President Shafik, one week ago, you authorized the New York Police Department to clear Columbia’s South Lawn of student protesters. We watched police officers zip-tie and arrest 108 of our friends, classmates, and coworkers. In response, students have mobilized in the hundreds at Columbia and campuses across the country, defending their right to peaceful protest for divestment from Israel. Now, police battalions surround campus, students enter and exit through security checkpoints, NYPD correctional buses circle the block, helicopters drone overhead, reporters probe students for front-page quotes, and communication from the administration has all but disappeared—with the exception, of course, of ominous late-night emails.

Columbia has become a national spectacle. Instead of defending your students’ right to free expression or engaging publicly with activist organizations, you and other administrators are scrambling to save face—granting campus access to select media outlets, the founder of a hate group that is as rabidly Islamophobic as it is antisemitic, and the occasional opportunistic politician—while abandoning the rest of campus. As tensions escalate here and elsewhere—Yale University, Harvard University, New York University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Michigan, and Brown University, to name a few—we question whether you understand the impact of what you have done. President Shafik, this is your legacy: a president more focused on the brand of your University than the safety of your students and their demands for justice.

In our April 18 staff editorial, we asked, “What is the role of the University if not to advocate for—and protect—its students?” Now, we ask, “Columbia administration, what is your end goal?” President Shafik, you have made it abundantly clear that your priorities lie with Columbia’s image and assets, not with its students. We have witnessed the total annihilation of Columbia as the advertised collegiate beacon of free speech, expression, and the right to protest. We have witnessed your capitulation to harmful media representation and opportunistic Republicans whose aim, it seems, is to put the values of a liberal education on trial. We have witnessed House Speaker Mike Johnson threatening intervention from the National Guard from the steps of Low Library and a congressman call for withholding financial aid from protesters in a press conference outside Columbia’s gates. Your misguided allegiances and failure to negotiate effectively have encouraged an environment where individuals are emboldened to climb the 116th Street gates, wave the flag of self-proclaimed terrorist group Lehi, and verbally harass students—how did we get here?

While you remain selective in your care for your students’ safety, they remain steadfast in their commitment to their community. In response to your identification of student protesters as a “clear and present danger”—an assessment NYPD Chief John Chell distinguished from the NYPD’s perspective—thousands of us, along with faculty and guests from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, have organized to uplift the spirit of the encampment. When the University fails to provide consistent community values, it is the true community of students who come together to fill that gap. Protesters have led teach-ins and assembly meetings, introduced and reinforced community guidelines, and manifested their own vision of meaningful University life. The students, not the administrators, have stepped up to protect one another from the media’s eagerness to “expose” the demonstration as antisemitic, anti-American, or something else entirely irrelevant to Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s clear demands.

As Kamala Harris so helpfully reminds us, “everything is in context.” President Shafik, do you think “you just fell out of a coconut tree?” You exist in context—that is, the context of University presidents across history who have attempted to suppress and control student voices for change, while still shamelessly touting Columbia’s “storied history” of protests. Your administration has proven, not only to your students, but to the world, that Columbia hasn’t learned from the past—notably, the Vietnam War protests in 1968 and the anti-apartheid protests in 1984.

It took Columbia decades to rebuild its image following the campus events of 1968. Undoubtedly it will take time, too, for Columbia to rebuild after your decision to authorize the NYPD on campus. If your administration truly cares about the well-being and safety of its students, it should learn from not only the missteps made over the past week, but those made throughout the school year, and throughout history. If you truly want to “rebuild the ties that bind us together,” you must confront the more than 30,035 Palestinian deaths and counting. Your students are not “dictat[ing] terms”; they are calling on you and the administration to reckon with the unfolding atrocities in which Columbia is complicit. President Shafik, your students are everything. But you’re an economist, so we’ll put it in economic terms: Your students are assets, not liabilities.

What you do has ramifications, not only for the future of this institution, but for the example you are setting of a tenuous relationship between administrators and protesters that will ripple across the country. All eyes are on Columbia: The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” has sparked at least a dozen other encampments, from Emerson College and Tufts University to Brown and Vanderbilt University. Likewise, your choice to allow the NYPD to arrest protesters has now been aped in the arrest of 47 students at Yale and 120 at NYU. Our protesters are not only setting precedent, you are—and the example you are setting is a dangerous one. Everyone is watching, President Shafik. Don’t turn your back on your students any longer.

Early Wednesday morning, you allotted the administration 48 hours to continue conversations. During this time, we hope you can reflect on the importance of your student body for your institution. We hope you can understand that the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” does, in fact, stand in solidarity with Gaza, and as we write in defense of student protests at universities across the United States, we hope you can recognize there are no more universities standing in Gaza. Resorting to more campus militarization, more student demonization, and further ignorance of Columbia’s complicity in war crimes will only cement your place on the wrong side of history.