The encampment was modeling a community of differences, which was beautiful to see. There was a Passover Seder that was celebrated right in that space. There were a lot of Jewish kids who, for reasons of their commitment to Judaism, were there. And there were a lot of Muslim kids who, for reasons of their commitments to Islam or whatever, were there. And everybody was kind of beautifully melding with each other, protecting each other from the outside world, because there were threats.

There was a little bit of the sense of a utopian community of people who were really trying to be good to each other in every sense. There was a guy, I suppose he was Chinese, whose English was not great, next to the encampment screaming at the top of his lungs. I’m a victim of genocide. America is committing genocide against me. Okay, this made no sense to me. He was surrounded in the gentlest possible way by people from the encampment who offered him water and gave him hugs. And that was the spirit that they were offering to everybody. And these are the people who were supposedly violently disruptive, who had endangered safety on campus. They were the last people in the world who were making anything insecure for anybody.

Do you know how those students are doing two years on?

That’s a very good question. The one that I know best was a Jewish graduate student from my department who was suspended and arrested. He was the representative of the graduate student union. And they decided to expel him the day before negotiations were to happen over the grad students’ contract, a year later. So that showed me a little who these people are in the administration. I know that other faculty members are trying to get him into another school. I can’t say that he’s the paradigm of everybody else. But I’m sure that people were already having internships revoked and job opportunities lost and so on.

How has Columbia been transformed by these events?

The one thing that’s visible to anybody is that it’s still locked off. You can’t get onto campus if you don’t have a Columbia ID. That’s a real affront to the community. 116th street is supposed to be an open thoroughfare.

I haven’t been teaching this semester. But what I have seen is a resurgence of interest in faculty self-governance, so that the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, has taken very good positions, has put together vigils on behalf of like Mahmoud Khalil, the student who was arrested in Columbia housing that Columbia did not lift its little finger to protect and never mentions.