Simone Weil on Columbia’s $221 Million Settlement:

“Obedience to Force is Not Peace”

An imagined letter from Simone Weil, philosopher, mystic, and Core dissenter-in-residence

To the students who have not yet grown numb, I have read of your university’s pact with power. The numbers are large — $221 million in tribute — but the moral cost is greater.

Let me speak plainly.

To obey force is not to uphold justice. To appease force is not to restore order. It is to participate in the degradation of the soul. I do not speak of your protests, nor of the slogans, nor of the chants. These are the surface of things. I speak of the deeper betrayal: that an institution dedicated to truth has accepted the terms of untruth in order to preserve its status. That your administrators, charged with safeguarding thought, have submitted to the demand that ideas be filtered, censored, and reviewed for their “balance.” That “safety” is invoked not as a condition for truth, but as a substitute for it.

This is the error of all empires. They mistake silence for virtue, surveillance for stability, and money for reconciliation.

I have said elsewhere: “The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be joy and reality.” Where is joy in a campus policed by fear? Where is reality in a syllabus altered to suit the State? When universities begin to mirror the bureaucratic machinery of empire — when committees replace conscience, and monitoring replaces meaning — they cease to be places of learning and become camps of training in compliance.

You are not citizens there. You are subjects.

And what of the students? Those whose dissent has been treated not as a cry of conscience, but as a threat to order? They are called disruptive. They are expelled. They are asked, now, to explain why they wish to study in America — as if study were a privilege granted only to those who promise not to think too much.

No university should ask that. No teacher should allow it.

Let me remind you of the only education worth the name: that which teaches attention. Attention to suffering. Attention to truth, even when it is quiet, or unpopular, or exiled from the donor’s banquet. Do not be fooled: it is not the protester who risks corrupting the university. It is the administrator who signs a treaty with force and calls it compromise.

To love truth is to risk exile. To seek peace is not to secure quiet, but to unmake injustice. Do not trade the real for the comfortable.

Hold your minds firm. Do not let them be purchased. In the name of afflicted truth, — Simone Weil