Overheard: Freud and Gandhi, seated on Low Steps, watching Columbia lock the 116th Street gates in response to student protests:

Freud:

So — they close the gates, barring the young from their chosen forum of dissent. To me it is an act of repression, in the strictest psychoanalytic sense. The leadership fears unruly desire, the Id of student life, and responds with the cold Superego of institutional order. But we know what repression breeds: neurosis, symptoms, return in the form of louder, stranger protest.

Gandhi:

You see repression; I see fear masquerading as strength. These gates are not merely iron — they are symbols of separation, of rulers from the ruled. But fear cannot be the basis of a just authority. Students seek swaraj of the mind — self-rule through dialogue, nonviolent but insistent. The moral law is not secured by padlocks.

Freud:

Yet your students are not purely rational beings, my friend. Instinct and aggression dwell in them as in all of us. To suppose that nonviolence alone governs human behaviour is naïve. The unconscious is a darker gate — one that no administration can bolt shut.

Gandhi:

And yet, Doctor, I have seen violence exhaust itself, devour its own cause. To discipline desire is not to deny it, but to transmute it. Nonviolence is not weakness; it is mastery over the passions you describe. The truest revolution occurs not when gates swing open, but when hearts do.

Freud (pauses, watching students chant beyond the gates):

Perhaps. Still, when authority responds with barriers instead of interpretation, it enacts its own anxiety rather than addressing the conflict. In analysis, we listen to the repressed. In governance, too, one must listen — else the symptoms only grow.

Gandhi:

Then here we agree. The closing of gates is a confession of failure. A university, like a soul, is strongest when it can face its own unrest without resorting to chains.

(some time passes… Low Steps, Columbia. The iron gates of 116th Street clang shut. Freud and Gandhi stand mid-debate. Fanon approaches, his coat catching the wind.)

Fanon:

Gentlemen, your words are elegant, but too detached. You speak of repression, of moral restraint, as though history were a seminar. These gates are not neuroses, nor symbols only. They are barricades in a struggle. You must see them as architecture of domination — the continuation of colonial logic in miniature.

Freud (bristling):

Colonial or not, the psychic mechanism remains repression. The symptom is universal.

Fanon:

Universal? No, Doctor. The colonised man does not suffer repression in the abstract; he suffers the boot, the policeman, the gate slammed in his face. And for him, violence is not pathology, it is therapy.

Gandhi (raising a hand):

And yet, my friend, violence only perpetuates the cycle. The true therapy is self-discipline, the courage to resist without striking back.

Fanon (intense):

You counsel patience to the starving. You would let them master themselves while their masters tighten chains. No. The gates will fall not with patience, but with force if need be. History is not on the side of passivity.

Freud (muttering):

There it is: Thanatos, the death-drive, dressed in revolutionary garb.

Fanon:

Call it what you like. I call it liberation.

(A silence, then, another figure appears — Hannah Arendt, with her notebook tucked under her arm.)

Arendt:

You men are all intoxicated — with instincts, with purity, with revolt. But politics is not therapy, nor sainthood, nor apocalypse. Politics is the fragile art of appearing together in public. And Columbia, by closing its gates, destroys that space.

Gandhi (nodding slowly):

On this, Madame, I agree. To deny the forum is to deny the people’s dignity.

Arendt:

Then let us be clear: the danger is not merely repression, nor only domination. It is the evaporation of the public world itself. History will side with those who keep it open.

Fanon (grim):

And if it takes tearing down the gates?

Arendt:

Then it is no longer politics, but war. And war is always the end of the common world.

Freud (half-smiling):

Perhaps at last we have a diagnosis: civilisation itself hangs on a hinge, like these gates. Whether they open or close determines whether we live together or against one another.

(The thinkers fall into uneasy silence…)