Rather than actively lobbying, Columbia University primarily wants to safeguard its business interests

“I note that the university is under the guardianship of a small group of board members who have no standing in the world of education, are reactionary and visionless in terms of politics, and narrow-minded and medieval in their religion. Their behavior betrays a deep misunderstanding of the true function of a university.”

They date from more than a hundred years ago, the words of American historian Charles Beard. In 1917 he delivered them as a farewell to his alma mater Columbia University, after it had fired several of his colleagues for protesting the American participation in the First World War. Beard and co. then moved to the New School of Social Research, which was to serve as a haven for researchers who resisted the war fever.

It is little surprise that Beard’s words are revived a century later. In recent weeks, thousands of American students have occupied their campuses in protest against their universities’ ties to the Israeli war machine. Beards Columbia again turned out to be a focal point of protest. The administrative response provoked by the protests shows unprecedented determination. At Columbia, the New York police force was called in to break the occupation of a university building; Even at the current New School, once founded for pacifist stowaways, repression was the first response.

Why the fierceness? Given the high costs of an education at Columbia, the university hardly seems to serve its own target audience with this repression. That idyllic vision ignores some uncomfortable facts. Less than 4 percent of Columbia’s revenue comes from student fees. The rest comes from medical research and donations, including deals with the private sector. Columbia, for example, owns a significant number of parcels of land on New York’s Upper West Side and rakes in huge sums of money from its real estate empire (an “investment fund with a university attached to it” was one critical researcher’s description). At the same time, the ties with the American arms industry are explicit. And it was precisely those ties that were questioned by the students; therefore the protest had to be suppressed.

Moreover, Columbia and other Ivy League colleges are hardly publicly accessible – after all, they are private institutions. This makes democratic participation more difficult, as recent protests showed: professors were treated as harshly as students. The board quickly showed its teeth: while students are welcomed as consumers and have to monitor their professors, they seem to have no say in the management of the university. There, participation appeared to be limited.

The repression itself therefore has little to do with an ‘Israel lobby’. Rather than actively lobbying, the university primarily wants to safeguard its business interests; interests that simply overlap with those of an arms industry that profits from the Israeli war.

Critics of the protest indicated that a university as an institution cannot be democratized and should not be subjected to political pressure. But that reasoning applies to both sides: not because of the students and not because of administrators. The former simply demand independence from a state that is anything but neutral on a global level.

In contrast to the United States, universities in Belgium are less subject to business interests. The dependence on private funds is less direct. But here too, links with Israeli institutions that benefited from the occupation were already mentioned.

The American repression is particularly sharpening the debate about academic freedom. Apart from the Israeli war, any university that listens more attentively to private than public voices compromises its own position. Since October 7, the Israeli army has killed no fewer than three rectors and more than 95 deans and researchers in attacks on universities. Then there can hardly be any question of neutrality, as Beard pointed out more than a century ago.