis: Is the university a forum for open debate or a protector of vulnerable communities? A neutral arbiter or a moral actor?

These unresolved questions are now being asked with urgency—and campus leaders are expected to answer them in real time, without consensus and under intense pressure.

A Leadership Crisis With No Easy Answers

What elite universities now face is not just a protest movement—it is a crisis of purpose. The traditional tools of academic governance—deliberation, consultation and incrementalism—are ill-suited to the pace, intensity and emotion of this moment.

Leaders are being asked to mediate between groups that no longer see one another as misguided, but as morally illegitimate. This is more than a governance challenge—it is a test of the university’s ability to define itself.

The path forward will require more than updated rules or improved communications. It will demand a serious reckoning with what kind of community the university intends to be—and how it will sustain moral, political and intellectual disagreement without institutional collapse.

Until that work is done, campus leadership will remain reactive, vulnerable and adrift in moments of crisis.

American Liberalism in the Dock

On the surface, the campus protests over the Gaza-Israel conflict are about a war far from American shores. But as in the 1960s, when protests against the Vietnam War evolved into broader critiques of racism, imperialism and authority, today’s demonstrations have become proxies for a deeper reckoning with American society—its values, divisions and unmet ideals.

These protests have become lightning rods for a wide array of volatile and overlapping concerns, including:

1. The crisis of liberalism: At the heart of many disputes is a growing disillusionment with liberal ideals—open dialogue, individual rights and procedural neutrality—as sufficient tools for justice. To many young activists, especially on the left, liberalism appears ill-equipped to confront systemic injustice, inequality and state violence. The idea that universities should remain neutral or give all views equal hearing is now contested. Many protesters argue that neutrality in the face of oppression amounts to complicity. Liberal norms, in this view, obscure power imbalances—who is heard, who is protected and who is excluded.
2. The shadow of Trumpism: The post-2016 political landscape looms large. Many student activists see themselves resisting the forces associated with Donald Trump: xenophobia, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism and attacks on marginalized groups. Gaza becomes part of a broader struggle against what they perceive as a reactionary, morally compromised political order. Meanwhile, conservative critics see the protests as further proof that elite campuses have become echo chambers of radicalism, hostile to Jewish and pro-Israel voices. Thus, campuses mirror a polarized nation, where every action is filtered through the lens of the culture wars.
3. Diversity, power and inequality: Universities are more diverse than ever. That diversity has brought greater demands for institutions to confront the legacies of colonialism, slavery and structural injustice. For many students, Gaza is not just a geopolitical issue—it symbolizes global patterns of domination and displacement. Protest becomes a moral claim: The university, as a civic institution, cannot remain detached from human suffering, particularly that of the marginalized.
4. Immigration and transnational identity: Many protesters are children of immigrants, international students or members of diasporic communities. Their politics are shaped by a global awareness; their commitments are transnational. Gaza, for them, is personal—and political. This shift challenges older assumptions about what counts as relevant in campus discourse. The once-dominant national frame no longer suffices.
5. A generational divide in activism: A generational rift underlies the current tensions. Older faculty and administrators tend to value liberal norms, civil discourse and gradual change. Today’s students—shaped by climate catastrophe, racial injustice and democratic backsliding—often reject those frameworks as inadequate. They demand action, clarity and systemic transformation. Appeals to “balance” or “civility” can seem to them evasive or complicit, making it harder for administrators to mediate.
6. The role of the university: Finally, the protests raise fundamental questions about what elite universities are—and what they should be. Are they sanctuaries for dissent? Forums for free exchange? Civic institutions with moral responsibilities? Or credentialing machines for the elite?

As with Vietnam, the Gaza protests reveal a tension between two competing visions: the university as neutral arbiter and the university as moral actor. In practice, it often fails at both. Efforts to maintain order are seen by some as repression, by others as surrender.

From Protest to Pedagogy: Reclaiming the University’s Purpose

The protests are not only about Gaza. They are about America—its values, fractures and future—and about what elite universities are for in a time of global crisis and domestic division. They reflect deeper tensions over power, identity and justice in the 21st century, exposing an academy increasingly caught in the cultural and political crossfire.

The elite university, like the society it inhabits, is now a contested space. The Gaza protests didn’t cause this crisis—but they have illuminated it. The real question is not how to suppress dissent, but how to respond to what these protests reveal: a fundamental uncertainty about what kind of university—and what kind of civic culture—we want to build next.

The path forward, in my view, lies not in containment or public relations management, but in transformation. Universities must academize the conflict—not to neutralize its force, but to redirect it into structured inquiry. The goal is not to avoid controversy, but to meet it with intellectual seriousness, moral humility and curricular imagination.

What if we didn’t just debate Gaza in op-eds and protests, but studied it—rigorously, collectively, in the classroom? What if we treated the passions on campus not as threats to be policed, but as invitations to deeper reflection and dialogue?

Columbia, with its Core Curriculum and history of civic engagement, is uniquely positioned to lead. Now is the moment to revive—or newly create—a course focused on contemporary dilemmas: a space where students and faculty can engage the urgent ethical and political questions that Gaza has brought to light.

Such a course would draw from political theory, history, literature, ethics, global studies and law and ask questions like these:

• What are the moral responsibilities of universities—and of faculty, students and administrators—in times of violence and injustice?
• How should universities respond to national and global controversies when no campus consensus exists?
• What principles should guide institutional neutrality, public statements or silence?
• What are the appropriate boundaries of protest—and how should universities balance free expression with safety order and the rights of others?
• What roles should faculty play in public controversies: scholars, advocates, institutional stewards—and what tensions arise among these roles?
• How should disciplinary policies distinguish between civil disobedience and misconduct?
• What does shared governance require in moments of political and moral crisis?
• How do histories of colonialism, nationalism and displacement inform present conflicts—and how should these be taught in pluralistic institutions?
• What does solidarity mean in a diverse, global university community?
• And finally: How can disagreement—real, painful, principled—be sustained not as a threat, but as the foundation of academic life?

This course would not offer resolution or consensus. It would resist slogans and binaries. Instead, it would aim to cultivate what this moment demands: critical thinking, historical understanding, ethical reasoning and the ability to hold complexity without collapsing it into certainty.

The goal is not to quiet conflict—but to elevate it. Not to avoid moral intensity, but to engage it with care.

If Columbia and its peers can rise to this challenge—not by retreating from controversy, but by building curricular spaces for courageous inquiry—they may yet transform a moment of polarization into one of renewal.

That is not just an academic opportunity. It is a democratic imperative.