As Christine Ruyter began resuming her routines last spring after hip replacement, she encountered an obstacle a block from her Morningside Heights home. College Walk, the tree-lined pedestrian thoroughfare across Columbia University between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, was indefinitely closed to the public. To control the chaos of anti-Israel unrest after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, the university had uniformed guards at the walk’s entrances bar anyone without a Columbia ID or pass.
Columbia, which has long enjoyed the benefits of being in New York City, has been keeping the city out when the city becomes inconvenient.
Columbia claims New York City ceded control of College Walk in 1953, when it sold the university the deed to that portion of West 116th Street for $1,000. In Columbia’s telling, allowing the public to walk through had been a lengthy act of kindness.
Ms. Ruyter and three neighbors are plaintiffs in a lawsuit claiming otherwise. Toby Golick, their lawyer, argues that the city retained the right of way because of a half-sentence from the transfer that reserves “an easement over a proposed pedestrian walk to be constructed by the university.” But the sentence continues: and “so much of the property of the university as will be necessary for the maintenance, repair and relocation” of city infrastructure. Columbia argues that the easement only allows access for utilities or public-safety vehicles such as fire trucks. The Eric Adams administration agrees.
But as recently as 2021, the university’s official alumni magazine described College Walk as a “tree-lined public walkway.”
Sid Davidoff was a key aide to Mayor John V. Lindsay in spring 1968, during the most serious period of campus unrest, when students took their dean hostage, and the college closed the gates. Mr. Davidoff says he believes Columbia has a right to bar outsiders “only in exigent circumstances.” “It was never the intention to close the walk permanently or even for a longer period of time” beyond days or weeks, he says.
Columbia’s narrow argument obscures its responsibility to set a good example. Ms. Ruyter calls it “super-irritating” that Columbia has created a six-block barrier making it more difficult for her and her neighbors to reach the subway and stores.
It’s also anti-urban. Columbia students and professors, and their neighbors, benefit from spontaneous acquaintances, even if it’s just a young student smiling at an elderly woman or a professor sharing the walkway with a father wheeling a baby carriage. “Sometimes I would meet somebody for coffee,” Ms. Ruyter said. “We’d just sit on a bench on campus.”
Columbia has a pass for neighbors, including, Columbia says, the plaintiffs of the lawsuit, but the system is “clumsy,” the lawsuit says, and violates the spirit of a public walk, anyway.
A Columbia spokeswoman 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.”
Practically speaking, this tactic isn’t working: Columbia students disrupted Butler Library early this month to protest Israel.
But even if it did work, the message to students is, outsiders are dangerous. Even unmonitored strolls are dangerous. My insider privilege keeps me safe in here.
This attitude keeps the city from thriving. And when the city is flailing, students remain in danger, anyway, whenever they step off campus. Is a student safer from a threatening protester outside, on the public sidewalk, then inside, on College Walk? Why should neighbors contend with demonstrators outside campus?
Columbia need not surrender to chaos in reopening its walk to the public. Peter Moskos, a John Jay College criminal-justice professor and the author of the new book, “Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop,” says Columbia could maintain order and openness with support from New York City’s government.
The key, he says, is to enforce “clear and explicit and transparent rules of conduct” for everyone, whether Columbia students or outsiders. People who want to protest peacefully could do so in designated areas. Just as it is against the law to light something on fire on the public street, or to use amplified sound without a permit, or to block a sidewalk, or to threaten, harass or menace an individual, it would be illegal to do so on College Walk.
It “would be a lot of hard work and they’re going to get ugly videos” after police and campus safety officers intervene when protesters “claim the space,” Mr. Moskos said.
As Louis Anemone, the Giuliani-era Police Department’s chief of department, notes, “It may take three, four, five, six, seven days, until people get the message,” but that’s better than the alternative. It “sends a terrible message to the public,” Mr. Anemone says, to “retreat.”
That cities and campuses can be disorderly is a fact of urban and college life. The answer to that disorder is not for Columbia to transform itself into a sterile enclave, turning its back on the messy neighborhood that provides students, professors and staff with a richly varied life veined with restaurants and parkland, but to work with the city with which it is intertwined, in good times and bad alike.
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Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
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