trustfulness

I know some people who teach at Columbia University, and I’ve been worried about them. Reading the reports of student unrest there, and especially of the surge in antisemitism, I’ve wondered how they have been holding up in what must surely be impossible conditions for teaching. Feeling guilty for my neglect, I decided I needed to check in.

Turns out they’re doing just fine. Yes, they have to show their ID cards to be admitted to what had previously been an open campus, but that simply revealed just how many of the protestors last spring had no connection to Columbia. On the first day of classes a protest was held just outside the gates, and the local TV stations — thinking like old-time movie directors on severely constrained budgets — placed their cameras to make the crowd look enormous. But one of the professors I know happened to be arriving on campus at that time and paused to count them: forty-two people. And after an hour or so they all wandered away.

This fall there have been rallies on campus — pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel — but it appears that those have been both brief and relatively uneventful. Yes, there are a handful of extremely noisy and aggressive student protestors, but one professor tells me that a number of students who got involved in the protests last spring are now feeling embarrassed about the whole business and glad to be able to return their focus to their classes. Indeed, for some, and maybe for a great many, classrooms where serious ideas can be explored and discussed provide a welcome refuge from overheated political tribalism.

Reading such reports, I started laughing — ruefully — at my naïveté. I realized that, though I know perfectly well the almost inevitable over-dramatization of events by journalists desperately for eyeballs and clicks, I had somehow suspended my usual skepticism in this case — maybe because it’s New York City, which on other grounds is typically described as a city in crisis. I was, I realized, imagining professors navigating the life-threatening horrors of the subway only to arrive at the second hellscape of Morningside Heights, where police in riot gear marched through clouds of tear gas to break up roving gangs of masked (and possibly armed) protestors.

I slightly exaggerate. And I don’t mean to suggest that New York doesn’t have real and serious problems. But I’m reminded that several New Yorkers have complained to me that the whole subway system is frequently described as broken, when in fact the problems are largely confined to certain lines at certain times. Now, to be sure, they themselves may be downplaying the seriousness of the issue — people who have invested their lives in a place don’t often want to think the worst of it. But when you hear only reports from an industry principially devoted to alarmism, even a little civic boosterism can be a useful corrective, and a reminder not to be overly trusting in news reports.

And in the case of Columbia University, I am grateful to have on-the-ground evidence that many students and faculty, while they know perfectly well that protests continue, manage without much difficulty to keep their focus on the studies that brought them to the university in the first place. Others may feel the effects of the protests more strongly, of course; but consider this as an account from actual insiders who have been watching and reading news reports with bemusement and annoyance. I was told, “Come and see for yourself!”

To be sure, one correspondent reports that a fresh-vegetable stand has popped up just outside the gate where he typically enters the university. But, he says, he just walks boldly past the looming asparagus and mushrooming mushrooms. New Yorkers are made of stern stuff.