Last Sunday, during Columbia University’s “Days on Campus” event for prospective students, the anti-sexual assault student group No Red Tape projected phrases like “Rape happens here” and “Columbia protects rapists” on Columbia’s Low Library in central campus. According to The Columbia Daily Spectator, Graduate Hall Director Rainikka Corprew and public safety officers obstructed the projection of the phrases, telling activists to wait until prospective students left Columbia’s campus before projecting onto the library again.
Aside from the sloppy handling of the event — Corprew said to the activists, some of whom were sexual assault survivors, that they were “becoming the oppressors” — the inconsistency of allowing No Red Tape to project phrases at some times and not others is problematic. If the school is going to allow protest in that form (as it should), it should not limit when that protest can take place for the sake of the university’s reputation.
Unnecessarily regulating protest prevents it from being its most effective: according to activists who spoke to The Spectator, No Red Tape organized this display specifically to coincide with Days on Campus in order to educate incoming first-years on the issue of sexual assault on campuses and because protesting during that time “was the most likely time that administration would feel obligated to react to activists’ demands.” What is the point of protesting if students can’t do it at times when they can garner the most attention and response?
Curbing these protests also misrepresents Columbia to prospective students. If, on a random day, a Columbia student may see a demonstration such as the one No Red Tape organized, preventing that demonstration just for the sake of a prospective student actually does that student a disservice by inaccurately portraying how a given day at that school may be.
Here at the University, after tremendous scandal surrounding our administration’s handling of sexual assault, administrators did not remove signs of student protest. When students placed post-it notes detailing their concerns on the doors of Peabody Hall, and when the Seven Society placed a banner over that same building — a building where many admissions tours start and end — administrators did not take those messages down. At that time, the presence of those various protests was the true experience of University students. To hide that from prospective students would have been to lie.
There is a difference here between what public and private schools may regulate, but there is no difference between our University and Columbia in terms of what is right and wrong when it comes to the voicing of student concerns. In this case, Columbia students should not see their protests restricted.
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