At exactly 9 a.m, on April 22, 2024, I sent an email to the two sections of my Literature Humanities course at Columbia University: “Dear all,” it began, “I am so pissed at the unholy marriage of force and impotence [in] Columbia’s administration. There is no way I am taking you guys online for one class, so CLASS TODAY WILL NOT MEET.” We had been scheduled to finish our discussion on Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: the Banana Massacre, collective resistance, institutional violence. (We never would.) I encouraged students to sign up for Zoom office hours anyway. As a kind of triage, I attached Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” At 9:11 a.m., I replied to my own email with two pages screenshotted from Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism, explaining, “You’ll see that you—we? Lit Hum—feature prominently in [Said’s] discussion.”
Ours was a storied course, required of every Columbia College first-year since 1937, and Said had taught it for nearly 40 years. I hoped that reading his thoughts on it—on what “humanism” ought to do—could help make sense of what was happening around us. No one responded to either message. In the final weeks of their first year, my students had found themselves at the center of a national movement; I imagine they had other things to think about.
I was writing to address another email sent by Minouche Shafik the same day at 1:16 a.m. Looking at it now, the serif font is set so small the words are almost unreadable. I have to zoom in. It reads, in part: “To deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps, I am announcing that all classes will be held virtually on Monday.” This was what I referred to, in my own email, as impotence. Less than a week earlier, on April 18, Shafik had invited the NYPD to campus, where they arrested 108 student protesters; that was what I referred to as force. Of course, I had no idea what was coming.
In another email, sent the 23rd, I explained we would not maintain status quo: “For me, there’s no use pretending (nor would I want to) that we can just trot back into 306 Hamilton and do a normal class … so, in consultation with you, via the form I sent out yesterday, I’ve decided … Tomorrow, class will meet IN PERSON, 12:30-3:30pm, in Morningside Park, on the upper hill between 113th and 114th (map below).” Both of my sections were to meet together, because, as I go on: “The Columbia administration has been very deliberate in its efforts to divide us. … Many of you (in conversations yesterday, as well as in your surveys) commented that you felt weirdly distant from your peers, or that you had no sense of leadership from anywhere other than Shafik-mass-emails or shouting from the lawns. You seem very much to want to come together as an understanding community to process, discuss, even debate; indeed, this is precisely what you are at Columbia to do! The park is also a significant choice; it was a primary site of the 1968 student protests because of the unpopular plans to build a segregated gym there.”
Students were scheduled to present on texts they wanted added to the syllabus of the course, which is set by committee and revised every few years; I call this assignment the “New Canon” project. Given the tensions on campus, many students had been unable to approach, much less complete, this project; others had found, in doing it, a way to address what they were feeling about activism, protest, racism, genocide, and imperialism. We sat on the side of a grassy hill, and students trickled in until the hill felt full. A few people brought pizza and shared with their friends. They listened carefully to each other’s suggestions about what Lit Hum was missing: the epic of Sundiata, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Ramayana, the Kalīla wa-Dimna, Zola’s Germinal. These presentations were important, and they were good. I wanted students to remember why we were there. But I also wanted them to remember why we were there. In my email announcing the move to Morningside, I made it clear that the bulk of our time would be devoted to discussing what was going on: campus protests, the administration’s retaliation, their actual human lives. I advised students ahead of time that we would “not address Israel or Palestine, though I will speak about the human right to citizenship and enfranchisement.” This was to be a conversation about them, students caught in the middle of something much larger than themselves and struggling to figure out how to respond, whether with action, discourse, or simply reflection.
I had promised that I would explain my thoughts about what was happening to all of us, but particularly to them. I thought it would be a very short talk, at the scale of the five-to-ten minute mini-lectures I typically gave to introduce Montaigne’s Essays, or Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. But as I began to write, I realized I was not entirely sure who “they”—by which I mean “students”—were, and I was even less confident that I understood who they were in relation to the political action to which they were party and for which they had become a symbol. Citizens, activists, protesters, rioters—I was pretty clear on these, at least in outline. But “student” protesters? The importance of the qualifier feels self-evident. Why? I wrote the talk to figure it out.
Literature Humanities comes from an Oxford course known as literae humaniores, which very awkwardly means “more humane letters.” Its proposition has shifted with time. We have treated it as a literature of the human, a set of texts that might give us a sense of what it means to be human. Yet even Edward Said allows that “there is something radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable about humanistic knowledge.” This does not mean humanistic knowledge is useless, but it is not total, or universal, or automatic. It must be bound to action. What kind?
I. The Student as a Political Category
This is the question you are faced with as students. “As students,” we say: “student” activists, “student” protesters, “student” senate, “student” researchers, “student” workers. These are political determinations. They depend on the political position of “the student,” a category about which we have said very little this year. What is the condition of the student as a political category?
There is no simple answer to this. The student is constituted multiply, intersectionally, overabundantly; it is a category that exemplifies Virginia Woolf’s dictum in To the Lighthouse: “nothing was simply one thing.” But, certainly, the politics of the student is a hypothetical politics. By “hypothetical”; I do not mean that the positions held by students, political positions, are merely provisional, much less somehow imaginary. I mean that the political condition of the student is to be in the practice of forming and testing hypotheses. Even that individual student who wishes to be apolitical, the person who derides peers, events, or movements as somehow “too political”; they, too, are subject. Whether they like it or not, they are practicing a hypothetical politics in their rejection of discursive action. Apathy and distance and ignorance are all political positions. A hypothetical politics is a politics of essays, in Montaigne’s sense: trials, efforts, experiments.
The most important part of such a politics of trials is the process of reflection and revision. We will come back to this, but for now it is enough to say that the political category of the student is one that is subject to change. This does not mean the positions of the student are not real, but that the student has access to productive, crucial, even constant rearrangements of relation and obligation. The student’s obligations are vitally unfixed.
II. Politics of Relation and Obligation
I’ve heard from many of you in past weeks about what a challenge it has been to be on campus. You have expressed enormous uncertainty. Even within your convictions, you are still asking yourselves: What am I supposed to be doing right now? How can I help my friends feel safe; how can I communicate what I believe; must I be involved? Am I implicated?
These are questions about relation and obligation. Asking them means that, however uncomfortable, however abject, however painful they may be, things are working as intended. The student’s forms of relation are always in flux, logarithmically. They scale from your already intersectional senses of yourselves as gendered; involved with too many clubs; racial; domestic or international; Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Atheist; as part of SJP, JVP, ADP, or none of them. As a student, you are subject to many of these forms of identity once, asked by each of them implicitly to determine: What are your obligations? Yours is a condition of ongoing political self-determination.
Once again, I want to emphasize: I do not mean that you are simply “figuring it out,” or that “this is just a phase.” I mean that you are figuring it out, that this is phase one. Student collectives work hard to establish new, exciting modes of relation: Passover seder and Islamic evening prayers done together; possibilities of reconciliation; they develop new and better ways of describing ourselves. Consider, for example, the term “Asian American,” coined by the graduate students Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee during the 1968 student protests at Berkeley; they figured something out. Even something as simple as this park class is for us a new relation, a fresh enactment of our obligations, a new politics of pedagogy, an experiment.
These do not always work. Failures of relation are part of the process. Clubs fall apart, or they betray their stated aims, or they go too far and you can’t agree with their positions so you leave. Classes in the park can be disasters; maybe this one is! Negotiations between groups do not only succeed, or even always make progress. In student politics, this can be difficult, upsetting and painful, but it is also right: still working as intended. The special political force of the student lies in its capacity for continuous revision in relations and obligations. Try something, fail, reflect, revise; a hypothetical politics, or even an apologetic politics.
III. Apology as a Revolutionary Mode
In The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado De Assis has his narrator make an absurd, true claim: that “the child is father to the man.” Similarly, the student is the teacher of the citizen. Just as the child remains within the man, as part of him, as his foundation and perhaps exemplary form, so too does the political category of the student remain inherent within the citizen. It doesn’t just go away, nor is it really ever superseded, nor conquered. We do not move beyond it. We never leave our “student” politics behind, nor are the politics of the student necessarily unavailable to the citizen, the revolutionary, the reformer, or the university president.
Adopting the hypothetical politics of the student makes error into opportunity. Sometimes, we get it wrong. We misunderstand our obligations; we associate with a movement we realize is going in a direction we can no longer support, or that a movement we have ignored or avoided deserves our support. We misuse power. To acknowledge this, through reflection, in revision, by reformulating relations, is a revolutionary possibility accorded peculiarly to the student. Apology is the realization of student politics as an erotic force on the model of Audre Lorde.
Lorde writes that the erotic “provides the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.” In the revision of obligation, apology—this erotic rearrangement—expresses sympathy with a community. It realigns the political subject, the student, with the pursuits of that community. In this way, as an erotics, an apology is not a sacrifice or abrogation of authority but an act of nurture, a cultivation of power. This cultivation, or nurture, as a collective possibility, has great political effect. It can be revolutionary; it can turn around relations from the use of force to the annulment of violence.
You do not need to be enrolled at a university to assume a student politics. You could do so even as president of one. Minouche Shafik could do so, and her apology would not be an act of weakness, but of strength: It could nurture a new collective possibility.
IV. “More Humane” Rights
By resorting to the use of force, Columbia’s administration revealed something even more difficult about student politics. The student, as I have said, is inherently mercurial in their relations—part of many collectives, always rearranging obligations. But there is one collective of which they are always a part: that is, the university. Membership in this collective is an opportunity, but it has its costs; enfranchisement in a collective also confers subjection to it. One follows its rules, is under its protection, bends to its demands. Or one doesn’t. But one is no less a student, no less enfranchised, even so.
Martin Luther King Jr., in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” quotes our Augustine, who writes that “a law that is not just is no law at all.” Montaigne agreed, with characteristic cleverness and only apparent contradiction, writing that “laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. … Whoever obeys them because they are just does not obey them for the reason he should.” What Montaigne means here, I think, is that one ought not to follow laws on the assumption that to do so is moral. Not all laws are right, or just, and there is nothing moral about following unjust laws. Perhaps, as King proposes, we should break them, and do so “openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” This is the compact of enfranchisement; this is the deal. To be part of a collective is to be its subject; to break its laws, even unjust ones, is to accept the penalty. This does not mean the penalty is right.
Students are right to hold on to their own political authority, and to demand it.
What is so galling, indeed so terrifying, about the use of force by the state—or here, by the institution (Columbia) and the state (New York) together—is its asymmetry. The state has a monopoly on the use of force. It is allowed to kill people; it is certainly allowed to rough them up, arrest them, and take them downtown in zip ties. Again, this is part of the deal. Enfranchisement, or “citizenship,” means that constituents—here, you, the students—are implicated in the acts of the state. Ideally, constituents have input; always, they have obligation. To act unilaterally, as Columbia has done, to choose without checks, balances, or meaningful consultation a course of violent action against citizens or students removes the premise of effective enfranchisement.
Students are right to hold on to their own political authority, and to demand it. They are right to demand it, too, for those outside of themselves, for the possible communities they are trying (essaying) to create, for those with whom they claim a new political relation, or toward whom they feel obligation. This is a revolutionary act. To risk enfranchisement, suffer its penalties, apologetically—on behalf of a political sympathy with others—is revolutionary.
This is the kind of action to which humanist knowledge must be bound.
Around the end of Part III, it started raining, and students huddled under a tree while I finished speaking. Because I had written the talk out longhand early that morning, I was standing in front of my students holding four or five pieces of paper that were now quite damp.
Still, the rain wasn’t too bad, and I was pretty worked up, so I encouraged them to take the next 10 minutes or so to chat—catch up, discuss my talk, their presentations, or just check in with each other. I took a walk. When we reconvened, students were as spent as I was. We retreated from the rain to dorms, to libraries, to office hours. A small group of us returned to our seminar room in Hamilton Hall to eat pizza and speak frankly for a few minutes before everyone fully dispersed. Over the course of four years as a contingent Core Lecturer, I taught 906 hours of Literature Humanities—nearly all of them in Hamilton. We met on the third floor, where, from our window, if anyone had bothered to climb on a desk and look out (it is not a very nice window) we could have seen the lawn where students had been zip-tied and marched away in NYPD custody.
Minouche Shafik never did apologize after the debacle on the 18th. And on April 30, just a week after our class in Morningside, Hamilton was the very building into which students would barricade themselves around four in the morning. Later that evening, in what amounted to military action, NYPD entered the building by a window down the hall from ours. Someone fired a gun on the first floor; it was, of course, the state. On the hand-drawn map the protesters used to plan and carry out their occupation of the building, our seminar room was carefully numbered “306.” A little box labeled “closet,” inside the room, was where I wrote what I called “actual human life advice” every class on a side chalkboard. The last thing I remember writing there is “Ice Cream Piano.” There is no closet. We did not meet there again; Morningside was our last class. 
Benjamin VanWagoner was a Core Lecturer at Columbia University. He lives in New York. His first book, Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.