Columbia Professor Slaughter: Protests Escalated Because of ‘Gross Mismanagement’

Columbia University Professor Joseph Slaughter said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Chris Jansing Reports” that the school’s administration’s “gross mismanagement” caused the New York Police Department to have to clear the encampment and arrest the protestors.

Slaughter said, “Faculty near me, students near me were crying in despair over the fact that the administration has escalated to the point where they’re bringing in an assault team to shut down student protest. I can understand that the building occupation is a different matter than a completely peaceful, nonviolent encampment that had existed on the campus for the last ten days or so.:”

He continued, “The fact that the building can be occupied is partly, is due partly to the gross mismanagement of this administration. It has escalated consistently for the last seven months. These students have been attempting to get what they understand to be a human rights message about justice for Palestine out for seven months, and at every turn, they have been met with repressive actions to shut down their ability to speak, to demonstrate, to try to make their voices heard and what they see as the greatest human rights crisis of the moment. And this administration, in failing to listen to its students beginning in October and November and failing to hear the voices of its faculty, experts in the field, experts in the area, coming up with their kind of administrative decisions among a small cabinet of ministers at the top of the, underneath the president, they have consistently escalated and kettled the speech of the students.”

NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton said, “They released a statement this morning, the president saying that they tried to have productive conversations with the students that went on for eight days, essentially saying they did their best to avoid what happened here. Do you do not believe them?”

Slaughter said, “They may have tried to do their best over the past eight days. They did not do their best over the previous six months. If they had had those productive conversations with the students when they were clearly making their their statements in absolutely peaceful, vigil-like manners in November and in October, we wouldn’t be here today. If they had bothered to sit down with the students. My understanding is that this president refused to meet with the leaders of the two student groups that she unilaterally suspended in November, refused to meet to talk with them about their demands, about their concerns, refused to hear the vast majority of students, who see this as an unfolding, potentially genocide in Gaza.”

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