What is after the Columbia Spring?

For more than a millennia, top global schools and universities have always carried the torch of setting the agenda of current and future generations of leaders.

Starting with the oldest universities in the world, such as the Qarawiyyin in Morocco or Bologna and Oxford in Europe, it was academic freedom for teachers and students that ensured that there is a balance between the progress of knowledge and our collective conscience and morality at the same time.

In April 2024, students in some of the best universities in the world, known in the US as Ivy League schools, led by Columbia University students organised a peaceful gathering that turned into a protest, calling for divestment of billions of dollars from industries involved in the occupation of Palestine. For a teacher, there is nothing that could make you prouder than seeing your students achieve good progress in both. Therefore, the university management and politicians’ violent reactions to students’ protests surprised teachers, along with any reasonable person around the world, with a mixed feeling after seeing hundreds of students in hundreds of universities around the world beaten and abused by law enforcement for protesting.

The global students’ protests, sparked by Columbia university students’ encampment, pose a serious question for humanity regarding whether our collective conscience and human rights values, such as justice, can return to business, and education, as usual after the current conflicts?

Secret investments

Before the 2024 student protests, few people around the world knew that trust funds of top universities around the world invest more than $50 billion in different ventures. The dark twist is hundreds of millions by these universities are being invested in what the United Nations have declared as illegal activities. This includes all activities conducted in the occupied Palestinian Territories. Moreover, these investments are becoming increasingly dangerous because they are contributing to harmful surveillance and targeting technologies used by occupational soldiers and settlers to kill and maim thousands of innocent men, women, and children every year without any accountability.

Civic Participation

Civic participation is a required study subject that ensures youth understand their roles and responsibilities as constructive members of the wider community. Students who are denied their rights to voice their points of view become passive citizens, and therefore cannot play an active role in their community. As the population of the world exceeds 7 billion people, who are increasingly connected physically and virtually, we are responsible to raise a responsible generation who respect their rights and responsibilities and respect the rights and responsibilities of others.

It is not in humanity’s best interest for the ways we do business and learn to return to business as usual after 2024. We cannot afford putting our money in technologies that harm and kill, while millions around the world are sick and starving. The decision to divest from toxic industries should be the easiest moral and business decision of any decision maker.

Similarly, we cannot raise our kids to be submissive, materialist citizens who have no reasonable opinions about what is right and what is wrong. Education can be either a dark, long winter a nature dreads, or a shiny spring where flowers bloom, and this depends on our ability to nurture morality as much it is about knowledge, and thanks to the sound opinions voiced by students’ gatherings there is hope that the current and future generations keep a healthy balance between both.