Columbia University still requires students to scan ID cards just to walk onto their own campus, a lockdown first imposed in October 2023, and even Jewish students who once feared for their safety now call the measure outdated and counterproductive.
The Morningside Heights campus in New York City has been closed to the general public for nearly three years, a security posture that began when anti-Israel protests erupted after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. What started as an emergency response to chaos on campus has hardened into a permanent fixture of daily life at one of the country's most prestigious universities, gates shut, IDs scanned, visitors turned away.
Newly installed President Jennifer L. Mnookin sent a letter to the Columbia community on September 7 announcing a committee to decide when and how to reopen campus. A university spokesperson told the New York Post that Mnookin hopes the committee will offer recommendations by the end of the semester. No specific criteria for reopening have been disclosed, and the university has not named the committee's members.
That timeline satisfies no one, least of all students who lived through the worst of the unrest and now wonder why the administration treats a diminished threat as though nothing has changed.
Nicholas Baum, a 21-year-old Jewish senior studying economics, supported the gate closures when protests raged across campus. He told the Post he was once afraid to leave his dorm.
"At that time, I was scared to leave my dorm. I was scared to go onto the streets of Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. But it's very awkward and weird to see Columbia still doubling down as hard as they can on maintaining the gate closures."
Baum's frustration goes deeper than inconvenience. He told the Post that if Columbia justified the closures as protection for Jewish students, the policy would backfire.
"I'd really be bothered if Columbia went out and said this was for the sake of protecting Jewish students, because the only thing that does is just put a greater target on Jewish students' backs, where other students now look at me and think, I'm the reason why the campus gates are closed."
That concern is worth pausing on. An administration that spent three years locking down a campus in the name of safety may have created a new kind of resentment, one directed not at the protesters who caused the disruption, but at the students the policy was supposed to protect.
Baum put the current situation plainly:
"There was a complete time and place where [closing the gates] was justified and was necessary. But now it's a constant and, frankly, outdated reminder [of the protests]. We're in a completely different environment."
The facts on the ground support Baum's assessment. A pro-Palestine protest outside Hamilton Hall in April drew roughly 20 people, based on video cited by the Post. That is a far cry from the spring 2024 encampment that turned the campus into a national flashpoint, or the May 2025 incidents in which handfuls of students, some of them Jewish, chained themselves to campus gates and a library takeover led to 78 arrests.
The trajectory is clear. Protest numbers have collapsed. Arrests are in the past. Yet the ID-scan regime and closed gates remain in place as if it were still the spring of 2024.
Aum Desai, a junior studying political science, told the Post that the closures carry costs beyond security.
"When you have an open campus, it's easier to bring speakers onto campus. You see more people from the New York City area, like the people that you're neighbors with as a Columbia student."
Desai's point highlights something the administration's committee process conveniently ignores: a locked campus is not a neutral campus. It is a campus that has chosen isolation over engagement, bureaucratic caution over intellectual openness. For a university that markets itself as a gateway to New York City, that choice carries a price.
Columbia's troubles extend well beyond locked gates. The Trump administration cut $400 million in federal funding from the university in 2025, citing in part the unruliness of pro-Palestine protesters on campus. That funding loss is a direct financial consequence of the disorder the administration failed to prevent, and the closed gates did nothing to stop.
Now, instead of decisive action, Mnookin has offered a committee. The September 7 letter establishing it provided no public timeline beyond "end of the semester," no named members, and no stated criteria for what a reopened campus would look like. The university spokesperson's statement amounted to a hope, not a plan.
This is a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched elite institutions respond to crisis. When the emergency was real, Columbia's leadership was slow to act, protests metastasized into encampments, encampments into building takeovers, building takeovers into mass arrests. Now that the emergency has passed, the administration clings to the emergency posture because reversing it requires a decision, and decisions carry risk. A committee absorbs that risk. A committee buys time. A committee lets administrators say they are "studying the issue" while students scan their IDs at the gate every morning.
Baum previously told the Post in September 2024 that he felt unsafe on campus during the height of the protests. His shift from supporting the closures to opposing them is not a contradiction. It is the natural response of someone who can see what the administration apparently cannot: conditions changed, and the policy did not.
The original gate closures were imposed in October 2023 to calm protests and keep outside agitators off campus. By any reasonable measure, that emergency has subsided. A 20-person demonstration does not justify a campus-wide lockdown. Seventy-eight arrests from a single incident over a year ago do not justify permanent ID checkpoints.
But Columbia's leadership has not made the case that current conditions require current restrictions. It has not pointed to a specific, ongoing threat. It has pointed to a committee.
The students who endured the worst of the anti-Israel protests, including Jewish students who had real reason to fear for their safety, are now telling the administration that the cure has outlasted the disease. When the people the policy was designed to protect say it no longer serves them, and the administration responds with a semester-long review process, the policy is no longer about safety. It is about institutional inertia.
Columbia lost $400 million because it could not control its campus. It may lose something harder to measure, the trust of its own students, because it cannot bring itself to reopen it.
