On Oct. 12, 2023, Columbia University closed its gates.
The ornate, iron fences were an $89,000 gift from the philanthropist George Delacorte. For years, their purpose was largely decorative, closing sporadically for special occasions. Most other times, they remained open, and members of the public could enter freely, sit on a bench and traverse the campus to get to the No. 1 train. The gates were mere emblems of exclusivity and elitism, of the wealthy and powerful whose names adorn the university’s buildings.
But now, they symbolize more than just Ivy League cachet. Initially shut in anticipation of demonstrations on campus over the war in Gaza, Columbia’s gates are at the center of a heated conflict over public versus private space.
To enter, students have to show security guards university-issued ID cards, cutting off public access to a portion of 116th Street known as College Walk. What was once a widely enjoyed pedestrian haven is now a hulking barricade. Columbia takes up six city blocks, running from 114th Street to 120th Street, in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. Residents have to walk around it to get from Amsterdam Avenue to Broadway. What was a roughly a five to 10-minute stroll now takes around 15 to 20 minutes, some neighbors say.
Some Columbia students and nearby residents are suing the school, arguing that a 1953 agreement between the university and the city makes College Walk a public, not private, space. Neighbors, many of whom are seniors, say that the closure has limited their activities in their own community, and students are concerned that their education is now occurring in a vacuum.
The lawsuit over College Walk comes as Columbia, one of the oldest universities in the United States and the largest private landowner in New York, grapples with other constitutional matters.
Its response to the demonstrations was heavily criticized, sparking a national discussion over police presence on campus and antisemitism. The fallout is still unfolding — this month, the school agreed to make changes to its Middle Eastern studies department and security practices, following the Trump administration’s announcement that it would cancel $400 million in federal funding. And after immigration officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and legal U.S. permanent resident who helped organize demonstrations, concerns over free speech emerged.
Other universities and the general public are closely watching Columbia’s decisions. In a moment where it feels like everyone outside its gates is telling the school’s administration what to do, it has kept itself shut off.
In an emailed statement, Samantha Slater, a university spokesperson, said, “We are focused on ensuring that all of our students feel welcome, safe, and secure on our campus as we also balance the desire for an open campus that is accessible to all of Columbia’s valued constituencies, including our neighbors.”
The implications in this case go beyond a neighborhood kerfuffle: For decades, college campuses and public streets have been critical venues for protest — and increasingly, the institutions that control them are limiting access to quell demonstrations. Legal scholars question what such restrictions mean for public space and free expression in the United States.
Earlier this month in Washington, after congressional Republicans threatened to withhold funding from the city, a mural that read “Black Lives Matter” was removed from a plaza near the White House. Also amid recent political demonstrations, the public lobby of a glossy New York University building in Downtown Manhattan was roped off — a sign in the window now reads, “a NYU ID is temporarily required for access.”
“There’s a deep history of using privatization to evade obligations sounding in constitutional law,” said Molly Brady, a professor at Harvard Law School who teaches property law. First Amendment freedoms — including speech and assembly — are typically protected only in public spaces. On private property, however, those rights are often in the hands of the landowners.
‘They Haven’t Been a Good Neighbor’
Columbia was founded in 1754 as King’s College, and over the centuries has churned out no shortage of successful business titans, artists and politicians, including four U.S. presidents. The cost of attending the private university as an undergraduate is around $93,000 per year.
In 1953, the school struck a deal with the city to take over the portion of 116th Street now in question. For $1,000, it would come under Columbia’s ownership and vehicular traffic would be shut off. There would also be an easement — a special right granted to a group to use property owned by others for a certain purpose — for a “pedestrian walk,” according to the initial agreement and a city commission report reviewed by The New York Times. The agreement also stated that “such change in the City’s street system” is favored because it was deemed to be “in the public interest.”
“How would it be in the public interest to close off a street to the public and create a six block barrier to walk around?” said Toby Golick, who lives nearby and is the attorney representing the plaintiffs.
The gates were installed more than a decade after the pedestrian agreement, and they were immediately met with criticism. “The best word for the new ‘ornamental gates’ which the University has erected on the Broadway entrance to College Walk is ugly,” a 1967 Columbia Daily Spectator article reads. It continued, with a misspelling, “The gates, of course, will not be locked — the campus will still be officially open to ‘outsiders’— but their appearence is undeniably hostile.”
But in the years following, the gates would, indeed, periodically close — after protests against the Vietnam War or at other times the school wanted to heighten security.
This time, though, some neighbors and students are worried that the closure will be permanent.
Phil Auffray has lived across from the campus for nearly 60 years. As a child, he’d go there to play soccer or tag with his friends. These days, College Walk is a necessity for his family and his neighbors. Before the gates were closed, his mother “would use the campus like a park,” he said. “She would just go there to meet friends and sit there and chat, have a coffee.”
Older residents struggle to lug groceries around the perimeter of the campus, and Mr. Auffray often steps in to help them carry their bags. “It’s become a hardship, they’re really hurting the senior citizens,” he said.
Columbia is “part of the Morningside community, not vice versa,” said Mr. Auffray, who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “They haven’t been a good neighbor.”
The university has accommodated some neighbors and family of faculty by granting passes that allow them through the gates. (Mr. Auffray said that he did not receive one.)
“Universities are one of the prime examples of what I call ‘liminal spaces’ on the spectrum between public and private space,” said Sarah Schindler, a professor at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. “They are often ostensibly open to all, and yet are often privately owned. ”
Ms. Schindler added, “the fact that Columbia did consent to this use for years bolsters the idea that the easement that they granted to the city was intended for public pedestrian passage.”
Public Space, Turned Private
The notion of tightening rules on spaces, making them more private or exclusive as a way to control speech, is not exclusive to college campuses.
Homeowners’ associations, for example, use privatization as a way to avoid protests, Ms. Brady said. “People routinely opt into homeowners’ associations precisely because they can exercise control over entrances, signs, flags and lawns in ways that formal governments cannot.”
The restrictions can curb liberties outside political expression. Ms. Brady pointed to a 2017 instance of the Kansas City Council voting to privatize sidewalks in order to screen for weapons, an effort to prevent gun violence.
During the Occupy Wall Street movement, in 2011, activists gathered at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s Financial District to protest economic inequality and corporate greed. The park is a privately owned public space — “a place that has a private owner who agrees to provide it for public use, in return for a zoning concession,” said Jerold S. Kayden, who wrote a book on the topic and is a professor of urban planning and design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
The ambiguous public-private status allowed for some benefits for the protesters, who camped out in the park for weeks. Zuccotti Park, owned by Brookfield Office Properties, was open 24-hours, whereas many public parks have early curfews.
But then, signs went up in the park and other Manhattan plazas, warning that camping, erecting tents, lying down, sleeping bags and the placement of personal property on the ground were prohibited. Eventually, following orders from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, police cleared out the protesters, and a judge decided that the actions of the owners and the city were not in violation of First Amendment rights.
“Privatizing formerly public places or restricting access to those places offers a short-term solution to purported safety and other interests, but imposes long-term costs to communities that depend on those places for expressive and other activities,” said Timothy Zick, a professor at William and Mary Law School and the author of “Speech out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places.”
Activism and speech can also be constrained through the regulation of aesthetics. Georgia’s Republican Representative Andrew Clyde called for the renaming of Washington’s Black Lives Matter Plaza and the erasure of the yellow mural with the movement’s name. Many people viewed the plaza as a physical space embodying the movement itself. After Mr. Clyde introduced legislation that would withhold millions in federal funding for the city, Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, agreed to remove the mural.
‘The Castle on the Hill Vibe’
For many young adults, college protests are a sort of rite of passage, as they find their voices and develop their values within a semi-contained intellectual environment.
Long before the recent wave of activism, universities have been catalysts for social movements, as the sites for sit-ins opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and demonstrations pushing for divestment from South African apartheid.
“Young and idealistic students have historically challenged authority and influenced national discourses and policies,” Mr. Zick said. He added, “These movements were not insular affairs, but rather included members of the broader community.”
Another parallel to what’s happening at Columbia is taking place at New York University. As demonstrations over the war in Gaza were taking place, the school began requiring an N.Y.U. ID to access the public atrium of the school’s multipurpose Paulson Center building. In addition to student housing, a pool and a theater, the building has a lobby that was meant to be open to members of the public.
At Columbia, over several months since October 2023, large crowds gathered for both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine demonstrations. Last April, more than 100 students were arrested after the university called in the police to clear out an encampment. City officials claimed that the protests drew outsize influence from protesters who were unaffiliated with the school.
The isolation of the campus has hurt bystanders, members of the public who were not interested in protests, but simply wanted to walk across the grounds, said Ria McDonald, 21, a student at Columbia Law School who recently joined the lawsuit.
“It seems like an inconsistent response, seeing as the protests are mainly from students themselves who are allowed on campus,” said Ms. McDonald. “That doesn’t quite make sense to me as a reason for locking down campus to community members who are not protesting.”
She added that the closure has impacted her own education too, shutting off access to community members she aims to work with. “I wanted to become a lawyer to provide legal advice to people in this community and help make their lives better,” Ms. McDonald said.
Dhananjay Jagannathan, an assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia, said that he didn’t think that the campus was the appropriate forum for the protests, but having to show an ID to enter feels uncomfortable. “The fact that we have to prove that we really belong is alienating,” he said. “I find it insulting. And I think that’s how the students feel. They feel the regulation of their movement as an intrusion on their dignity.”
By closing itself off from the rest of New York, Columbia is at risk of becoming a gated community, students say.
“Columbia is already an elite institution,” said Annie McGovern, 25, a law student who also joined the lawsuit. “Closing the gates plays into the castle on the hill vibe that they claim to be working against.”
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