A Letter to the Baroness Shafik, Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and President of Columbia University

May 7, 2024

To the Baroness Shafik, Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and President of Columbia University,

I want to tell you about my friend Laure de Montebello, who I met while studying poetry writing as a graduate student at Columbia’s School of the Arts from 2017–2019. Laure comes to mind, I believe, as I sit down to address you because she so strikingly shaped my time at Columbia and because meeting Laure marked the first time in my life I had personally encountered the aristocracy, an exclusive order to which Laure belonged and to which you, as a life peer and member of the House of Lords, now help to comprise.

The de Montebellos, as you may know, are an old French family. Some of Laure’s relatives descend from Marshal Jean Lannes, the Duke of Montebello and an aide to Napoleon. Others in her family trace their lineage to Marquis de Sade. Laure’s uncle Georges was president of the Swiss Helvetia Fund and Laure’s father, Philippe de Montebello, was the long-time director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is a connection in her family to John Marshall Harlan, the late Supreme Court Associate Justice, and to Marie-Laure de Noailles a French artist and influential patron of the arts who associated with the likes of Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau. Befriending Laure was the first time I had met anyone who could say that attending an Ivy League university was a matter of social descent rather than social ascent, that Columbia was a place to mingle with the public riff raff.

And I, Baroness, am the riff raff. You see, my family is decidedly not an aristocratic family. My ancestors on both sides are immigrants, tailors, farmers, and teachers. My mother, for most of her life, worked as a server in a restaurant and now teaches special education. My father is a non-denominational pastor at a smallish Evangelical church in northern Minnesota, who delivered newspapers for more than a decade to make ends meet for our family of five. I started working as soon as it was legal, at the age of fourteen, at a hotel where I collected the dirty sheets and scrubbed the stains left by families wealthier than mine who could afford regular weekend getaways. Since then, I have worked often in the trades or in service industries, as a carpenter or a roofer or a barback or a cleaner. While I was not privy to the discussions that led to my admission, I have long assumed I was accepted into Columbia’s MFA program because I have genuine and current connections to the working class, because I write passionately about work, and, in part, because of Timothy Donnelly’s appreciation for the importance of fostering working-class voices in American literature.

So, while at Columbia, despite the fact we were quite unlike each other in family and class background, Laure and I struck up a sort of implausible friendship. And I soon came to love and appreciate her.

I loved Laure because she prepared food in a way that bore her soul to others and she relished, as I do, the ecstasy that eating together can bring. I loved Laure because she again and again introduced me to various French foods without making me feel like a complete philistine. I loved Laure because she introduced me to Jack Gilbert and sent me messages like, “If you are interested in reading more, let me know — I have all of them and will happily lend you his Collected. :)” which made me feel like she understood, more than anyone I met at the School of the Arts, that I was too cash-strapped to buy all the books I needed to study properly but too proud to tolerate anyone thinking for one second that I was going without. I loved Laure because she was a generous and gracious host. I loved Laure because she teased me gently about not knowing how to use a buzzer at an Upper West Side apartment but then taught me how to use one. I loved Laure because she was a devoted mother. I loved Laure because of her endlessly delightful snark. I loved Laure because no drink was ever really strong enough for her and no bill was ever too much for her to clandestinely pay. I loved Laure because she believed, like I do, that the writing life is not confined to classrooms, and she loved to gather poets together — often with a printer at the ready — so we could write and draft and revise together for hours. I loved Laure because she once slipped me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at a party, even though I thought I was successfully hiding how I was struggling to pay for groceries and to eat well. I loved Laure because we disagreed, sometimes vociferously, about politics. I loved Laure because she was an astonishing writer. I loved Laure because she invited me into her life, even into the exclusive places — to early openings at The Met or to her family’s cottage in the Hamptons, for two examples. It was that latter trip, especially, that opened my eyes even more to precisely how far removed the ruling class is from the average people of our world. I was moody and I stared out the window for hours in the backseat while I brooded over this acidic reality on the drive back home.

I write of this love in the past tense because in the spring during our first year at Columbia, Laure died.

It was March. It was grey. I went to the funeral and I wore black. That spring we also lost our beloved Director of Poetry, the timeless and incomparable Duchess of Letters, Lucie Brock-Broido. I went to the gatherings held in her honor in Dodge Hall. I didn’t say much. I felt numb with loss. At that point in my life, I was fortunate to have only a little experience with death.

For months, I had been in denial about Laure’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis. I still thought she and I had the rest of our lives to share the books we loved, to read and to edit each other’s poems. I still thought I had all the time I needed to argue with her, to tease her, to gossip with her, to apologize and to explain why I was being so moody on that one car ride back to the city.

As it turns out, death is truly final.

I believe I would never have crossed paths with someone like Laure — nor she with me — had it not been for Columbia, and for the role universities can play in our once-full-but-now-deteriorating democracy. In fact, when I was a high school senior my father explicitly discouraged me from applying to Ivy League universities because he believed them to be places that spiritually corrupt young people. And yet the art, culture, literature, and perspectives to which Laure exposed me, I have found, constitute an invaluable informal education, one I return to again and again and again.

If this is corruption, then let me be forever a heretic.

I feel what Laure gave to me — her unique personal history and viewpoint — is what I owe to you and to Columbia University at this moment, to give back in kind. Indeed, over the last several decades Columbia has made a point to admit more students from backgrounds historically not represented on campus, knowing it will strengthen the intellectual community and lend the university credibility as a societal leader.

So as an alumnus from a lower income background, I feel I owe it to you — and to the university — to express my fervent disapproval of the way you have managed the protests on campus. Thus far your decisions seem to me to have been reckless and inflammatory. And candidly, from my vantage point, they seem to be characterized by your status as an aristocrat. It seems to me you have been living a world away from the realities of this current American moment and the climate on American campuses and are thus unprepared to act.

I heard a removed disregard in the way you responded during your hearing before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, specifically in your responses to Representative Jim Banks of Indiana. I sensed an aristocratic aloofness in your instinct to retreat into the cloistered circle of the Board of Trustees rather than to engage more fully with the democratic messiness of the University Senate, which had been repeatedly advising you not to invite the NYPD to campus. I observed this courtly distance in the way you have crafted communications regarding the destruction of property on campus. And, lastly, I noted a lordliness in the way that you were not — or did not appear to the public to be — physically present on campus when the NYPD raided Hamilton Hall.

I am calling on you to let your sense of remorse prevail and to change course and tone immediately or, if you cannot, to resign as president of Columbia University.

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Congressional Hearing, House Committee on Education and the Workforce

Much has already been written and said about your approach to the hearing before the United States House of Representatives and I have little to add to what has already been said besides to agree that it was humiliating to anyone who sincerely cares about the academy’s independence from the capricious vacillations of political power. It is in part my resistance to the inappropriate nature of the hearing in the first place, and the attempt of politicians to have outsized influence on university campuses, that I am not rigidly calling only for your resignation but rather hope you will change course of your own volition, and therefore avoid the appearance of being at the beck and call of political opportunists.

I will add, though, that I am uniquely concerned about your response to Representative Jim Banks of Indiana regarding orientation materials for incoming students at The School of Social Work. Representative Banks, dripping with performative condescension about the Ivy League, asked “Can you explain why the word ‘folks’ is spelled f-o-l-x throughout this guidebook and in other places at The School of Social Work?” You responded, in a tone that I can only describe as patronizing and insulting, with, “They don’t know how to spell? I mean I’m not familiar with that spelling. . .”

At first, I thought you may be willfully playing along with Representative Banks and his obnoxious political grandstanding which would be upsetting but understandable given the odious nature of the hearing and, I imagine, your desire to exit that room as quickly as possible. But after watching and listening several times, I am convinced you may genuinely not be aware of the term folx, its etymology (despite its longstanding entry in the Oxford English Dictionary), its social history, or the current scholarship taking place at Columbia which uses or investigates alternative spellings as they are connected to queerness, gender and its varied expressions, language, and education, especially within the Institute for the Study of Sexuality.

If I am right, I find that lack of awareness highly alarming. And I find it offensive that someone in your position, even if they were not personally interested in such lines of inquiry, would be ignorant of and dismissive towards the current intellectual trends and lively academic conversations happening within the disciplines at Columbia. Had you been more in touch, you may have been able to shed some light on how folx dates back at least a century, links to the 1970s feminist spelling of Mx. (instead of Mr. and Ms.), and was revived more recently in online queer culture, instead of joining Representative Banks to publicly disparage an entire graduate school in a manner I can only describe as belittling.

Further, as a queer alumnus and as a poet, writer, and editor who is committed to the importance of language in our lives, I find your response to Representative Banks beyond disappointing. Mostly, I feel this interaction lent credence to my overall impression that you are out of touch.

Disengagement From the University Senate

I find this matter relatively simple. The facts are as such, by all reports: the 13-member executive committee of the University Senate has repeatedly advised you not to invite the NYPD to campus.

You ignored them the first time and asked the NYPD to arrest student protestors, and then expressed your regrets. Then, despite your apparent recognition of the unhelpful and inflammatory nature of such a decision, you doubled down on it and invited the NYPD again to campus, and this second time they came with excessive numbers and militaristic vehicles, pushed a student down several stairs, and fired off a stray bullet in Hamilton Hall.

I find your decision-making to represent a willful deafness to the members of your community and to established university process. I see it also as a form of holding yourself at a distance, as if you are above the processes of advisement and accountability set up by the community.

Stance on Property Destruction and Nonviolence

We are a rowdy bunch here in America, as you may remember from the years you lived here last. We have a pattern as a society: we dislike being told what to do and we love to destroy property while we are trying to make it known that we dislike being told what to do. I’m not saying the destruction of property or vandalism is always the most persuasive tactic (although it can be nonviolent and effective in certain contexts) or that it’s always a rational choice but I am arguing that it is within the tradition of nonviolent protest and I am pointing out that it is quite American. From the Boston Tea Party to the Molly Maguires to the riots of the 1960s to the WTO protests in Seattle to the burning of the Third Police Precinct in Minneapolis to today’s student protests, it’s hard to argue destroying property isn’t part of the American way of expression.

On this matter of a general American affinity for lawlessness, I defer to a favorite poet of mine, Philip Levine, and his words captured in the 1983 documentary Anarchism in America directed by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher:

“One of the things that struck me most when I went to Europe was, and lived there for a couple years, was how law-abiding the people were, and how I broke all the laws. And I think I didn’t break the laws so much because I was an anarchist, and I’m . . .you know . . . it was just because I was an American. I mean if I came to a traffic light and nobody was there, I went through the goddamn thing; it was just an attitude, you know? — What’s the point of staying here? You know? Or if I could get, you know, if I could get out on the left-hand side . . . and I found that my European neighbors went crazy — “stay in line,” you know, it was sort of the constant was . . . “stay in line,” “be this way,” “queue up,” in England, you know, and I’d say, you know, “First one to the bus gets on,” you know? And it was a sort of, this crazy American attitude that I had, you know? And I think it was very American, that we are a people who, who are very smart, you know?, that we got a lot of street smarts. I mean, we know what “the law” is all about, we know who made it and how it gets enforced. I mean, yeah, I think if you stopped the average American and say, “What’s the law all about? Did God make it?” they’d say, “Oh bullshit God didn’t have anything to do with it, you know who made it — John D. Rockefeller made it.”

Within this American tradition of disobedience, as the president of a flagship American university, I implore you to let Columbia students exercise their right to refuse. It’s at times like these that I turn again to Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action. As far as I can tell, the methods being used by protestors seem to fall under the category of nonviolent physical interventions, including student strikes, refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse, and sit-downs. Sharp defines these actions as “predominately characterized by the interference created by people’s physical bodies, especially as they enter, or refuse to leave, some place where they are not wanted or from which they have been prohibited.”

This sort of nonviolent resistance has a long and established history and should be permitted without interference by Columbia University. These tactics and their cousins — occupations, sit-ins, ride-ins, teach-ins, die-ins — have been used by those who fought for the abolition of slavery and by civil rights activists and by those in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It was used in Sunagawa, Japan, in 1956, when “ten thousand people occupied a site intended for a United States air base.” This method has also been used by Native American activists, during the 1957 encampment at Schoharie Creek, or the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island, or in 2016 at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

It may include the building of barricades as a defensive measure or some light damage to property (for example, foisting open a sealed window to pass food and communications back and forth or forcefully opening a hatch to access the roof of a building or removing a panel of glass in a door to defensively reinforce a lock from the outside). The use of these tactics does not, as you have written, place the protests outside the realm of political speech. Also, these tactics, in my view as someone who personally watched the smoke from the Third Precinct drift above South Minneapolis, are not a cause for moral panic but are relatively tame in the spectrum of possible property destruction. Further, the only action that seems to have raised “safety risks to an intolerable level” is your decision to bring the NYPD to campus.

Destruction of property is not the same as violence inflicted on people. We can see the latter in the actions of members of Hamas who brutally massacred innocent Israeli civilians and took others hostage. We can see the latter in the disproportionate and horrific and genocidal response by Israel’s forces against Palestinian civilians. We can see the latter in the actions taken by pro-Israeli protestors at UCLA against students there. The only violence against people I have seen or heard of at Columbia is from NYPD officers and from pro-Israeli protestors who sprayed chemicals at peaceful demonstrators several weeks back.

Given that the protests at Columbia have seemed markedly nonviolent, your overreaction to the encampments on the South Lawn and the occupation of Hamilton Hall indicates, to me, that you are out of step with the long tradition of nonviolent American protest, especially by students at American colleges and universities.

Physical Presence and Leadership on Campus

The last piece of evidence which indicates, to me, that you may be operating at a remove is how little it appears you have been physically on campus, interacting with protestors. As a point of contrast, I would note that at least half the House Committee on Education and the Workforce had visited the encampment at the time of your hearing. You, at that time, had not.

Further, if you are going to invite the NYPD to campus against the community’s wishes, then the least you can do, I feel, as a morally courageous leader would be to be physically present so you can understand how the police are conducting themselves firsthand and be ready to respond to any escalations or incidents, such as what could have happened if the stray bullet that the NYPD fired in Hamilton Hall had not landed in a wall but rather in a student’s body.

This is not impossible for a university administrator to do, as the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School Jelani Cobb demonstrated by his presence throughout that night, personally supporting student journalists who were tirelessly covering the events on campus. Even in the apparent depths of exhaustion and stress, Dean Cobb was continually seeking to use the circumstances as a teaching moment for students and to protect their safety and their right to free expression and a free press.

I wish that I had any words of praise to offer about your presence on campus, but your most recent public appearance was in a carefully curated video, apparently evacuated of all students or campus activity in the background, in which you stood alone — an optic which I think says it all.

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Despite my sense, as outlined above, that you are operating at a remove from current campus realities, and despite strongly disagreeing with nearly every one of your decisions involving the protests on campus, and despite my fear that resignation may be your only morally credible way forward, I think it’s important to implore you first to reverse course and to make repairs with the student body and faculty.

What might that look like?

First, there should be no NYPD presence on campus — period. I ask you to immediately reverse your request for NYPD officers to remain at Columbia until after commencement. If students interrupt the various and fractured commencement ceremonies you have arranged, so be it. When I was a student, I worked during two commencements with the Office of Disability Services to facilitate access to graduation events, so I saw up close that each year commencement is a monumental undertaking. There is a lot of labor and money on the line, not to mention the hopes and dreams of thousands of students and families are realized over the course of several days.

However, I don’t feel graduates choosing to protest during this joyous time warrants NYPD presence or will jeopardize the safety of attendees. The point of a university, in my view, is not the pageantry. The core purposes of the university, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, can continue even when ceremonial celebrations are disrupted or interrupted.

Second, I ask that you re-engage with the University Senate. It’s true, the Board of Trustees play an important role at the university, but they are not the only relevant stakeholders in our community. The University Senate represents a diverse cross-section of Columbia, and I urge you to heed the advice of the Executive Committee.

Third, I ask that you publicly acknowledge the distinction between the destruction of property and violence against people. While the occupation of a campus building is unusual and can be alarming, it is not inherently violent and to portray students who choose that tactic as violent is not, in my view, acting in good faith. They are engaging in a long tradition of nonviolence and should be allowed to do so on a campus in the United States of America.

Further, I ask that you show up on campus as a more visible public presence. I ask that you interact with and build relationships with student activists. I urge you to associate with the rowdy riff raff. It may be too late, but I hope it is not. Now is the time to model what it looks like to engage in complicated and thorny dialogue.

Lastly, and most importantly, I ask you to continue to imagine the death and suffering in Gaza, to let that act of empathy lead you to ethical and humane action and, most importantly, I ask you to help end the Netanyahu administration’s attacks on innocent Palestinian people by leading Columbia University to divest from any financial commitments it has to the waging of war. Perhaps you are already using your influence away from public view to this end, acting continually and decisively on behalf of peace and the besieged Palestinian people.

I hope so.

Over the past weeks, Columbia students have been expressing their desire to actively shape the university and to ensure that it has no direct role in furthering war or violations of international law or genocidal atrocities. In so many ways, you are the right leader for Columbia during this moment of international crisis. But, I believe to realize that potential, you will need to resist the aristocratic instincts you seem to have followed thus far and open yourself up to the chaos of university life.

The stakes could not be higher. While I write to you, Israel is sending tanks towards Rafah and who knows what carnage may be at hand. Or a ceasefire may be imminent, bringing with it at least the distant chance for lasting peace. It is high time to act.

Baroness Shafik, I ask you to immediately change course — and if you cannot, take the noble path and resign your presidency.

Sincerely,

Peter Guy Witzig
Columbia School of the Arts
Class of 2019