A Pedagogy of Unrest

Professors on protest and Palestine in the classroom

By Maya Lerman 

It’s the first day of the semester, and I feel lost in contradiction. On my way into campus I pass a contingent of protestors, clad in keffiyehs, urging students to skip their classes and join their “picket line.” I swipe my ID. Minutes later, on the steps of Hamilton (Hind’s) Hall, my mind becomes awash with images and sounds: swarms of police, a student being thrown down the stairs, desperate calls for a medic. If you hadn’t witnessed that scene you might have mistaken this for an ordinary academic building—if not for the watchful Public Safety officer by the door. After climbing the stairs I sit down in my first class of the year: Contemporary Civilization, a hallmark of Columbia’s pedagogical mission.

Something feels wrong with this picture. I came to Columbia to learn; why would I skip my classes at the behest of protestors? Then again, I wonder what this place—with its checkpoints, guards, and oppressive sense of manufactured calm—could really teach me. Part of Columbia’s Core Curriculum, Contemporary Civilization (or CC) purports to foster critical engagement with politics, yet as I entered the classroom I felt, instead, like this was an attempt to hide from the political turmoil outside the gates. Then my CC professor says something in passing that gives me further pause. He poses the question: “Is studying at Columbia a moral decision?”

What interested me about this question was less its elusive answer and more the context in which it was asked. Spoken by a member of Columbia’s faculty, in one of Columbia’s famous Core Curriculum classes, inside a hall that had been occupied by student protestors and raided by the NYPD, a loaded sentence in itself took on new meaning. The choice to ask that question—a question that demanded even the briefest inquiry into a context outside the immediate text of our classroom discussion—fascinated me. 

Illustration by Derin Ogutcu

In the political war on our campus between student activists and the administration, there is a third party, operating in a gray area between these opposing forces: professors, who are often split between their allegiance to their students and their fealty to the institution. As I ventured to understand how we, as learners, grapple with the inevitable coalescence of our education with the political reality we find ourselves immersed in, I began by seeking the perspectives of these educators. 

For philosophy professor Fred Neuhouser, the resolution to my quandary lies outside the classroom walls. In class, he doesn’t address the protests at all. This hardly means he is silent on the issue: Neuhouser helped lead an unsanctioned teach-in held by Barnard faculty on Barnard’s undemocratic restrictions on free speech, where he spoke about the legacy of the 1968 Columbia protests and how campus repression has worsened in the decades since. “The teach-in was important because there are so few opportunities to talk about political events,” Neuhouser remarks. Student attendance was high, suggesting to him that “students want to have these conversations.” 

The administration criticized such demonstrations as disruptive, but Neuhouser believes that’s part of the point. “I think it’s possible for disruption to be educational,” he says. “Learning about the power in institutions and their motives is important.” While Neuhouser in no way belittles the academic learning environment, he recognizes that there is some education an institution won’t give you. Protest, often portrayed as separate from and perhaps even “disruptive” to learning, may fill that gap. The events of last spring have left the student body more aware not only of Palestinian politics and history, but of the pernicious functions of the university, the media, and the American government.

When I press him on his and his department’s pedagogy as it relates to protest, Neuhouser states that the philosophy department is not in tune with current political realities before adding “maybe it should be.” Neuhouser’s aside presents a genuinely perplexing dilemma. There is certainly weight to the criticism of teaching texts detached from their ‘applicability.’ But, as, my CC professor would say, there will always be more context to discuss; sometimes, we just need to focus on the text in front of us. 

This is largely the approach taken by Christopher Brown, a professor of history whose viral speech condemning Minouche Shafik’s decision to bring the police onto campus has made him a figurehead of academic freedom. Brown knows his students could easily look him up and probably guess his politics from his public statements, but that doesn’t mean he wants to bring his personal politics into the classroom. A guiding principle of his is to make students comfortable and avoid creating the illusion of favor and punishment based on political alignment. This has meant skirting discussions not immediately relevant to his courses, including those surrounding campus events and Middle Eastern politics.“That doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions, but I have a job to do,” he says. 

Christia Mercer, a professor in the philosophy department, takes a different approach, believing that teachers are obligated to provoke students to be aware of their place in an inherently political world. In the opening slideshow of her Philosophy and Feminism class, Mercer juxtaposed two images: one of the paintings of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, in Butler; the other a picture of Alma Mater stained with red paint, taken earlier that day. Mercer used the contrast to situate the course in academic and activist traditions. In this vein, she seems eager to apply theory to practice, making a point of referencing Foucault—an author included in Philosophy and Feminism—to describe the securitized nature of the campus lockdown.

Yet despite her candid consideration of campus unrest, Mercer reveals she is not as uncensored as she’d like to be. She fears her lectures being recorded and shared without her consent, describing a colleague who, after being doxed, received no protection from the University. “Discomfort is necessary to learning. If you don’t stir things up you’re not doing your job,” she tells me. “I feel less comfortable doing that now because I don’t think Columbia has our back. They want us to do our job but won’t protect us when we do.”

Despite differing slightly on how they conceive of their role as educators, Brown and Mercer share a growing fear that the administration is not willing to stand up for its faculty and, accordingly, have been wary of their classroom demeanor. I ask Mercer how she would handle a class discussion explicitly mentioning the genocide in Gaza. She answers immediately: She would never talk about Gaza. Perhaps this contradicts her conception of the educator as a provocateur. But, to her, the subject is simply too triggering, with too much potential for misunderstanding and anger. 

Columbia’s newly created Task Force on Antisemitism provides little guidance on the matter. In their second report, the Task Force published a brief section of varied comments from professors, largely from the Master’s of Public Health Program and graduate student union. The Task Force did not respond to my requests for clarification on how classroom conversations can be conducted with student safety in mind.

In my conversations with professors, the very word “Palestine” is like a black hole—our discourse inevitably orbits it, but all parties involved seem to agree that getting too close would spell disaster. Gaza, it seems, represents a rupture, and addressing that rupture head-on is a near insurmountable task. And so, professors talk around it—Brown via the independence of higher education, and Neuhouser via the history of protest movements. As I converse with members of Columbia’s faculty, I find myself falling into the same avoidance. It’s easier, after all, to ask about Columbia’s repression than to meaningfully speak about what it is they are trying to repress. As my CC professor puts it, “Teachers are trained to talk a lot. But we can’t say everything.”

If anyone is willing to call out the political weight of this rupture, it’s student activists. This October, I attended a protest against the gentrification of Harlem outside Columbia’s gates. Though not directly related to Palestine, the intersections of the issues and of those who care about them are evident. Signs read: “From New York to Gaza, Stop the Displacement!” Protestors cover their faces with keffiyehs. Hagen Feeney, CC ’26, takes to a megaphone and turns Columbia’s Core Curriculum into a call to action: “Columbia, we demand you pay what you owe Harlem in full if you give a shit about the real Core Curriculum!”

For Feeney, the texts we read bear directly on our political lives. Thus, his conception of a “real Core Curriculum” is one which aims to make us more informed and active citizens in the “real” world, and being an active citizen means challenging the institutions we take for granted—Columbia included. Professor Mercer, former chair of the freshman-year Core class, Literature Humanities, understands Feeney’s sentiment. “Literature Humanities is transformative if taught well,” she asserts. “It should cause people to see themselves in the world in a more nuanced way.” 

Among the educators I spoke with, the one most willing to embrace the “transformative” power of the Core Curriculum was Jehbreal Jackson, my former University Writing instructor and a PhD student without the protections of tenure. Early in the semester, Jackson shared a ceasefire petition as a resource for students who felt inclined to sign. Jackson’s justification for their choice resembles the model of education proposed by activists. “The ceasefire petition was in alignment with being a citizen,” they explain.

Following the sweep of Hind’s Hall, Jackson fostered a frank, student-led discussion of the climate on campus. “The narrative that we were fed was that we were arresting students for the safety of the students,” Jackson says. “But I heard the contrary: that the encampments were where people felt safe, and not with the police and security presence on campus.” Jackson tied the frustrations of the students to the course’s source text, How Scholars Write, which teaches reading in terms of “scholarly problems,” or moments of tension in a text. The “common understanding,” as the UW curriculum puts it, was the media circus surrounding our campus; the “complication" was the counter-narrative of community safety found in the encampment. Jackson remarks, “One could not have desired a more relevant and urgent way to say, ‘This is why we are practicing these skills in this class.’”

While not all classes bear so directly on politics, and legitimate concerns surrounding student comfort and institutional repression render this approach challenging, it’s hard to deny the appeal of drawing from campus life to understand class content. Still, whether educators choose the classroom as a site to explore tensions between our politicized experience and the ideal of unadulterated education, one thing is for certain: The tension is all around us, and we, the students, have the capacity to learn from it either way.

With an administration unwilling to protect its faculty, external pressure from Congress, the demands of student comfort, and the threat of doxing, perhaps there is power in things both said and unsaid. Though Neuhouser does not speak of protest in class, a subtle and subversive curricular change may speak for itself: He tells me that he added a work by Franz Fanon—famous for his theorization of decolonial violence—to his Political Philosophy curriculum. Neuhouser says he has no plans to link the text to any current event. But when asked if he had Palestine in mind, he responds plainly with “yes.”

We read Foucault, and think about campus surveillance. We read Fanon, and think about the Palestinian resistance. A professor refers to Hamilton as “Hind’s Hall” on the syllabus. Students wear keffiyehs to class and sport political stickers on laptops. Aloud or unspoken, we question if studying at Columbia is a moral decision. 

In his interview my CC professor flips the inquiry to me, the student: He asks if I think he addressed the protests with his question. I think about it and reply yes, I did think that. He gives no confirmation that my reading is correct. He says only this: “Students are smart enough to figure it out.”