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After Columbia Revokes Pro-Palestine Protesters' Degrees, Alumna Says Time to Burn Our Diplomas
Academia, exemplified by Columbia University, has surrendered its proclaimed mission of intellectual independence and endeavor, and the academic pursuit of knowledge and social advancement.
Mar 16, 2025
In May of 1986, I received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. That degree has been a proud part of my resume in the many years since.
As Columbia rushes to appease the Trump administration by expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of a growing number of students accused of peaceful protest and exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, I unequivocally renounce my degree and any affiliation with the university. I charge Columbia with complicity in the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and with terrorizing its anti-genocide, pro-Palestine students, faculty, and staff. I charge Columbia with appeasement of and partnership with fascist governments (Biden and Trump) in Washington.
The shameless capitulation of Columbia to government pressure is reflective of the corporate, neoliberal selling-out of academia. Academia, exemplified by Columbia University, has surrendered its proclaimed mission of intellectual independence and endeavor, and the academic pursuit of knowledge and social advancement.
Today, I renounce my 1986 master’s degree from SIPA. I renounce it in the name of Mahmoud Khalil, of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, of Hind Rajab, of Shaban al-Dalou, of all those who are names and not numbers.
In Gaza today, during this holy month of Ramadan, more than 2 million people suffered through the 14th day of a criminal siege imposed by Israel. No food, no water, no electricity for light, heat, desalination, or medical equipment, and no humanitarian aid or supplies have been permitted into the decimated Gaza Strip for two weeks. The people, who continue to experience a genocide conducted by the United States and Israel, are dying of hunger, of thirst, of disease. They are dying from their untreated wounds, from hypothermia, from shelling, sniping, and drone attacks. They are dying from causes too numerous to count.
In the West Bank today, Palestinians continue to be driven from the Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams refugee camps—camps established because the Nakba of 1948 made them refugees in their own land. Today, the Israel Defense Forces (let’s call it what it is—the IOF—Israel Occupation Forces) continued to tear up roads, wells, and infrastructure across the West Bank, deny Palestinians their supposedly inalienable right to return, take selfies amid the rubble of homes and schools, shoot children, and defecate on the floors and furniture of the emptied buildings.
In other words, this was an ordinary day in the lives of Israeli soldiers and decision-makers in Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C. And yet, in this world that fascism and genocide turn upside down, it is not the perpetrators of these historic crimes who are in the dock. Instead, peacefully protesting students are targeted by their own schools and government.
On March 13, the Zionist administration of Columbia University (recall that Zionism is a racist, supremacist, settler colonial political ideology), rushed to cooperate with the Trump administration after it received an extraordinary letter listing nine demands Columbia must meet to avoid having $400 million in federal funding denied. Eager to comply with this extortion, university officials announced that an additional 22 students were expelled, suspended, or had their degrees revoked.
The next day, the U.S. Department of “Homeland Security” (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) followed up on their abduction and rendition to Louisiana of Columbia graduate and green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil with the arrest of a second student, who is also Palestinian. Evoking the “Commie sympathizers” trope of the Red Scare, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem referred to the students as “terrorist sympathizers.” Meanwhile, Columbia allowed federal agents to search dorm rooms at Columbia University. At the request of Columbia University “Public Safety” officers, the New York Police Department (NYPD) entered Butler Library to investigate graffiti in a men’s restroom.
On March 14, I drove from my home in western Massachusetts to W. 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan to stand with pro-Palestine students of Columbia and Barnard, and leaders of Within Our Lifetime. As an alumna, I felt compelled to be in the presence of their humanity, their courage, and their uncompromising, untiring dedication to Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea.
To Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo, dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and former officer and intelligence analyst of the IOF: We see who you are. We see the role you have played in calling in the NYPD on the peaceful students of last spring’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. We see your hosting of former Israeli prime minister and war criminal Naftali Bennett (“I’ve killed many Arabs in my life and there’s nothing wrong with that”), who joked about distributing exploding pagers to anti-genocide students at Harvard a few days ago.
Today, I renounce my 1986 master’s degree from SIPA. I renounce it in the name of Mahmoud Khalil, of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, of Hind Rajab, of Shaban al-Dalou, of all those who are names and not numbers. I denounce the terrorism of Columbia University, and of all the U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican, that have supported and partnered in the decades-long dehumanization and genocide of the Palestinian people. I denounce Columbia’s and the U.S. government’s monstrous conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that puts Jews in the way of true danger and is, in itself, anti-Semitic.
Each day of the deepening fascism of the U.S. is another day of starvation, displacement, and terror for Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. But in renouncing my degree and burning my diploma, I say: I will never stop talking about Palestine.
Following the example of the protesters who burned their draft cards during the Vietnam war, I call on all CU alumni to join me in publicly burning our Columbia diplomas.
Many alumni can give firsthand accounts of the 1968 anti-Vietnam war protests at Columbia that led to nonviolent occupation of campus buildings. When campus negotiations failed, Columbia called in 1,000 police, resulting in the arrest of over 700 students and the shutdown of the university. True to corporate, neo-liberal and neo-fascist form. But the protests on Columbia’s campus and campuses across the U.S. contributed to ending the largest U.S. colonial war of the 20th century.
No symbolic gesture such as burning diplomas can atone for the suffering that Zionist institutions like Columbia and Barnard cause and are complicit in. Each day of the deepening fascism of the U.S. is another day of starvation, displacement, and terror for Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. But in renouncing my degree and burning my diploma, I say: I will never stop talking about Palestine. The repression of Columbia University and the U.S. government, as with all historic repression, lights the flame of deepening and widening resistance and change.
The people will teach the Zionist authorities a long overdue lesson. As the students of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) explained, in responding to CU administration anger over “Free them all” graffiti spray painted on the President’s House on March 14, “The people will not stand for Columbia University’s shameless complicity in genocide. The University’s repression has only bred more resistance and Columbia has lit a flame it can’t control.”
“Free them all” refers not just to Mahmoud Khalil. Not just to all pro-Palestine students persecuted by Columbia and by DHS, ICE, President Donald Trump, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It refers to all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli torture prisons. It refers to the Palestinian people, past, present, and future. And ultimately, it refers to us all, since ultimately, we are all Palestinian. I hope that the flames of burning Columbia diplomas will help light the way toward this freedom.
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Crime of the Century: An Old Soundtrack to Our Current Nightmare
How Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem foreshadowed 2025’s catastrophe.
Mar 16, 2025
Listening to Supertramp’s album Crime of the Century in 2025 is like dusting off an old diary and realizing you were right about everything.
Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem was not meant to be trapped in a decade drowning in idealism. Rather, it was a collection of elegies that resonate with me more now, in our current nightmare, than when I first listened to it. The mournful melodies and plaintive lyrics (by Richard Davies and Roger Hodgson) speak of the crises of vague spiritual thirst, self-loathing, money culture, schools churning out compliant citizens, and unabashed corruption.
It came to a head in the 2025 inauguration of an American president with the grand unveiling of a well-worn power system but with a staggering level of audacity. Near the president and out of the shadows, there stood magnates of seemingly incurable hubris who reached their bliss points, invited to take reign of sensitive policy and firing authority and gain access to the country’s secrets and public money. A new administration wasted no time unveiling a “billionaires’ row” of insatiable elites who aren’t just playing the game. They own it. Collectively worth $1.35 trillion, they have become brands in human flesh, more recognizable than the corporate empires they built.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture.
And somehow, it’s all there… in the album.
Four years after its release, I came across Crime of the Century in a used album store on the main strip of Carbondale, Illinois, during my undergraduate years at Southern Illinois University. Every other week or so, I’d walk to the music store that always smelled like stale cannabis and was managed by a large man with cannabis-stained teeth and a lot of opinions. He was clearheaded enough to have promised me that he’d keep an eye out for Supertramp cassettes and vinyls.
Back in the apartment, I had Crime on repeat for longer than I will confess. Somewhere in the silage of existential angst, I decrypted the pangs that augured the coming of a novel strain of corruption and indifference capable of shaking the moral foundations of anything in its path, including a nuked-up, power-bloated country, exulting in its hegemonic dominance, yet hanging on to conceits of global moral leadership.
There were plenty of suspects to point fingers at back in the 70s, but the hardest part—which the album still dares us to do—was staring down ourselves, we the self-satisfied searchers, critics, and activists with bell-bottoms, inebriated by our magical thinking of independence and convincing ourselves that we were above the detritus and contributed nothing to the collective rot. You’ll find this indictment in the concluding lines of the title track, “Crime of the Century”:
Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let’s see
But that's not right, oh no, what’s the story?
Look, there’s you and there's me
I can’t say I saw today’s condition coming when I was 20. But it does seem close to a kind of Bayesian reasoning, where you have an initial, under-substantiated certitude about something and then see new evidence that confirms your most primitive claims and worries.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture. Former President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Vice President Kamala Harris have exited the stage, but their hollow-point scruples remain contagious, repurposed by their successors. What we are witnessing is not a change in direction but a seamless handoff, a continuation of the same imperial prerogatives, now dressed in different rhetoric.
The Oval Office openly covets resources and land that belong to other people. The perverse logic of supremacy and strange level of entitlement (epistemic assumptions of Empire) are rubber-stamped by compromised elected and appointed men and women of Pharaonic arrogance, who have narcissistic visions of taking Gaza’s seashore and gas fields, Greenland’s minerals, Canada’s lumber and oil, Ukraine’s massive rare earth reserves, and Panama’s canal.
So do we need more proof of active colonial appetites?
The existential dread of Crime of the Century should have shown us an imp squatting on the chest of a defeated counterculture that my generation thoughtlessly held on to. The costumes and performance of rebellion ultimately became products themselves, mass-packaged and sold back to consumers, as the edited book Commodify Your Dissent painfully argued a bit too late in 1997. To identify with grunge or goth moods, for example, subsequent generations purchased the look from fashion brands who created inventories, price points, and a market that preyed on real feelings of alienation and disillusionment in youth culture.
At the heart of Crime of the Century is a troubling accusation: We’re complicit in the corruption we claim to despise. It’s easy to cast blame on political elites, but the rot runs deeper. Media personalities, especially the high-profile journalists of broadcast celebrity and late-night comics, make their careers selectively criticizing these very figures and what they represent—only to rub shoulders with them at off-camera galas, clink wine glasses, invite them onto their shows, and turn critique into entertainment.
Each day, the celebrity reporters and broadcasters spew hundreds of thousands of words to demonstrate their erudition, apparently depleting their allotment of verbiage for the day, leaving no room for “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
The oligarchs of influence thrive because, in part, we fund them. We engage the platforms, consume and share the storylines, and chase virality. We freely give away the inventories of our privacy. We do this knowing that the details of our inner sanctums are the products that social media giants are trafficking for great profit. The hard truth is, no one’s fully off the grid. We’re entangled in the wires we trip over and then curse at them like podcasters.
So, what do we do? Keep spinning the album and nervously thumb prayer beads (misbaha, in colloquial Arabic), cowering in the album’s pastel and gloomy brilliance?
With the exception of those who dared to speak truth to power (mainly through alternative presses that captured the right kind of radical), my generation watered the tillage that sprouted our current conundrum. One of the tracks of Crime exposed many for what they were: “For we dreamed a lot / And we schemed a lot / And we tried to sing of love before the stage fell apart.” That’s right, we were cantors of phantom ideals that were about to fall apart early in the 1980s, when John Lennon was murdered in New York City and Ronald Regan sired trickle down economics, which “foolishly trusted the collective greed of a people” to care for the needy and marginalized.
Songwriters like Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, and Rick Davies, along with scholars like Christopher Lasch, sounded the alarm early, but most of us dismissed it, assuming the warning had to be for someone else. In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch saw through the cracks of idiot-proof idealism and noticed the shape of social and psychological narcissism that soon enough would be given the key to the Oval Office.
My generation’s surviving tenants need to stop lecturing and stop recounting imagined glories of the past. It’s time to move out of the way, especially for the generation of young people now whom we bitterly complain about, but who actually are better positioned to succeed where we failed. They have ideals but are not idealists, and they are jaded, but not overly so, just enough. Former and current students of mine, they are not content with just listening. With hunger and the right kind of impatience, they will write new songs. Can’t wait to hear them, for if we’re still noticing the crimes of 1974 in 2025, it can only mean the crime never stopped. It just learned to dress better.
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With Bird Flu, Our Factory Farmed Chickens Have Come Home to Roost
It was only a matter of time before the horrific and unjust conditions in the animal agriculture system became the proving ground for a pathogen capable of igniting a dangerous pandemic. Now our luck may have run out.
Mar 15, 2025
In Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, set in the French Algerian town of Oran, rats one day begin showing up dead on residents’ doorsteps, dying with violent spasms and blood pouring from their mouths.
At first, the rats’ death agonies are only a curiosity to the townspeople. But then the rats begin dying in greater numbers, their corpses piling up in the streets. “The staircase from the cellar to the attics was strewn with dead rats, 10 or a dozen of them. The garbage bins of all the houses in the street were full of rats.”
When Dr. Rieux, a physician, remarks upon the strange phenomenon to his mother, she replies vaguely, “It’s like that sometimes.”
The avian flu threat, however, has now given us an opportunity to rethink our existential and ethical relations with the other animals of our planet, and to recognize how closely our fates are bound together.
By the time Rieux realizes what is happening, it is too late. Bubonic plague has come to Oran. Soon it is the townspeople themselves who are dying in agony, their bodies heaping up in mounds—like the rats whose suffering, and fates, they had only days before viewed with indifference...
Lately, I have been thinking of Camus’ novel, as we ourselves teeter on the brink of a new deadly plague—avian flu. Like the people in the story, we too have remained indifferent to the suffering, and shared collective fate, of our fellow creatures. And we continue to do so at our own peril.
For more than a year, I have followed news reports of the H5N1 virus that causes bird flu, or highly pathogenic avian influenza, as it has torn across the world, infecting hundreds of species and killing millions of animals, from storks and snowy owls to cranes and harbor seals, from foxes and herons to finches and lions. Geese have fallen from the skies dead over Kansas City. House cats have died from violent seizures in Iceland and Texas. The virus has decimated colonies of Adélie penguins in Antarctica, wiped out albatross fledglings on the remote South African island of Marion, killed dolphins and manatees off the Florida coast.
Never have scientists seen a virus infect so many species all at once, nor spread so quickly or with such devastating effect. It is the first observed panzootic—a pandemic of “all” animals. Researchers are now calling avian flu an “existential threat” to planetary biodiversity.
While droves of our fellow beings were dying in agony in far-away places, however, few people seemed to notice or care. Even today, we resist acknowledging our own role in the catastrophe—the fact that it is we ourselves, by imprisoning billions of animals in the food system, then allowing the virus to run rampant inside it, who have turned H5N1 into a trans-species bioweapon. And now that bioweapon is turning toward us.
While the H5N1 virus is naturally occurring, it emerged as a global problem only when it became concentrated in the Asian poultry industry in the late 1990s. Farmers at the time killed hundreds of millions of chickens and other birds to try to contain the virus—in many cases, by burying them alive or setting them on fire. Since then, H5N1 has resurfaced again and again on animal farms, leading to the deaths of poultry and humans alike.
For years, epidemiologists have warned that the animal agriculture system was a time bomb waiting to go off. Most of the deadly diseases ever to have afflicted our own species, including cholera, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS, and influenza, have been caused by our exploitation of animals for food. Today, three-quarters of all emerging infectious diseases are in fact zoonotic in origin—a consequence chiefly of the modern animal food system.
That system has increased our vulnerability to animal-borne diseases in two ways. First, raising cattle and other ruminants for slaughter requires staggering anounts of land, which destroys animal habitat and crowds species together, thus enabling viruses to find new hosts who lack natural immunity to them. (More than half the surface of the Earth has been turned into farmland, and 80% of that is devoted to raising animals for slaughter.) Second, we have created a permanent source of new plagues by concentrating sick and traumatized animals together in industrialized conditions.
Even with a vaccine, Americans can expect little help from their government should a bird flu pandemic materialize, since President Donald Trump is eviscerating the federal agencies responsible for public health and disease prevention.
Few people are aware of the sheer scale of the global animal food system. But each year, 80,000,000,000 land animals and up to 2,700,000,000,000 marine animals die violently to satisfy growing human demand for animal products. This system is now the most ecologically destructive force on our planet—the leading cause of the mass extinction crisis and the second-leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the main cause of freshwater system loss, algal blooms, and land degradation.
The animal food system is also a moral and epidemiological calamity. Billions of sensitive chickens, pigs, cows, and others are forced into miserable, fetid conditions of intensive confinement, where they are beaten, tormented with electric prods, and then brutally killed at a fraction of their lifespans. Our prisoners suffer such psychological and physiological stress and trauma that millions die even before they can reach a slaughterhouse. So to keep them alive, farmers pump them full of antibiotics. Seventy percent of antibiotics worldwide are fed to farmed animals, a practice which, in turn, is fueling deadly new strains of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”
Natural ecosystems constrain the virulence of pathogens like H5N1, by selecting out the most lethal traits that would otherwise keep a virus from spreading by killing its host prematurely. As science writer Brandon Keim observes, however, the “constraints on virulence” ordinarily found in nature are absent on industrialized poultry farms, where birds are killed at a tiny fraction of their normal lifespans. In fact, virulence is selected for.
It was only a matter of time, thus, before the horrific and unjust conditions in the animal agriculture system became the proving ground for a pathogen capable of igniting a dangerous pandemic. Now our luck may have run out.
Last year, the H5N1 virus crossed a crucial threshold, when wild birds exposed to concentrations of the virus on animal farms contracted the disease and spread it to other species along their migration routes. Meanwhile, the Biden administration, deferring to powerful agricultural interests—and seeking to avoid antagonizing rural voters in an election year—squandered every opportunity to track and contain the deadly disease. For months, the U.S. government effectively stood by and did nothing. As a result, H5N1 has now become endemic throughout the U.S. animal agriculture system. And the longer it remains there, the more likely is it to mutate into a form transmissable between humans.
How bad would that be? In 2005, David Nabarro, then the United Nations system coordinator for avian and human influenza, warned that a bird flu pandemic could kill up to 150 million people. That may be a conservative estimate, however, since the known past mortality rate from avian flu in humans has been over 50%, making H5N1 up to 100 times deadlier than Covid-19. Unlike Covid-19 furthermore, a bird flu pandemic would not primarily target older adults or people with underlying conditions, but would kill indiscriminately.
The H5N1 virus is neuropathic, meaning that it attacks the brain, causing conditions ranging from mild encaphalitis to seizures, coma, and death. Children and pregnant women would be especially vulnerable to the virus. When a Canadian teen contracted the H5N1 virus last year, she suffered multiple organ failure and had to be placed on a respirator for months before she recovered. Avian flu has meanwhile killed 90% of the pregnant women who, in past decades, contracted it. “We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” Angela Rasmussen, a Canadian virologist, recently warned. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.”
So far, we have been extremely lucky. The dozens of farm workers who have fallen ill from avian flu this last year, most from exposure to infected dairy cows, appear to have contracted a mild version of the virus. Most have now recovered. Last month, however, the far deadlier D1.1 variant of the virus was discovered in a herd of cattle in Nevada. Should such a lethal variant mutate into a transmissable form, and become capable of binding to receptors in our lungs, the resulting pandemic could lead to societal chaos and mass mortality.
For too long, we have behaved as if our species were “an island entire of itself,” and we were the only beings whose lives mattered or had value.
Just before leaving office, then-President Joe Biden transferred $590 million to Moderna to accelerate development of a bird flu vaccine. Other companies are also working on vaccines. But it’s anyone’s guess if they will be ready in time. Even with a vaccine, Americans can expect little help from their government should a bird flu pandemic materialize, since President Donald Trump is eviscerating the federal agencies responsible for public health and disease prevention. The new administration has slashed the budgets and staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FEMA, suppressed CDC updates on bird flu, and taken the U.S. out of the World Health Organization—the international agency responsible for monitoring and providing guidance on global public health threats, including pandemics.
Worsening matters, any federal response to an avian flu pandemic would be in the hands of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of Health and Human Services—a notorious vaccine skeptic. President Trump himself would likely respond to a new pandemic not by protecting the most vulnerable Americans, but by using the crisis to expand his own powers, if not to impose martial law.
Perhaps our luck will hold, and we will somehow all avoid getting avian flu. But we can’t count on it. Nor can we afford to go on ignoring the inextricable links between our oppression of nonhuman animals and growing pandemic risk.
The best way to prevent zoonotic pathogens from making us sick in future is to begin transitioning to an all plant-based diet. In doing so, we would not only spare billions of animals further suffering, but also mitigate a great deal of environmental damage to our planet. And we ourselves would be healthier for it. Scientists have shown that vegans have lower rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and type 2 diabetes than meat-eaters. One study in JAMA found that vegans may even live longer than “omnivores” who consume animal products.
Tragically, however, rather than rethink our dietary choices, we continue to cling to the animal system, and to its vast cruelties, against the better claims of reason and conscience. Few people indeed seem aware of the violence and suffering that attend even “ordinary” animal production. To produce eggs, for example, tens of millions of chickens are jammed into cages so small that they cannot extend even a single wing. The birds’ beaks are painfully cut off to keep them from pecking at their cell mates in distress. Then the chickens are repeatedly starved to shock their systems into producing more eggs. Finally, they are violently grabbed and thrown into a truck, and brought to the slaughterhouse. There, they are shackled upside down by their legs and have their throats cut, often while still conscious. Many are boiled alive in feather removal tanks. Billions of male baby chicks—of no use to industry—are meanwhile ground up alive or are simply tossed away in dumpsters, to suffocate or die from dehydration.
These and other barbaric practices have no place in society today. Even now, however, Americans are concerned only about soaring egg prices, not about the suffering of the tens of millions of animals being killed in ventilator shutdowns across the country. The idea that we should simply stop eating eggs—for the birds’ well-being as much as for our own safety—appears not to have occurred to anyone.
As an ethicist who has spent decades lecturing and publishing on animal rights, hoping to convince people that there is a better way to live a human life than by imprisoning and killing our fellow beings, I find it beyond discouraging how little progress has been made toward ending our violence against animals in the food economy. The avian flu threat, however, has now given us an opportunity to rethink our existential and ethical relations with the other animals of our planet, and to recognize how closely our fates are bound together.
“Ask not for whom the bell tolls—it tolls for thee.” When the poet John Donne wrote these words, centuries ago, it was customary for churches in England to toll their bells to announce the death of someone in the community. We are deeply connected to one another, Donne was saying, and what happens to one, happens to all.
“No man is an island entire of itself,” Donne wrote. Each of us “is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Every death therefore “diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
Donne’s poem has taken on new significance, as avian influenza now closes in around us. Our species is not alone on the Earth, but part of the biotic main, a “piece of a continent” teeming with myriad other suffering, mortal beings. And what we do to the other animals, we do also to ourselves.
For too long, we have behaved as if our species were “an island entire of itself,” and we were the only beings whose lives mattered or had value. Now, after long treating our fellow creatures with violence and contempt, as mere “things” to be exploited and killed for our purposes, our karmic debt is coming due, in a ruined Earth and escalating pandemic risks. The tolling of the bell today is avian flu, and it tolls for us.
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