The word on Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, calling in the NYPD to arrest students who refused to leave what they called the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a tent city they set up on the lawn that seized control of a portion of campus, was that her actions were predicated on showing Congress that she was doing something to protect the Jewish students at Columbia. Neither the students nor the faculty took her decision well.

Rather than put an end to the tent city, and to attacks on Jewish those students who didn’t join the protest to show they were the good, progressive Jews rather than the evil Zionists who deserved to be raped and murdered, it fueled a renewed effort. Who could have seen that coming? So Shafik issued another ultimatum, this time setting a deadline of midnight on Tuesday. The “or else” did not turn out well for Shafik.

It's past midnight, and turnout of students and faculty has filled the entire plaza of Columbia University. An end to US complicity in the genocide of Gaza remains their focus, they insist, despite media attempts to divert attention to issues like student safety or free speech pic.twitter.com/JipFNYSsJ4

— Palestinian Youth Movement (@palyouthmvmt) April 24, 2024

A midnight deadline set by the university late on Tuesday for protesters to disband passed without signs of police moving onto the campus to quell the demonstrations that have upended the final weeks of the spring semester and challenged the school’s leadership.

Around 3 a.m., a statement from the university said student protesters had agreed to remove a significant number of the tents erected on the lawn, ensure non-students would leave, and bar discriminatory or harassing language among the protesters.

In other words, the students won and the university capitulated.

This is what happens when you walk onto @Columbia Gaza Solidarity encampment…happened just now pic.twitter.com/R3C82q5TjE

— Jessica Schwalb (@jessicaschwalb7) April 22, 2024

The university had previously said that if no agreement was reached by the deadline, the school would consider “alternative options” for clearing the lawn of the tent city. That raised the specter of the New York City police returning to Columbia’s campus. The arrests on Thursday of more than 100 activists touched off a firestorm of debate over the students’ free speech rights and the need to protect Jewish students who have felt threatened and harassed.

Apparently, an “alternative option” was getting a vague promise to maybe do something and letting the students have their way.

Administrators at campuses across the nation have been struggling to balance students’ free speech rights and the need to protect Jewish students. Some demonstrations have included hate speech, threats or support for Hamas, the armed group based in Gaza that led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, sparking the war.

Free speech does not include the seizure of campus and preclusion of students who are unwilling to be used as props in their secular religious performance. Protest all you want, but you don’t get to take control and you don’t get to attack others. Nor do you get to make it difficult if not impossible, for those students who merely want to attend classes and be educated. They too have rights, both not to be threatened and the right to receive an education for their tuition dollar, as was once the purpose of college.

Indeed, the protests, right or wrong, have been going on for months. This is different. Calling it free speech is to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what free speech means.

The problem now is that the administration at Columbia, and its sympathetic clones, are in a bind. The students left them with few choices, unwilling to disperse as directed and testing the administration’s will to make good on its “or else,” its deadline. Shafik was not only the target of student ire, but censure by faculty who, unsurprisingly, chose to side with the students against the university whose paychecks were on direct deposit.

What happens now? Now that Shafik has blinked, is there anything she can do to salvage a university from the south lawn’s version of Chaz, Columbia’s “liberated zone”?

Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as South Lawn West on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.

Columbia prof John McWhorter reminds us of the obvious analogy, what if these were white students prohibiting black students from entering their “safe space”?

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Of course, McWhorter misses the point. Being against black people would be wrong. Being against Jews, or being for Gazans as the children prefer to believe, is right. Easy-peasy, dopey professor. And indeed, in the minds of the simplistic, it is that easy. There are oppressed and there are oppressors, and when you’re told who’s who, you must act upon it or be complicit.

President Shafik took her one shot at being tough and it ended up backfiring, merely fueling more rage and an uprising by faculty who take the view that the rapes, murders and kidnappings of October 7th were not terrorism, but the righteous resistance of an oppressed people.

At Columbia, nearly 170 professors put their names on a statement suggesting that “one could regard” Oct. 7 as “an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.” Leaving aside the lawyerly language, there’s little question as to where the sympathies of the signatories lie. What are Jewish students — including the Israelis enrolled at Columbia — supposed to do when faced with such militant hostility not only from their peers but also from their professors?

But as long as the students in the Columbia tent city say they will try to be better, it gives Shafik an out to not take back the university. Columbia has lost. The students have won. Roll on, Columbia.