President Armstrong - Open the gates now!

Since the Gaza Solidarity Encampments in April of last year, Columbia has locked the campus gates and spent untold millions of dollars on multiple security forces to impose this policy.

As a result of this decision, workplace conditions & morale have deteriorated. Getting to and from our places of work & study is riddled with annoyances, disruptions, and delays. Locked gates & buildings deny faculty & staff access to infrastructure, tools, and resources that are necessary for us to work and provide a healthy educational environment for our student body. Alumni, who were promised lifetime access to Columbia libraries, are banned from campus. Students lose easy access to places of community, libraries, gyms and other amenities. Some students have even been surveilled and harassed by private investigators hired by the administration. All this impacts the accessibility of the campus and isolates Columbia affiliates from the general neighborhood.

The rules change from week-to-week, day-to-day, and even hour-by-hour. It has become difficult to host outside researchers, performers, artists, scientists, authors, journalists, filmmakers, guest lecturers, and more. Guests traveling from all across New York, New Jersey, and beyond have been turned away from a show, panel, or screening. As time goes on, more and more organizations are refusing to partner with Columbia University because of the locked campus. On January 15th NYC Council Member Shaun Abreu published “an open letter” to CU Interim President Armstrong titled, “Admission denied: Columbia must reopen its gates.” These demands should not go ignored.

The locked gates face overwhelming criticism from students, alumni, faculty, and staff. Yet the administration refuses to change their policies. While faculty & staff across departments and schools are presented with budget cuts, hiring freezes, and austerity measures, negatively affecting the quality of education provided to students, Columbia's administration is happy to spend millions on an unnecessary, alienating, and sometimes abusive security force.

This cannot continue.

Columbia University has been an open campus for nearly its entire history. The gates were originally locked because Columbia students exercised their right to assembly in the protest of a genocide enabled by American funding and weapons. It is a moral imperative for Columbia University’s administration to take even the smallest steps back towards reckoning with their complicity in this historic crime against humanity.

The guarantees to freedom of speech and assembly must be rebuilt on Columbia University’s campus. This is especially true after the recent re-election of Donald Trump. Trump's right-wing administration is already heightening their attacks on higher education. Columbia's response has been to hire conservative lobbying groups to try and cozy up to Trump and his cronies. This is not how our school's resources should be spent. We need an open and free campus to unite our community in the face of what's to come.