As It Happens6:36Columbia newspaper editor says students are self-censoring out of fear
Some student journalists in the U.S. are thinking twice before writing about controversial issues and getting caught in the crosshairs of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, says the editor-in-chief a Columbia University student magazine.
This self-censoring comes amid a wave of campus arrests, detentions, threats of deportations and student visas being revoked.
U.S. officials have said student visa holders are subject to deportation over their support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza, calling their actions a threat to U.S. foreign policy. Several student activists have been detained without charge by immigration officials.
Columbia University has been at the forefront of this after the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that occurred at its New York City campus.
Earlier this year, the Ivy League university agreed to put its Middle East studies department under new supervision and overhaul its rules for protests and student discipline, acquiescing to an extraordinary ultimatum by the Trump administration to implement those and other changes or risk losing billions of dollars in federal funding.
The Columbia Political Review is a student outlet at Columbia University that publishes op-eds, interviews, and political analysis on everything from campus news to international affairs. But lately, some contributors have been wary about writing on certain topics that could put them under an unwanted spotlight, says editor-in-chief Adam Kinder. Some have even asked to have their articles taken down.
Kinder spoke to Nil Kӧksal, host of CBC Radio’s As It Happens. Here is part of their conversation.
When people reach out to you and ask you to take down their articles, what kinds of reasons are they giving?
We’ve had writers in some cases provide nebulous justifications saying: “Hey, I just really don’t want my name out there right now.” But, in other cases, we’ve had writers specifically cite what’s going on and say: “Hey, I would really just prefer to keep myself safe and to keep my family safe.”
That said, in a general sense, I think for as much as people have been scared or are chilling their own speech as a result of the political atmosphere on campus and in the country right now, there’s been a significant contingent of people that have also been galvanized by what’s going on and are continuing to speak up.
So people are still sending you their work and hoping to be published and getting their message across. But those people who reach out with those different reasons — sometimes vague, as you suggest there — what do you say to them?
We always offer them the ability to republish at any point that they would like. If somebody is taking the time to reach out to us to say: “Hey, I would prefer my article is not up on the website right now,” we oblige.
And if they would like to comment on the situation in general, or if they still have some element of the argument that they want out there, then we encourage them to publish anonymously, which is a policy that we haven’t really entertained in the past, but which now we’re expanding and advertising and really getting out there to the whole student body.
What is it like for you to have to take those articles down given the work you do?
Fortunately, these requests are not nearly like the deluge that I would imagine are coming to a lot of different publications. But it is saddening. I don’t want to have our work or the work that we do with our writers placing anyone in, especially, physical danger. But, also, as a publication that relies on the principle and the practice of free speech, it’s disappointing that our country has gotten to this point.
What’s encouraging is the fact that we are continuing our output at levels that are unprecedented — even for our history — and that people are interested, people are reading. We’re getting our print magazine out next week. People are continuing to stay engaged despite how personally depressing the situation may seem.
One very vivid and recent example of someone’s life being impacted and changed because of an opinion piece is Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University student. She was taken into custody by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and she has been in custody since last month. She had written an opinion piece calling on her own school to divest from companies that have ties to Israel. Were you expecting these kinds of requests to start coming in?
After that, yes, absolutely.
Fortunately, again, we haven’t seen nearly the flood that I’ve heard is occurring at different publications. Still, I’ve spoken with multiple writers — especially international students — who are worried. And to the extent that they’ve requested it, we’ve been willing to give people the ability to hold off from meeting their article minimums and things like that until we have a little bit more clarity about the situation in general, what seems to be safe to write about and what’s not.
That said, we’re always encouraging everyone to be honest and to write from their own perspective and not to moderate just to acquiesce in the way that the school’s administration has to and what the government is demanding from students right now.
So you’ve received about a dozen of these types of requests. What kinds of topics are we talking about here?
We’ve had probably about half-dozen people request takedowns, and about half-dozen more request hiatuses — so a total of a dozen.
Overall, people are much more scared to talk about Palestine than anything else.
But now, because of heightened tensions between the U.S. and everywhere else — and especially international students that, for example, live in China — writing or being critical of either the U.S. or the Chinese government is another kind of sticking point that we’re learning how to navigate as tensions are kind of inflamed.
There is a worry that this is going to extend beyond Gaza into other issues. For now, we have only heard mainly rumblings of that. My personal opinion is that soon — especially as a contestation between the Trump administration and universities heats up — that this is going to continue to escalate in ways that maybe we didn’t expect.
How will you brace for that — for the unexpected?
The approach that most aligns with what our function as a student publication is is to just keep on keeping on. To continue writing, to continue being transgressive where that’s necessary, and to ultimately represent what the student body feels.
And the student body feels very, very strongly about the direction that the university is taking in response to the government, the direction the country is headed right now and the direction of free speech on college campuses.
We are, at the end of the day, a venue to allow all voices on the undergraduate campus to speak — and we’re going to continue to do that tenfold now.
