After a day of protest and confusion on its Manhattan campus, Columbia University announced Monday evening that it had begun to suspend students who had not left a pro-Palestinian encampment by a 2 p.m. deadline.
The measure reflected the difficult balance Columbia administrators are seeking to strike as they try to avoid bringing the Police Department back to arrest those in the encampment, but also commit to the stance that the protest must end.
Students in the encampment, along with hundreds of supporters, had spent a tense afternoon rallying around the site in a show of force meant to deter the removal of its tents. But by 4 p.m., with no sign of police action, most of the protesters had begun to disperse, leaving only what appeared to be several dozen students and about 80 tents inside the encampment.
Universities under neoliberalism remind me of the adage about online stuff: “if you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product, not the customer”. Except of course, at university, we do pay — quite a lot, in some countries. Even being customers is bad in this context though, because the over-businessification of universities is a huge problem, in my view. <Shakes fist at Thatcher and Reagan>
The primary product of universities nowadays is metrics, which is why the ratio of bureaucrats to teaching staff has shifted so much over the last couple decades.