Unusual journalism and life lessons from a year at Columbia University
An Indian journalist at Columbia University navigated a tumultuous year marked by the Israel-Gaza war protests, Trump’s election, and federal crackdowns. Here’s what he ended up learning, “more viscerally than anything in a syllabus”.
New York: I never thought I would study at Columbia University. On good days, I felt there was no need to go back to school to level up my journalism career in India. I was writing stories I was proud of and that mattered. On bad days, I felt this belief was shielding me from a crushing reality: that I was not good enough. I lacked the innate confidence Westerners seem to carry, chasing lofty ambitions as if preordained.
I told no one: family or friends, that I was applying, except my recommenders, because I didn’t want to deal with the fall-out of rejection and have fellow (equally) nosy reporters gossip about my prospects.
When I got the coveted acceptance letter on 15 March 2024, I did not think that the very education I craved would risk becoming a footnote in a fight for democracy, free speech and pluralism: things journalists purport to represent but rarely see tested so severely and awkwardly.
I left for New York in August, days after Minouche Shafik stepped down from the university’s presidency, what seemed like the zenith of campus drama. The Israel-Gaza war had sparked waves of campus protests; Shafik had failed to quell protestors or satisfy their demands, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine sides reportedly found her handling inadequate. Through September, my first month on campus, I read through tense, angry discussions on Reddit forums, news articles and saw anxiety building on our WhatsApp groups, but I struggled to grasp the enormity of events around me, a tragi-comic failing for a journalist, in part because I was wearing my student cap again: devouring dense economics and accounting textbooks with the zeal of a new thriller.
On 7 October, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack, severe protests erupted again, our access to campus was clamped down to two main gates (otherwise you could enter and exit from several others), where we would have our IDs checked by uniformed guards on a random basis. But things still felt manageable.
I was at The Hamilton, a faintly-lit, wood-furnished bar near Columbia the night of 5 November, when Donald Trump stormed back into The White House. Throwing back beers, my friends and I refreshed the New York Times app every couple of minutes to see if their election needle would move towards Kamala Harris, whom everyone around me was supporting. This was supposed to be the closest election in decades, whose results could take days, if not weeks to verify. We knew by 11pm.
Universities tend to lean left—and in liberal, diverse New York City, Columbia even more so. A professor noted that the zip codes around campus, including mine, 10025, are among the most liberal in America. After Trump’s win, the atmosphere around Columbia’s campus with lush-green lawns and majestic, red-brick buildings, was funereal. People exchanged links to prayer sessions and support groups. We had glum faces and exchanged nihilistic memes. The Financial Times called it “An era of upheaval".
Two days later, Columbia Journalism School’s dean, Jelani Cobb, convened a town hall—‘How we meet the moment: A discussion on moving forward as an institution’—where faculty fielded anxious questions about what Trump’s presidency would mean for those who saw his victory as the triumph of opposing values. I wasn’t sure of my own view, unwilling to accept the chorus warning of impending fascism. I wanted to be “objective."
I largely held back my opinions for three reasons. One, I was here to study; to make this hard-won experience count. Two, I did not think I was the best-informed person to hold forth on the politics of a country a world away from mine. Three, I was scared. I was very aware of how much I did not know. Society pushes us to have strong opinions even when we don’t know enough. It’s easier to repeat half-truths or borrowed takes than admit, “I don’t know." But here, that would not be unfair at best, dangerous at worst.
For the next few months, my physical surroundings felt safe, but longer-term questions over Trump’s effect on my life were looming. Employing long-perfected gallows humour, we would guess what institution would Trump disrupt next with the cheerfulness of a parlour game. There was also the small matter of the five hundred assignments, deadlines and reading material I had taken on, not to mention the 8000-word masters thesis I was working on, pending.
But on 7 March, Trump said he was canceling $400 million in grants to Columbia—basically a fine—to punish the university for supposedly letting discrimination towards Jews fester on campus. These grants fund scholarships like mine, cutting-edge research and doctoral programmes.
Although ‘only’ 10% of the government’s grants to Columbia, it showed how vulnerable this supposedly powerful university was. He could cancel billions more if he chose to. $400 million was also a curious figure—the exact same figure that Columbia refused to pay Trump 25 years earlier for a Manhattan property.
Our school’s student president replied to the news on our group: “excuse my french but F****** HELL".
Simultaneously, WhatsApp groups began buzzing about US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE agents being inside campus, even dormitories, to arrest and deport international students who had participated in protests. The next day, Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestine protestor was arrested, on the way to his university-provided house after dinner with his wife, who was eight months pregnant. Khalil was a US permanent resident, a green card holder.
It felt like the dam broke after that. An Indian student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled to Canada to avoid arrest. A student in Boston was picked up off the footpath, arrested and physically restrained by ICE. A Palestinian batchmate switched to online classes for a week, fearing for her safety. I hadn’t joined any protests, but fear and crackdowns aren’t always rational.
Our university president said federal agents came with warrants to search two student rooms and the campus at large. At the bottom of the email notifying this, interim president Katrina Armstrong attached a list of “university resources": counseling options, psychological services and support groups. The university’s best response against arrest and deportation threats was…therapy?
The abbreviation ICE became a chilling fixture in our lives. Two months away from graduating, we discussed the possibility of ICE knocking on our doors or rounding us up on campus in the same breath as resumes and cover letters.
I came to the US believing that in a polarized world, universities were among the last examples of neutral, independent institutions.
But under pressure, Columbia agreed to reduce autonomy and increase government oversight over its Middle East studies division, a decision that triggered swift and harsh criticism. I thought back to the Kanhaiya Kumar controversy in India in 2016, where the government saw student activism as a threat. At the time, I was too young to fully understand it.
With my westernized upbringing—American sitcoms, pizza, Percy Jackson novels—I had adapted easily into New York. It was tempting to forget I was only a student, an outsider. I’d seen numerous friends and relatives move to the US, study, work, settle. But the rights and freedoms I treated as givens weren’t guaranteed, and I began to see that many here saw people like me differently than I saw myself.
Every development at Columbia was covered blow-by-blow by international media—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, Reuters. The reporter in me wondered who the sources of these stories were, the student in me felt paralyzed and unsure, the free-speech advocate in me kept quiet. The New Yorker said of the period, “We are sleepwalking into autocracy".
A few days after Khalil’s arrest, Dean Cobb addressed us in a closed-door session, seeking to reassure students that the journalism school, an especially large-sized target, would do all it can to protect students. The off-the-record session was reported in a distorted way by The New York Times, which quoted his words, “Nobody can protect you" without enough context. Further, a batchmate had contributed to the story without seeking permission in an off-the-record setting, fuelling severe backlash from other students.
We were studying journalism and living through a real-time lesson in its dilemmas.
Leaders of large institutions are often criticized for not communicating enough during a crisis: they leave stakeholders guessing and in a lurch. Columbia’s two presidents who held that post during my year were frequent, even urgent with their emails. One was titled, “Columbia’s commitment to our international community,"; another, “The principles guiding me."
But those ‘principles’ felt absent when international students, who cough up years, even decades of future salaries to afford this education, felt unsafe and endangered, often by mere association with this university.
My friends and I would often ridicule the word-salad of emails we received. In over a dozen emails, president Armstrong used the word ‘mission’ 63 times, ‘freedom’ 46 times, ‘values’ 34 times, ‘expression’ 39 times. Those emails felt like praising my swimming technique while I was already drowning.
Amid this battle for the future of education, we went about our routine. My seminars and classes were captivating, perversely strengthened by what was happening outside the classroom because it made our studies inside that much more important. In days thick with news of arrests and Columbia’s “capitulation" and “surrendering" to Trump, one legendary professor, Sam Freedman, would start his 9 am class with rousing speeches. Every fact we write “is an active resistance," he would say. “You are taking a stand by being factual." In my chunky, colourful, sneakers, seated in a cozy chair with my MacBook open, I felt on the frontlines of a battle.
When I told new acquaintances or sources that I’m doing my masters at Columbia, they would sometimes reply, “wow," or “lucky you". Now, people puffed their cheeks out. “Damn, how’s that going in this environment?" “Are you okay?"
My father has a quaint habit of sending me pictures of newspaper articles, rather than web links, of articles he thinks I will find interesting and sending them to me on WhatsApp. This could range from a scoop I published or missed, Virat Kohli’s retirement, or traffic jams in Mumbai. Increasingly, he only sent articles about students being deported from the US and Indian students expressing their anxiety. One headline in The Times of India he sent: ‘Trump is forcing us to confront the myth of the American dream itself.’
Both my parents and my paternal aunt, a career academic, had no compunctions in their advice for me: stay quiet, lay low, keep your thoughts to yourself. Either they didn’t recognize the irony in telling a journalist to suppress expression, or worse, and likely, they feared for my life and future, and their free speech values died at the altar of familial protection.
While I fretted about my thesis, deadlines, graduation, I was struck how my parents seemed to care only about my safety. They didn’t once enquire about my work.
In early May, two weeks to graduation, I was planning to go to Butler Library, Columbia’s 600,000 sq. ft study area spanning eight floors with long rooms reminiscent of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. It housed two million volumes of books and was open 24-7 for students. It was my sanctuary: if no one knew where I was, I was at Butler. As I was putting on my shoes, I heard the distinct chopping, whirring sound of helicopters above. When I went down to the street, the road to campus was barricaded, the New York Police Department was guiding students away, the cop helicopter still roving. Pro-Palestine protestors had taken over the library, refusing to leave and “causing chaos." Columbia suspended and expelled 60 students.
For the past year, I constantly felt a cognitive dissonance. I lived a five minute walk from campus, regularly walking home at 2 or 3 am, pulling my three layers of sweaters close to me. Columbia and its surrounding area was home. I felt peaceful in my bubble of assignments and friends. In March, my sister, a professor in Singapore seeing the headlines asked in disbelief: “Are things really this intense there? Does it really feel this precipitous?" I sometimes questioned my own judgement and sanity.
But I knew so many of my friends and peers were deeply distressed by events on campus, and when I read the news, it was all true and damning but seemingly unrecognizable. That cognitive dissonance collapsed the evening of the library occupation; I felt jolted into reality.
The year also brought a different kind of culture shock. In India, I was used to critiquing rivals and peers, but rarely ourselves. We knew our workplace’s flaws, but would tiptoe around it. Here, classmates openly dissected our own institution’s flaws. At first, I felt embarrassed—how could I question the very place my parents and I had worked so hard to reach? But I came to see that critique itself was part of the education: a lesson in independent thinking.
On graduation day in late May, Columbia’s latest president, Claire Shipman, a journalist herself, took the podium to address what was meant to be one of the most celebratory days of our lives. Instead, several students, including many from my own school, booed. Shipman spoke in defence of international students and their rights, but the arrests and tension on campus hadn’t lifted, and for many she became the stand-in for everything that felt broken at Columbia.
I did graduate, with an M.A. in Business and Economics Journalism, dutifully posing for robe-clad selfies, tossing a cap skyward, and watching the Empire State Building glow Columbia blue in our honour. And yet the cognitive dissonance crept back in: how could life seem triumphant, yet menacing?
Two months later, Columbia agreed to pay the US government $220 million to restore its funding and end Trump’s probes. Meanwhile, Harvard, another Ivy League university a couple hours away from me, was suing the government to protect its academic freedom and autonomy which Trump was cracking down on. Columbia’s settlement drew mixed responses, many professors saw it as bending the knee, but others saw it as the only practical solution: the best of a bad, messy situation. The greatest concern is that Trump can strong-arm major institutions into ‘compromises’ that appear balanced but, in reality, erode rule of law and democratic norms.
After six years in Indian and international newsrooms, I saw how India’s place in the world was being reframed. I valued foreign coverage of declining press freedom, even as hostility grew at home. Yet, Western outlets, writing for their own audiences, often spoke down to emerging markets. My understanding of India sometimes came filtered through outsiders’ judgments, even as I grew up witnessing America’s dominance.
So when I first hand saw the same problems in America that their outlets chronicle elsewhere, it shocked me additionally. How was I afraid to voice myself in the world’s strongest democracy?
As The Guardian recently put it—“If this were happening somewhere else—in Latin America, say—how might it be reported…Except this is happening in the United States of America and so we don’t quite talk about it that way."
I came here to study economic journalism, but what I ended up learning, more viscerally than anything in a syllabus, was how fragile established ideals and norms can feel when tested.
M. Sriram is a reporter based in New York
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