A selective history of the University Senate and Columbian democracy.
By Chris Brown
Illustration by Em Bennet
“What we know is that there is a gap between the process that the University administration should have taken and the process that it did take,” Vice President of the Student Affairs Committee Minhas Wasaya said in a statement to the University Senate at their monthly meeting in November of last year.
Without permission from the Senate, the University had updated its event policy after the initial wave of protests following the Oct. 7 attacks. With only a minor change in wording, the school had unintentionally pulled back the curtain; it had acted against the wishes of its main representative body, and there was little they could do about it.
According to its website, the University Senate is a “policy-making body” that considers “all matters affecting more than one Faculty or school.” There is little that the hand of the Senate doesn’t touch; Columbia’s university statutes mention jurisdiction over curriculum, budget, academic freedom, and student life.
The Senate was a body forged by protest. Out of a 1968 shockwave that had destroyed faith in an administration whose decisions seemed arbitrary and unaccountable, Columbians yearned for representation. The proposal for the Senate, the discussion of which took up nearly the entirety of the Spectator’s February 1969 issue, was both a chance to restore confidence and “a painstaking and serious endeavor to build for the future so that we may more fully realize the idea of a university.” It was a win and promised a democratic future for the Columbia community.
Columbia’s Senate is unique in its composition. Faculty senates are not uncommon across the country, but direct election of faculty and students to the same body seems to exist only here. The Senate promises that the students, representing one-fifth of the body, have an actual hand on the steering wheel. The faculty is the only group with more representation in the Senate, but it is students, with the short time they have been allotted, that act as the primary engine for change and legislation. The students are the beating heart of the legislative process for all Columbia policy.
Democracy in a university is a strange concept. Everyone is familiar with the idea of a student council: elected representatives who interface with the administration on behalf of the students. But it is no secret that student councils exercise no power over the day-to-day running of the school. The Senate itself is a unicameral body, and in theory, it is intended to be the first and last stop for any changes affecting the experience of students or faculty at Columbia.
The Senate, while being the main policy-making body of the University is at all times “subject to the reserve power of the trustees.” WikiCU wryly refers to this power as “Royal Assent.” Broadly, the Board of Trustees will approve any legislation passed by the Senate, and it will become university law. However, even the first line in the University statutes that established the Senate stipulates that it is “subject to the reserve power of the trustees.”
The power of the trustees looms over every decision that the Senate makes. The University President, who acts as both the head of the Senate and a sitting member of the Board, is a reminder of this at every meeting. By paying tuition and choosing to study here, every student at Columbia nominally assents to this power. We are, after all, consumers of a product that the trustees are offering us. But it is this threat that often leads the Senate to refuse certain items, even when the student body appears unanimous about their necessity.
The times when our democracy backslides into oligarchy may be rare, but with the Senate’s name in the news more than ever, it is worth looking at some of its most controversial moments. The records of these moments are currently being digitized, and for the first time giving Columbia students a chance to re-examine their past. Gazing into the archives for a few examples shows just how thin students’ claim to power is and how tenuous the Senate’s role in preserving it has been.
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From the beginning, the Senate was fraught with tension: It took the entire 1969 school year for a proposal to be approved, and the trustees delayed voting on it three times. The Senate’s original proposal to be the final judicial and legislative stop on all University matters had been vetoed. Even still, the revised proposal that changed it into the current policy-making body was passed with 90% of the vote in a referendum of students and faculty. Frustration with the trustees’ refusal was so strong that balloting for the first set of University Senators occurred before the trustees even formally approved the body formally. The trustees finally approved the Senate after the school year, planning for it to convene the following fall.
When the Senate opened for its first session in the fall of 1969, the student body eagerly awaited what monumental change would come out of the great democratic shift. Many were disappointed that it was almost nothing. One of the very acts of the nascent Senate was an official condemnation of the Vietnam War, which, fittingly, the trustees never endorsed.
Not only did this refusal to endorse the Senate’s resolution serve as an early warning that the Senate was not all-powerful, but the Senate’s first full year revealed a trend embedded into its very nature. Students are impatient; each of us only has four years to enact whatever change we want to see, and most senators only get a single year. Tenured faculty can spend decades fighting for changes, but there is no time for students to wait on the slow bureaucracy that the administration represents. Students were already condemning the Senate’s lack of institutional change two months after it opened its doors, and by the spring of that school year, one of the original senators had resigned, calling the Senate a “magnificent hoax.”
From the first moment, there was concern that our new democratic body was nothing more than window-dressing for an administration that could still engage in the authoritarian practices of its past. It now had an additional tool, with the Senate operating as a democratic veneer over the actions of the trustees and the administration. Like a monarchy, they often don’t need to cancel legislation overtly, only stall; students only have four years, but the administration is eternal.
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Jumping a decade forward, perhaps the most explicit refusal of the trustees to assent to the will of the Senate and student body happened in the early ’80s: their refusal to allow the University to divest from apartheid South Africa. The year 1985 is a somewhat neglected chapter in Columbia’s lore, never operating pride of place above the massive protests of 1968. However, it is here where the now teenage Senate entered its first full-scale fight with the administration.
There had already been rumblings of a controversy over South Africa in the early ’70s. Reviews of University finances had started as the War in Vietnam ended, and by 1977, the trustees themselves had agreed to allow the Senate to review the University’s finances. But, to the students, this initial wave of trustee morality was actually another distraction for their ulterior motive: bringing former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger into the Columbia fold as a tenured professor.
Kissinger—who was under investigation at the time for his potential role in covering up the overthrow of the left-wing leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, while he was secretary of state—had been offered a position by President William McGill. There was immediate backlash from students and faculty, who saw this as a turn towards the exact same kind of politics that the children of ’68 had protested. Faced with protest and a petition of over 900 signatures read before the Senate, McGill and the administration held their ground, but it ultimately did not matter, as Kissinger turned down the job in the summer of ’77.
In this context, the first seeds of the Senate pushing for divestment from South Africa began to sprout. After protests shook the University and McGill at the end of the spring ’78 semester, the trustees agreed to work towards removing Columbia investments from holdings in South Africa and preventing future investments in the country.
But the story of the Senate and South Africa had only just begun. McGill had been replaced as president by Michael Sovern, CC ’53, LAW ’55, one of the original pioneers of the University Senate. After a four-year lull, a new generation of students brought back the spirit of the ’77 and ’78, this time demanding total divestiture by the trustees. In 1983, the Senate passed a resolution calling for total divestiture with unanimous support, even as one trustee called it “a fairly futile gesture.”
And it is here, after the Senate had acted on what its constituents wanted, that the question of what democracy at a university means came back into focus. “Senate Viability,” an op-ed published the week after the resolution passed, stated that “if the trustees do not agree to total divestment from holdings in South Africa,” they will “prove once and for all that the University Senate is a worthless, frivolous entity.”
The trustees decided to try to prove the op-ed right, and delayed voting on the resolution for as long as possible. The spring ’83 semester ended without a vote, and it wasn’t until July that the trustees finally convened and outright rejected the resolution. The Senate was dually plagued by disappointed resignation and outrage as the calendar turned and the fall ’83 semester began. The rejection by the trustees left an existential crisis for the Senate, now facing its first major example of the limits of its power. The Spectator dedicated an entire issue to proposing another set of changes to university governance, including the addition of a student and faculty member to the Board of Trustees. Once again, the students felt disenfranchised by their representative body.
The Senate spent the year having a committee draft another report on why the trustees should divest and managed to convince them to declare a freeze on new investments at the close of the ’84 academic year. This policy was almost immediately reneged before the next school year started, only fanning the flames of a student body that already felt disenfranchised.
The Senate was forced into a choice: They either had to agree to approve the trustees’ caveat-filled freeze plan, which had already been reneged on once, or return to their initial call for total divestment. They chose to stick to the trustees’ line and vote for the former. After this call, the dam of protests finally broke loose, and students occupied Hamilton Hall again, just as they had 17 years earlier. The Senate, created to end the need for that form of protest, had been left unable to do anything, faced with an unhappy student body and an unwilling set of trustees. An article titled “Columbia is not democratic” voiced the exact same concerns that had been voiced in 1970: “The trustees did not like this idea, so they told the Senate to go to hell and refused to divest.”
The following fall, the trustees finally voted for full divestment after a third report from the Senate. But by then, it was too late, and the Senate had once again suffered a blow to its reputation. Public opinion had once again outpaced the ability of the Senate to respond, and frustration grew again. Like the original generation of students at its initial founding, it was again glaringly obvious where the true power lies.
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After the crisis of 1985, the next decade passed in relative quiet. The University Senate faded into the background as another piece of Columbia’s administrative machinery. Gone were the days of fiery, prolonged protest; Columbia had moved into a quieter age. The threat to the Senate was no longer trustee refusal but general apathy. In 1995, the Spectator expressed concerns about the threat of “casual members” of the University Senate, worried that the casualness of senators would leave the body toothless in the face of another real conflict between the students and administration.
This toothlessness and red tape came to a head as it took the Senate a full decade to create a cohesive and comprehensive sexual misconduct policy. The first task force on the subject convened in 1994, and it released its first report two years later in 1996. But it wasn’t until three years later that the Senate released its recommendations for updating the policy.
This delay did not go unnoticed by the student body. On the eve of its 30th anniversary in 1999, the Spectator called the Senate “sweeping in scope, miniscule in influence.” A petition titled “We Waited Three Years For This?” was presented to the Senate the same year, revealing the students’ damning perception of the Senate. It had become an inert body, unable to pass even the most basic legislation for its constituents. The Senate had been dreamed up as a panacea to the University’s problems, a broad-sweeping body that could react to any problem, and now general apathy had rendered it largely irrelevant. In 2005, still looking for more on the issue of sexual misconduct, the Spectator asked: “If the University Senate has a meeting and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
This is where we found the University Senate in 2023—a body with power that had waned, left to send emails that mostly went ignored.
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The University Senate has returned to the forefront of the news cycle in recent years at Columbia. Once again, it has come into conflict with administrators on behalf of students and has been forced out of the stupor that it had been left in after the firestorm of ’85. The Senate is still as limited as ever; it cannot force anything on the University that the trustees oppose.
But even if participatory democracy in a university is illusory, that does not render the Senate useless. The Senate is as close to a democratic institution as we have at this school, and even if it is only a shadow of the power that it could have, there is still room to make use of the Senate as an institution. It is the closest that we get to interface with the administrators that run our school, the closest we get to working alongside faculty toward a common goal, and the first site for many of the student body’s grievances. The Senate is only as strong as the people who populate it and the student body that it represents; we have no choice but to continue to make our voices heard.
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