President Armstrong, Tear Down This Wall
Campus gates have been closed since April. What gives?
“The Alumni Center is currently closed to Alumni due to the ‘I’ Campus Status.” The sign reads like something out of a Monty Python skit, but to the many alumni and parents who visited Columbia over Homecoming the last weekend of October, it was all too real. Many even struggled to get onto campus and had to brave Columbia’s bureaucratic jungle of guest passes and registration forms.
In response to the protests that throttled the University in the spring, administrators have decided to uphold the Shafik-era policy of closing down campus to prevent outside agitators from entering (which had only limited success). Since April, Columbia’s once-open gates have been replaced with guarded entry points and ID scanners. Flocks of security guards dutifully patrol each gate, ready to deny entrance to anyone attempting to breach the University’s defenses.
Columbia has spent the last several months experimenting with methods of communicating these campus closures. In July, the University established a system of color codes to indicate the level of campus access. The colors ranged from green, which indicated a completely open campus, to red, which indicated that campus access was limited to those living within the gates and essential staff. In September, Columbia decided to simplify the color coded system (memorizing the meaning of four colors was deemed too difficult for the average Columbia student) into three categories indicated by letters: O for a fully open campus, I for CUID holders and approved guests, and R for CUID holders only.
If Columbia deems it necessary to change their campus access status to the ultra-restrictive “R” rating, even those registered for a guest pass may be restricted from entering campus. Many discovered this on October 7 of this year when Columbia denied all guests access to the campus—the Office of the President cited the risk of “groups not affiliated with Columbia choosing to come to our Morningside campus for activities that raise concern about the potential for violence.”
Interim President Katrina Armstrong claims these measures are only temporary. In a September email to the Columbia community, Armstrong affirmed her desire to move “thoughtfully and deliberately toward a fully reopened campus, a destination I hope to arrive at in a matter of weeks, not months.”
Armstrong suggested that reopening Columbia is not just about removing the nuisance of ID scanning and guest registration—it is instead an issue central to the University’s defining principles. “I am mindful that history provides too many examples of institutions that retreat from active engagement with the world around them. That is not and will not be the case here,” she wrote.
But do all Columbia students even want a reopened campus? After enduring weeks of protests and occupied lawns and buildings, do Columbia students think the inconvenience of pulling out an ID card to enter campus outweighs the risks of allowing just about anyone onto campus?
To some, Armstrong’s goal of reopening campus reads more like a threat than a promise. Some students feel that an open-gate policy would make campus more dangerous by inviting more protests. One such student told me, “If closing the gates is what it takes to prevent total anarchy on campus, then that’s what the administration should do. It’s SJP’s, JVP’s, and CUAD’s fault for creating chaos on campus and they’re to blame for destroying student life.”
But these policies often come at the expense of alumni and non-affiliates who come to campus for benign purposes. Local residents who want to use the campus for recreation, aspiring students visiting the school, and non-affiliated scholars attending public lectures and events all face increased burdens for accessing the University.
Students taking a gap semester are similarly impacted. Phillip Grabovsky CC ’25, who is taking a semester off to pursue an internship, told me, “Even though I live just a few streets down, it has become nearly impossible to access the people and places that I have learned to call home over the past 3 years.”
Columbia proudly touts itself as an Ivy League university “in the City of New York.” That means engaging with the city and surrounding neighborhood, including collaborating with the city in research, the arts, and more. The current closed-gate policy has begun to diminish this relationship with the outside world, physically and symbolically.
The detrimental effects of gate closures would suggest that the policy is a necessary evil—a way to keep campus safe from external threats.
Unfortunately, that might not be the case. Of the 112 people arrested in Hamilton Hall and the encampment on May 2, a little under 30 percent were non-affiliates. The remaining 70 percent were Columbia students, nearly all of whom were invited back to campus this fall. Closing the gates allowed Columbia to improve its image by framing the unrest on campus—even though it was perpetrated mainly by students—as a foreign threat that infiltrated an otherwise peaceful student body.
In her September email, Armstrong insisted that campus would open “in a matter of weeks, not months.” It is now mid-November, and Columbia’s gates are still closed with no signs of reopening. As long the gates remain shut, frustration from alumni and students will steadily grow.
Perhaps most frustrating is that the University has not clearly stated the conditions for reopening campus. As we speculate about what exactly is keeping the gates closed, one thing is certain: If Columbia is waiting for peace in the Middle East, we might be waiting for a while.
Oren Harstein is a staff writer for Sundial and a freshman studying physics at Columbia College.