On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Columbia University Trustee and former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson acknowledged that Columbia’s delay in calling the police to crack down on the demonstrations on campus was partially due to a fear that the faculty would fire the school’s president and Columbia’s tradition of not calling the police.
Co-host Joe Scarborough said, “I want you to explain this, Jeh, because you have a unique perspective that a lot of us don’t, and that is the fact that, had this [happened] — when this happened at Florida, it was much easier for the president of the University of Florida to say, I’m going to clean this out today. We’re not a [daycare] center, boom. He didn’t have to worry about the faculty senate trying to get him fired. And I want to — it gets far more complicated at a place like Columbia, and we need to understand this. Why didn’t the police get sent in the first day? Because you actually had members of the faculty that were actually encouraging the disruptions of the campus or actually encouraging the protests, let me say, in some instances, encouraging law-breaking. And so, there’s a faculty senate that was ready to censure or suggest that the president be fired, and it was a much more difficult balancing act for Columbia’s president than it may have been for Florida’s president or if this had happened at Alabama or if this had happened at, say, Nebraska.”
Johnson responded, “Joe, that’s absolutely right. Every large college and university has its own character, its own dynamic. Columbia is one of the largest universities in the country. It’s right smack in the middle of New York City, the media capital of the world. We have a very, very diverse, large student population. It’s essentially an international student population. We have a very vocal faculty, faculty senate, university senate with their own views, and part of the Columbia history is we don’t call the New York City Police Department. We hadn’t done so on a large scale since 1968. And so, you put all that together, it presents a unique set of very, very complicated, highly emotional decisions. I suspect the University of Florida system is different, UCLA, University of California is different, Morehouse College, where I went to college, graduated, is different, — where President Biden is speaking in a week or two — each school and university has its own character. Columbia was and is especially complex, and I compliment our president for working through all of these very, very complicated emotional issues to get to where we are.”
Johnson also said that the risk of increasing danger by bringing police on campus was another factor in Columbia’s decision-making.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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