In 2006, when another U.S.-backed war was raging, Nellie McKay released her sophomore album, Pretty Little Head. Among the many gems on the record (including “The Big One,” “Swept Away” and “Lali Est Paresseux”) was “Columbia Is Bleeding.” No stranger to making political statements with her first album, Get Away From Me, McKay had already established her knack for acerbic lyrics on politically-tinged songs like “I Wanna Get Married,” “Inner Peace,” “Work Song” and “Respectable.” With such tongue-in-cheek ditties giving listeners an introduction to McKay’s biting wit, they were technically “primed” to receive a message like the one on “Columbia Is Bleeding.” And that message gave the eponymous school plenty to quake in its very expensive designer boots about. Though, based on the continued use of animals (particularly baboons) in laboratory testing at Columbia, maybe the institution wasn’t affected enough.
For those wondering why Columbia has laboratories where animals can be experimented on in the first place, perhaps they’re forgetting that the university is above all a research one (a trait that played heavily into its role in helping to create the atom bomb). And “research,” unfortunately, always seems to involve animals. Beings who, for whatever reason, still have to be advocated for in terms of making humans believe they should be protected under laws that recognize them as sentient creatures. Which, of course, they are. And yet, it has only been in recent years that more and more scientists are realizing that all manner of creatures previously ignored under this category (particularly insects) have a far more elevated consciousness than once acknowledged. So yes, McKay was (and probably still is) rightfully upset about the cruel and torturous ways that “lab animals” are treated at Columbia. The lid was blown off Columbia’s gross mistreatment of the animals (e.g., eyes being cut out of their heads while they were fully conscious) in their labs starting in 2002, when a veterinarian working onsite became a whistleblower after their repeated reports and complaints went ignored by the “higher powers” at the institution. The frequent and excruciating testing on these animals without so much as an analgesic or anesthetic was just the tip of the iceberg. And yes, blood was spilled over and over again in the name of “research.”
So it is that McKay sardonically sings, “Chris Hougan/She had to run/Last night been a lot of fun/But now it’s French/A little tense/She hadn’t done the reading/There she sat/Hoped to pass/Didn’t think to face the fact that/Oh by gosh/Alas alack/Columbia is bleeding.” Painting the picture of students going about their daily, often frivolous business as unbridled torture went on behind closed doors, McKay continues, “Walkin’ down/Off the bus/Vickie Lucas crossed campus/Was thinkin’ how/She’s made it now/That successful feelin’/Walked by fast/Hailed a cab/No clue that she’d passed a lab/And while she’s sittin’ in lit class/Columbia is bleeding.” In the eighteen years since “Columbia Is Bleeding” was released, the students are very much aware of the kind of bleeding that’s going on outside their walls and, now in recent weeks, inside them. Not just for the animals, but the humans being attacked by police in response to pro-Palestine demonstrations.
The NYPD was summoned to the premises by the university itself, claiming that the students who had set up encampments in solidarity with Palestine were creating “a disruptive environment for everyone.” But the most disruptive environment of all was created by the NYPD’s presence as they cleared out the encampments and occupied buildings with the brute force they’re so “renowned” for. One officer even managed to let his gun go off in the process. Accident or not, bullets “grazing” students is nothing new in the university-based protest scene (though they did more than just graze the four students who were killed at Kent State by the National Guard, solely because they were protesting the injustices of the day: the government’s escalation of the Vietnam War and civil rights).
In the late 60s, which the current situation is being compared to, Richard Nixon commented of the rise in protests on university campuses, “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around this issue. You name it. Get rid of the war there will be another one.” Sadly, Nixon, “dick” or not, wasn’t wrong about that last assertion (mainly because the same types of warmongering people will always find themselves in power). But his out-of-touch statements are mirrored in one of the evergreen lines from McKay’s song that resonates more than ever. Namely, her sarcastic delivery of: “Everybody knows/Protestors are those/Schmoes who don’t have a life.” With such attitudes from their “elders” lobbied against them, it’s a wonder that anyone in attendance at universities and colleges feels compelled to protest at all—and yet, students, being young and energized as they are, serve as the lone population with far less to lose than any other when it comes to protesting. This, of course, isn’t to say they aren’t putting their own lives on the line when they take that risk. A risk that many of their parents would urge them against. Not just because they don’t want their children to get hurt, but because they’re paying “good money” for them to be there so they can “learn,” not rebel.
Good money that is doled out in addition to the already sizable endowment Columbia is known for. Indeed, as a private university with one of the largest endowments in the United States, Columbia has nonetheless remained hush-hush about where they get said endowments and what they’re funneled back into (in 1968, student protesters found that it was funneled right back into killing the Vietnamese via the Institute for Defense Analyses). Hence, the protesters’ additional call for the university to divest “from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.” A cute thought, to be sure. But, in case anyone needs reminding, Columbia began as a colonial university—of course it’s going to support a fundamentally colonialist “cause”: the occupation of another, “inferior” country. In part thanks to being a “colony college,” historically, the students that attend it are from a largely privileged and, yes, largely white background. It’s the Ivy fucking League, after all. Diversity has never been its strong suit. Something that tracks in another verse from “Columbia Is Bleeding” that goes, “Didn’t think to face the fact/That while he’s thinking, ‘Man that’s wack’/Columbia is bleeding/Quite a snob/He didn’t tip/Nice guy Rob watched the eclipse/Then looked around, ‘I’ve made it now I’m just so glad to be here’/Made a pass/Got hand slapped/Didn’t think to face the fact/That while he’s mackin’ on that ass/Columbia is bleeding.”
In the present, it would take a total lack of sentience to see that it’s not, and yet, there are many who would prefer to simply ignore all these “unpleasant scuffles” and return to the art of what it really means to be a student: getting drunk and high and sleeping in until the first afternoon class. And, of course, those in power would love, more than anyone, to see things magically “getting back to normal.” Which, in all likelihood, they probably will (even though nothing will ever truly be the same again). The revolution will not be televised, but steamrolled.
McKay concludes the song with the dry declaration, “This is the Ivy League/Columbia is bleeding…/Columbia is bleeding…” So, too, are many other universities in the U.S. right now, with the comparisons to the eruption of student protests in 1968 being the closest Gen Z has ever come to identifying in some way with baby boomers. The latter generation also believed that they were riding a “tidal wave that would just sweep over the world and cleanse it and make everything new” (which is kind of where Hitler was coming from, in his own skewed mind), as writer/former Columbia student James Kunen phrased it in an interview about his response to student protest history repeating. That was his take on how protesting felt in April 1968. In 2024, one wonders if it feels slightly less so. If it’s coming more from a place of being “fresh out of fucks” about trying to placate a genocidal government than it is “we can make the world anew.”
While many remain hopeful about the results that these protests might eventually yield, one can’t help but think of a certain monologue from Alex Garland’s 2020 limited series, Devs. In it, the head of security for a sinister tech company called Amaya finds himself in the position of needing to torture someone who has gotten caught up in the dangerous situation at hand. As an ex-CIA operative, Kenton (Zach Grenier) tells that person, while giving him a moment to collect his breath after waterboarding him, “My problem is I have to contain a very complex situation, but the situation is refusing to be contained. In fact, it’s cascading…” Sounds a lot like the protests that are going on now. And yet, perhaps like the government, Kenton insists, “But I’m not panicking, I’ll tell you why.” The why, for him, is: “Long ago… a popular uprising had started on mainland China. The focus point was Beijing. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators had occupied Tiananmen Square. Wouldn’t fucking budge. And at a certain point, my bureau chief called us into his office and said China was finished. Whatever the government did wouldn’t make a difference; the protests would spread across the country, the system would collapse. The tipping point was reached, the cascade was unstoppable. You know what happened next? The Chinese government sent in soldiers and tanks to Tiananmen Square, shot everybody they could, took the revolution by the neck and crushed the fucking life out of it.”
At the moment, that feels like the more probable result of these protests than any actual ceasefire, with blood, blood and still more blood spilling in universities across the U.S. as they try to make warmongers see reason. But you know what they say about trying to reason with crazy people: you can’t.
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