Photo credit: Wally Gobetz, NYC - Columbia University: Greene Hall and Bellerophon Taming Pegasus, (2007), Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/1022903657/.

On the facade of CLS’s building is a sculpture called Bellerophon Taming Pegasus (“Bellerophon”) which depicts a man ensnaring a horse with a rope and taming it to death. Inspired by Jacques Lipchitz’s earlier work “Birth of the Muses,” the sculpture symbolizes humanity’s control over nature. Lipchitz averred, “You observe nature, make conclusions, and from these you make rules [...] and law is born from that.” Recent events, however, have brought a different interpretation to the forefront. A long-established tradition exists—not only at Columbia—that municipal or state police should not be present on academic campuses. This custom is respected by the NYPD, whose top officials have indicated that they would only send officers onto campus if specifically requested by the highest university official. Following President Minouche Shafik’s decision to summon the NYPD to disperse the encampment at Columbia University’s Morningside campus South Lawn, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 protesters, I find myself drawn to another meaning in the Bellerophon symbol carved onto the face of the law school. Bellerophon represents the trials of a first-year law student, casting us in the role of Pegasus—the legendary winged horse—whose subjugation symbolizes the suppression of creativity, freedom, and individuality by dominant societal forces. This is a plight frequently faced by first-generation students of the law. Recently, this sense of crushing authority seems more palpable than ever, leaving me disoriented amidst the seemingly arbitrary bureaucracies that stifle the voices of my peers, both in the classroom and on the campus lawn.

Indeed, the stifling of dissent, coupled with efforts to restrict voting and criminalize protest, signals a deeper peril than mere strategic maneuvering for short-term political gain. Within the law school community, there seems to be a significant inertia in responding to cultural conflicts that suppress ideas and literature, urgently calling on educators to address the crisis confronting our fragile democracy. Legal scholars, including many at CLS, have ignored critical issues like book bans, the dehumanization of people in the Middle East, and discriminatory censorship laws that endanger public education, electing to remain silent in their classrooms. In my view, elite institutions that vaunt their role in educating lawyers for a changing world are tragically unprepared to cultivate the legal acumen necessary to extricate white supremacist ideals from legally entrenched doctrines. Ostensibly, students at these institutions find themselves sidelined by the most crucial issues of our time.

Duncan Kennedy eloquently reminds us that “[t]he denial of hierarchy is false consciousness” and “the problem is not whether hierarchy is there, but how to understand it, and what its implications are for political action.” While I cannot catalog all the urgent concerns facing this moment, I will focus this discussion on two: discriminatory censorship laws and free speech on Columbia’s campus. Consider, for instance, how in 2020, the Trump Administration contacted Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, resulting in the inception of what would be known as the initial discriminatory censorship regulation: Executive Order 13950 titled, “[On] Combatting Race and Sex Stereotyping.” Regrettably, since January 2021, federal, state, and local government officials have introduced nearly 800 discriminatory censorship laws—over 500 of which target K-12 schools. Of these 500, over 370 regulate classroom teaching, and over 380 regulate curricular materials. By controlling what Toni Morrison calls the “Master Narrative” and limiting access to information, these laws uphold hierarchies of repressive control, and we become as Duncan Kennedy coins, "reproducer[s] of hierarchy." Accordingly, dissenting voices and perspectives go unheard and dominant forces remain unimpeded.

Students, including myself, find themselves ill-prepared to revitalize our democracy as we are ensnared in the study of superficial first-year doctrinal inquiry. Lacking the capacity to perceive and articulate the perils of our multicultural democracy, we are profoundly impaired to address them because we don’t even talk about them in the classroom, and when we protest, we are criminalized. We are in precarious times for justice, for democracy, and for the fabric of law itself—and in the words of James Baldwin, “Ignorance [...] [is] the most formidable threat of justice.” As students, our challenge is to reject these conditions as standard and match the intensity of those who propagate ignorance with our own fervor for combating it. We must fiercely stand against the banning of books and the curtailment of free speech, reinforce our dedication to academic liberty, and address the remnants of historical complicity with white supremacist ideologies.

Each generation tends to develop or adopt its own version of activism. Over the last months, however, we have witnessed both the rise of dissent and the decline of free speech. Student protests have demonstrated that universities are not insulated from the broader societal and economic challenges affecting them. In 1968, Columbia University became a focal point of anti-Vietnam War protests, with students staging massive anti-draft demonstrations against the university’s involvement in defense research. Nuclear warfare intensified “grievance and frustration.” For the students, “it was a matter of life or death—to kill or be killed” and a tension among students and the faculty. Similarly, the recent protests demanding divestment exhibit the same spirit of defiance. More importantly, the university’s response underlines a significant failure of the lawyers involved, who seem focused on one primary objective: protecting President Shafik’s job by bowing to the demands of Republicans in Congress and conceding to their every request—including calling the NYPD on students who were exercising their constitutional rights. Columbia’s decision points to a prioritization of institutional preservation over the protection of free speech and encouragement of robust, open debate. Irrespective of the political stance these students took, Columbia and the lawyers responsible for upholding the Constitution failed them.

In the shadow of Bellerophon, the recent events and arrests on Columbia’s campus underscore the critical importance of safeguarding free speech and the need for vigilance against misuse of authority. As we navigate these turbulent times, let us draw inspiration from the courage of students before us and curtail the taming of dissent. By steadfastly refusing to be silenced, we can uphold the legacy of Bellerophon and Pegasus as symbols of resilience rather than repression.

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