Where the CC University Senate Candidates Stand on the Spring Referendum Issues

The candidates have a range of stances on proposals pertaining to special campus officers with arrest power, placing the MESAAS department under a receivership, and student disciplinary powers.

Amber Yin/Columbia Sundial

Note: CC Senate candidates Sciana Vertusma, James Coppersmith, Liane Bdair, Eli Baum, and Elizabeth Adeoye did not respond to Sundial’s interview request. Interviews lightly edited for clarity.

Read the full interviews here. In addition to conducting personal interviews, Sundial asked the Senate candidates how they would respond to this election’s six referendum questions.

Should an amendment be passed to require the appointment of students, elected by their peers, to the Trustees of Columbia University?

Elisha Baker: No.

Sean Tiger Li: Yeah. Anything for the purpose of shared governance principles, Columbia University would do well with student trustees. Logistically, there are some challenges. I brought up a point about how there might be a power imbalance between trustees, but at the end of the day, they do have the consent of the governed. So I think it’d be very useful to have a graduate student and an undergraduate student on the board of trustees, or even the ability for the Senate to appoint not just half, but half plus one of the board.

Keana Simon: First, it is non-binding, and I’m glad they gave that disclosure because it’s not likely that the trustees would agree to have a student among them, especially since they are very business oriented, and having a student there would just take away from their business mindset. Although we can be wishful, and hope we could get more student representation, it’s not gonna happen. So I don’t see the point of the question.

Daniel Shneider: I would support this. I think that students of course have a vested interest in the oversight of Columbia. And we’ve also seen some pretty severe overreaches of trustee authority in the past year. I think it’s for the benefit of the students to have a student representative to the trustees, on top of the shared power and decision making processes that can be done better.

Should the members of the University Judicial Board be appointed by the Executive Committee of the University Senate, as required by the University Statutes?

Elisha Baker: No. I do not believe that faculty members should be in charge of student conduct disciplinary processes.

Sean Tiger Li: Yes. The statutes legally require it. Also morally I think that students should be able to have a say in how discipline is done in the school. We call them community standards for a reason, so let the community decide what our standards should be.

Keana Simon: Yes. Actually, I did serve last spring, when students were still allowed there, I served on the UJB Applicant Review Panel. It’s a very diverse group of applicants from all schools, so I actually don’t have information about what’s happening to the students now that were accepted last spring. I do know that they’re being restricted, but I think it was done very well when it was under the Executive Committee.

Daniel Shneider: Absolutely. For anything, we need the University to abide by its own statutes. This has been a consistent problem. I think that it doesn’t matter how you feel about what the results of certain disciplinary procedures should be. The University Judicial Board provides a level of transparency and due process that’s really important. The effort to shove this to the executive office of the CSSI is less transparent and makes things more arbitrary, which isn’t of interest to anyone.

Should students be appointed to serve on the University Judicial Board, as required by the University Statutes?

Elisha Baker: No. I do not believe that students should be adjudicating student conduct disciplinary hearings for their peers.

Sean Tiger Li: Yes.

Keana Simon: Yes. Pretty much the same response as the last question.

Daniel Shneider: Yes. The committee needs a role in how disciplinary procedures are done, both to ensure the application of proper disciplinary measures when needed and to prevent the use of disciplinary measures and an overreach to punish what should otherwise be free, fair, and protected speech.

Should Columbia employ special officers with arrest power?

Elisha Baker: Yes, 100 percent. The University and public safety should have the ability to enforce policies and rules of University conduct. This is obvious to me.

Sean Tiger Li: No. These officers will not be, in fact, able to arrest for actions that don’t violate state law. The mere breaking of certain community standards of Columbia is not sufficient for them to have the power of arrest. I think this is a way for them to sneakily get rid of people for “trespassing.” I’m a transfer student and I went to a university with their own police department. It’s not unprecedented, but this feels very backhanded, very underhanded, and very, very contrary to the principles of shared governance.

Keana Simon: I think the biggest issue with this topic is the fact that there’s a lot of ambiguity of what powers the officers have. I work in the University Senate, so it's just a struggle for the Student Affairs Committee to get more information to share with their constituents. To answer your question, more directly, I don’t believe that there should be officers with those arrest powers because we don’t know to what extent they can utilize those powers. It’s creating a lot of fear and discomfort on campus, and I think that goes against what the Senate wants to foster in the Columbia community.

Daniel Shneider: Absolutely not.

Should the Office of Institutional Equity be able to defund, suspend, and derecognize student groups, without the involvement of the Student Group Adjudication Board?

Elisha Baker: Yes. The OIE is in charge of investigating and finding responsibility, or non-responsibility in cases involving discriminatory harassment and discrimination, and when a group acts in a way that violates an OIE policy, it should be on the OIE to determine what comes next. I generally believe that it should be in the hands of the administration, through the OIE, to adjudicate cases involving student groups, rather than students adjudicating for their peers.

Sean Tiger Li: No. I think that the Student Group Adjudication Board needs to have some kind of say in it. I’m not denying the existence of hate on campus. This is a problem, and we should very much deal with this problem. But to put the power to recognize, derecognize, and defund student groups in the power of the upper administration is not only dangerously edging into restrictions to free speech, but also fundamentally undemocratic. If you can demonstrate that a certain group is behaving in a certain way, I don't think it makes a difference whether students or upper administration are determining it. If, for example, a certain group is antisemitic, then they are antisemitic, regardless of whether that’s reviewed by students or upper administration. So we should keep that sort of power within the students to govern themselves.

Keana Simon: I think it’s important for students in general to ask why the University is taking the actions that it does, because what we’re seeing right now is that they’re taking a lot of actions to separate the administration and the trustees from the students. People have less communication and understanding of what’s happening behind doors. Even with the emails they’re super vague and no one understands what they’re about or if they’re telling the truth. There’s a lot of confusion happening, and this is something that they take advantage of. It’s the same issue with the Senate, where no one even knows what the Senate does. They take advantage of that. We even see in the Student Affairs Committee where the student senators are not included in the task forces that the administrators are creating. My main issue with all of these bodies that they create is that it feels like more effort to separate the students and the administration. The Senate was created to increase democratic governance, and they’re trying to take that down one action at a time.

Daniel Shneider: No. When correction measures need to be implemented they absolutely need to be done with input from the community. The OIE, I believe, functions more to protect the University from liability rather than to ensure equity. To prevent overreaches and censorship, and to make sure that everything being done is in the community’s interest, we should not give this power to the untouchable administrative body. Rather, it should be a democratic process.

Should Columbia University place the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under an academic receivership?

Elisha Baker: It’s complicated, because that means a lot of things. If you’re asking me, should MESAAS be reviewed for the purposes of ensuring viewpoint diversity and that the department lives up to its responsibilities as a department within Columbia, I do believe that MESAAS should be subject to such a review. Now, what does that review look like? I think we should have that conversation. That’s a deeply complex issue that requires much more thoughtful contemplation and involvement of the different stakeholders. But does MESAAS need to be reviewed? I believe so.

Sean Tiger Li: No. Academic receivership is very rarely used, and this is simply an attack by the federal government on academic freedom. I see no reason that these academic departments are somehow failing at their job. We have these principles for a reason, that even if the subjects that we study and the conclusions that we come to are uncomfortable to us, that does not mean that they should be restricted. Receivership is something for the university itself to decide, not for the government to decide.

Keana Simon: They haven’t clarified what receivership would look like. They’re doing that a lot, saying things without clarifying. Another problem has to do with what’s going on across the nation, with education being limited, and attempts being made to censor education and people's abilities to to learn. I feel that college out of all places is where you should be able to expand your mindset and attack those areas of your knowledge that you didn’t realize you were lacking, or you didn’t realize you had bias in. Attacking universities is a very bold move and it’s very troubling that they’re going after these departments. I know people who have never taken an African-American history class, or they really haven’t had extensive history education, especially in the U.S., no shade to my fellow Americans, but it’s very troubling. Once you don’t understand your own history, so many problems come out of that. So short answer, no. I don’t believe there should be a receivership.

Daniel Shneider: Absolutely not. This department has been a beacon of scholarship and an amazing resource for the community, and it's clear that this proposal for a receivership is an attempt to enforce a single view, both among faculty and students. The role of the University is to encourage research, debate, and multiple perspectives. To begin to censor departments for the content of their research is very disturbing.

Voting is open for Columbia College students until Monday, April 21 at 5 PM EST. See more information about the candidates for CC Representative to the University Senate on the student elections webpage.