Meet the Columbia Academics at War With Western Civilization

The Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought is rethinking everything—starting with liberal democracy.

Amber Yin/Columbia Sundial

It is time, in the West, to get beyond liberal democratic forms of governance that are wedded and captive to advanced extractive logics of wealth accumulation, concentration, and monopolization. It is time to dismantle the logics and institutions of advanced capitalist accumulation that empower our punitive society.

At first glance, these words might seem like they were lifted from the revolutionary writings of Vladimir Lenin or Karl Marx. They would also fit right in with the militant critiques of capitalism put forth by Mao Zedong or Che Guevara. These are all thinkers who not only analyzed their societies’ power structures, but also sought to overthrow them through direct action.

But they belong, in fact, to Bernard E. Harcourt, a contemporary legal theorist and political philosopher at Columbia Law School who has made it his mission to investigate the entanglement of capitalism, governance, and punishment in the modern world.

Harcourt heads the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT), a joint project between the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Columbia Law School, whose mission is to study and teach critical theory. Critical theory is a Marxist-inspired movement that seeks to identify and challenge inequities and oppressive social structures. The subject has gained increasing prominence within the Core Curriculum, particularly in the Contemporary Civilization curriculum, where students are required to read the works of critical theorists like Michel Foucault and Franz Fanon.

In fact, Columbia played a crucial role in the early development of critical theory. Many pioneers of the field, primarily German-Jewish philosophers and sociologists, fled Nazi Germany during World War II and continued their research at Columbia. That early group of critical theorists, commonly referred to as the “Frankfurt School,” was largely focused on analyzing the causes of authoritarianism and antisemitism. In the late 1940s, the Frankfurt School critical theorists severed their ties to the University, and several prominent members returned to Germany. Now, the CCCCT has inherited the mantle of studying and teaching critical theory at Columbia, and its research focus has shifted significantly from that of its predecessors.

The People

The CCCCT website’s “People” page lists over 40 members, including affiliated faculty, emeriti scholars, and fellows. Their research topics range from queer and trans studies to commodity fetishism in South America. Here are a few of them:

Derecka Purnell: A lawyer, writer, and outspoken advocate for police abolition. In a 2020 Atlantic op-ed titled “How I Became a Police Abolitionist,” Purnell wrote, “We never should have had police. Policing is among the vestiges of slavery, tailored in America to suppress slave revolts, catch runaways, and repress labor organizing.” She goes on to argue, “Policing cannot even fix the harms of our nightmares. People often ask me, ‘What will we do with murderers and rapists?’ Which ones? The police kill more than a thousand people every year, and assault hundreds of thousands more.”

Kenyatta Emmanuel Hughes: A songwriter and artist-in-residence at the CCCCT from 2021 to 2024. Hughes spent 24½ years in prison for killing a cab driver during a robbery he committed when he was 21. Hughes is now an advocate for criminal justice reform and improved arts programs in prisons. “Our thesis is that artistic expression by the incarcerated is, of itself, a challenge to oppressive systems of mass incarceration. Of course, anything that fills out an individual’s complexity is an attack on systemic oppression,” Hughes wrote in a 2022 Stanford Social Innovation Review piece.

Michael Taussig: A professor emeritus of anthropology at Columbia and author who is interested in combining storytelling with critical theory. In his book The Corn Wolf, Taussig includes a chapter titled “Two Weeks in Palestine: My First Visit.” The chapter is an account of a trip Taussig took to the West Bank in June 2013 in which he platforms several conspiracy theories about Israel. For example, he suggests that the Jewish National Fund plants pine trees “to conceal the prior existence of Palestinian villages” and that Israel trains wild boars and gazelles to trample Palestinian crops. “The peasants hear strange whistles and other sounds emanating from the pines at the times of attack,” he writes.

I asked Taussig what he thought people misunderstood most about critical theory. He responded by confusing critical theory with critical race theory, a sub-discipline of the field. “Well, I think Critical Race Theory is the same as rational smart thinking and long—very long—overdue,” Taussig wrote in a statement to Sundial.

Bernard Harcourt

Photo courtesy of Columbia Law School

The most active and influential member of the CCCCT is the organization’s founding director, Bernard Harcourt. On his personal website, Harcourt describes himself as an author, editor, litigator, teacher, scholar, publisher, and advocate. He began his legal career representing inmates on death row and later became a professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago. He is currently the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, as well as directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Harcourt is the lifeblood of the CCCCT. In addition to being its founder and executive director, Harcourt features prominently in nearly all of the organization’s events. The Center’s website even has a page titled “Bernard E. Harcourt Media” devoted exclusively to news about the executive director. Much of the website is dedicated to chronicling Harcourt’s career, with pages discussing his legal fields of interest, such as Guantanamo Bay litigation and death penalty cases.

Harcourt is also a prominent political commentator. After the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, he published an op-ed in the Boston Review titled “The Fight Ahead,” in which he considers the possibility of secession in the United States. “We can engage in politics by other means, meaning outright war, or we can splinter across irreconcilable ideological divides. The latter, secession, should not be dismissed so lightly anymore,” he writes. “Unless we fully recognize that we face, once again, the power of white nationalism and what those more than 74 million votes stand for, we are doomed to continue down that path.”

However, despite his fierce criticism of Republican voters, Harcourt thinks it is imperative to convert them to his worldview. He writes, “We need to bring more Trump supporters to our side. That is, of course, what we do in politics—we convince others of the truth of our world view, of the truth of our interpretation of the facts. Sometimes this occurs through argument and persuasion, sometimes through charisma, sometimes through fear—and sometimes through utter domination.”

Harcourt declined Sundial’s interview request.

The Initiative for a Just Society

One of Harcourt’s primary research focuses is on the topic of praxis, the practice of applying theory to the real world. Praxis is one of the defining features of critical theory; while other academics like mathematicians or physicists often have to wait years to see their theories achieve any real-world application, critical theorists are constantly attempting to put their theories into practice. In fact, the CCCCT has an outreach arm called the Initiative for a Just Society (IJS) devoted exclusively to practical engagements.

The IJS says its mission is “to create a just and equal society in which each and every one of us can flourish.” It seeks to achieve this utopic vision primarily by providing legal services to various causes. Their website mainly advertises Harcourt’s and other members of the IJS’s legal battles in fields such as death penalty litigation and police abolition.

But the IJS’s ambitions extend far beyond fighting court cases. According to the IJS, American society is not simply flawed, but irredeemably immoral. They write in their mission statement:

The ancien régime of aristocratic nobility collapsed. The Antebellum era of chattel slavery and de jure White Supremacy ended. But our current age in Western liberal-democratic countries is hardly better: it privileges the selfish accumulation of wealth over the equal welfare of human beings and has produced racial, gender, and class hierarchies that are unconscionable and have become today unsustainable.

The IJS believes that our government and social structure must be completely overhauled to achieve a “just and equal society.” Their mission statement includes a bold call to “abolish, more ambitiously, the punitive society that produces these recurring injustices, but beyond that, Western liberal-democratic advanced-capitalist society as we know it today.”

The 13/13 Seminars

The CCCCT’s desire to apply critical theory to the real world even extends into their approach to teaching the subject. One of the CCCCT’s main initiatives is their 13/13 Seminars, a series of lectures that approach the study of critical theory through an analysis of thirteen important texts from authors like Nietzsche, Foucault, and Marx. Despite what the CCCCT’s name might suggest, the seminars do not take a critical approach to these texts. Rather, the goal is “not to tear them down and criticize them for their faults, but to discover what we can do with them today.” The 13/13 Seminars seek to “deploy and manipulate critical texts for our own political projects.”

Since the first 13/13 Seminar on Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know in August 2015, there have been over 100 such lectures with topics including “Revolution,” “Open Borders,” and “Anti-imperialism.” Each year, the CCCCT invites prominent guests, which have included author Malcolm Gladwell, linguist Noam Chomsky, and philosopher Cornel West, to participate in their discussions. The guests and Harcourt sit around a table, often reciting essays they’ve written and discussing the works of other critical theorists.

Palestinian Activism

The CCCCT also played an active role in the protests and encampments during the 2023-2024 school year. Several CCCCT faculty members were spotted participating in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and guarding its entrance. One such faculty member was Jack Halberstam, a professor of English and women’s studies and author of the book Female Masculinity. In an interview with the BBC at the encampment, Halberstam said:

This is what education looks like. Education isn’t simply something that happens in the classroom, it’s when people read and think and engage and debate and then take those ideas back into the world…

During Passover, a Jewish holiday that celebrates the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt and the start of their journey into Israel, Halberstam, who identifies as Jewish, recited a satirical adaptation of the “Four Children” passage of the Haggadah, a text traditionally recited during the first two nights of Passover. In Halberstam’s adaptation, the four children are various Columbia administrators, with former University President Minouche Shafik described as a “bootlicker” who “hides behind the trustees.”

Amber Yin/Columbia Sundial

Halberstam is also quoted in an Instagram post by the Columbia-Barnard chapter of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) as stating, “The students who created this lovely experiment will be suspended, expelled and doxed. Their only comfort right now is knowing that they are on the right side of history and seeing clearly now that this world, the world of administrators and bureaucrats, fascists and white supremacists, must be completely dismantled.” Eleven days before this post, protestors had violently occupied Hamilton Hall.

The Center itself also signaled its condemnation of the Columbia administration. In May 2024, the CCCCT advertised an event titled “13/13 in Exile | The Cooperative University with Kali Akuno.” The event description states that their guest, Morehouse College political science professor Andrew J. Douglas, is “rightfully boycotting Columbia University in response to the massive arrests on campus.”

Trump, Columbia, and the Future of the CCCCT

On March 7, the Trump administration announced the freeze of $400 million in federal funding for Columbia because the school has failed to “fulfill their civil rights responsibilities to protect Jewish students from harassment and anti-Semitism.” In response, Columbia has given in to many of the federal government’s preconditions for negotiation, including hiring public safety officers with arrest powers, changing rules on masking, and centralizing the University Judicial Board under the University president’s office.

Columbia may also be trying to shift the Trump administration’s perception of it as a leftist institution: The University announced its intentions to expand intellectual diversity among faculty in Middle Eastern studies and formally adopt institutional neutrality.

The future of the CCCCT hinges on whether Columbia sees the Center as essential to its mission of fostering intellectual diversity and inquiry or as a source of further instability during an already tumultuous period in the University’s history. Amid this uncertainty, one thing remains certain: The CCCCT has no intention of depoliticizing or abandoning its activist focus.

As national debates over academic freedom, DEI initiatives, and campus politics intensify, the CCCCT is a microcosm of one side of a broader ideological struggle. Whether it can remain an unabashedly progressive force—or whether external pressures will force it to adapt—will help determine the future of left-wing activism in academia.

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Oren Hartstein is a staff editor for Sundial and a freshman studying physics at Columbia College.