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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're going to turn now to our lead Eric Adams reporter, Elizabeth Kim. She joins us now as she does generally on Wednesdays to talk about the mayor's weekly, any topic news conference, which takes place on Tuesdays, but also today to talk about the mayor being out this morning, talking about the police involvement at CCNY last night and at Columbia. Liz, always good to have you on the show. Intense times, huh?

Elizabeth Kim: Right, Brian. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start at this morning's news conference. Well, it wasn't a news conference. He's been doing some media rounds this morning. Why don't you just describe first what the mayor has been doing this morning?

Elizabeth Kim: The mayor did give two interviews this morning on television, but yes, he did have a news conference at nine o'clock with the NYPD, and he's basically briefing the public on the arrests that happened both at Columbia University and also at City College in Harlem last night. There were approximately 300 people arrested. As we know, this has been a moment that's been building, basically culminated this week in the taking of a campus building on Columbia.

Even though the president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, had said that she did not want to bring the police in a second time, she ultimately wrote a letter to the police commissioner, asking him to bring the NYPD in because she felt that she had no choice. She said that the taking of the building was an escalation in tactics by the protesters. She also said in her letter that she felt that the leader of the protesters was someone that was not affiliated with the university.

She also went on to ask the police to stay until May 17th. Now, May 15th is the graduation ceremony for the university. Basically, there will be police presence there, I guess, to see the university through its commencement ceremonies, and then a few days after. It really does show you the severity of how the president perceived these demonstrations and how she felt that she no longer had a control over the situation, even though she had been reaching out and saying that she wanted to negotiate with the protesters. She wanted to see a resolution without having the NYPD, but ultimately that was not what happened.

Brian Lehrer: Here's the mayor's answer to a question posed during his interview on CBS this morning on whether or not sending in police in riot gear was the best way to deescalate the situation.

Mayor Eric Adams: Once I became aware of the outside agitators who were part of this operation, as Columbia mentioned in their letter and their requests with the New York City Police Department, it was clear we had to take appropriate actions. When our intelligence division identified those who were professionals, well trained, one of them was married to someone that was arrested for terrorism, we knew these children were being exploited and they were in danger, and would have been irresponsible not to reply to requests from Columbia University.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, what does Mayor Adams mean by outside agitators, and what kind of danger or exploitation of students, he used those terms, was he concerned about?

Elizabeth Kim: This is something that the mayor talked about last week as well, and we discussed it on your show, Brian, this idea of outside agitators. As I said last week, this is not a new concept. This is a claim that has been made during the Civil Rights Movement, for example. It was also made under the de Blasio administration during the Black Lives Matter protest. It's this idea, and the mayor has used this term, that there are so-called professional outside agitators, who come in, and their sole purpose is to sow chaos and to disrupt. The mayor began making this claim last week, and then he made it very strongly, he repeated it again yesterday in advance of the NYPD going into Columbia.

The question about this idea is whether there is enough credible evidence that the mayor and the NYPD can produce about outside agitators. I think what's difficult in this moment is this is a movement. This is not something that is just confined to Columbia University or New York City. We see this happening across the country, if not the globe, anti-war demonstrations. The idea that there would be some kind of collaboration, cooperation among larger organizations, that's not unique. Secondly, with regards to tactics, there is a history of civil disobedience tactics that do sometimes involve the taking of buildings, that do sometimes involve vandalism, the destruction of property, and even sometimes violence.

For the mayor to say that this is exactly what is evidence of outside agitators leading the movement on campuses, I think is a little thin. The press has been rightly pushing the mayor and the NYPD on this, and they've asked the mayor repeatedly, "Can you give us the names of these outside agitators?"

Brian Lehrer: And the President of Columbia, I would imagine, right?

Elizabeth Kim: Correct. We've also asked like, "Give us a breakdown. Roughly 300 people that were arrested, give us a breakdown? How many were students? How many were people that were not on campus?" Now, the protesters themselves have really pushed back on this narrative of the outside agitator because they say that they have themselves identified as students. That's not to say that there are not people agitating from the outside and that there may in fact be individuals who are somehow exploiting the moment to bring about, as the mayor says, something a little bit more sinister.

The problem is, how many people are we talking about? Can we really begin to characterize this as a movement that is organized around people outside who have these sinister intentions? I think that's the question that we're trying to push the mayor on resolving. I think the mayor in his press conference today, he addressed that, and he said that-- I think he acknowledged that the majority of people-- he says it doesn't matter that the majority of people were students. That he says that this idea of the outside agitator co-opting students is still valid.

I think in the coming days, they have promised that they would release more intel, and we're going to see what that intelligence produces. Now, I will say that this same idea was also discussed during the Black Lives Matter movement, and we're still yet to see those names, the names of the so-called outside agitators who were to blame for causing some of the looting perhaps that happened during Black Lives Matter.

Brian Lehrer: I see listeners are calling in and anybody connected to Columbia, or City College, or anyone else with a comment or a question for our Liz Kim covering Mayor Adams this morning, 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692.

There have been reports of police brutality at Columbia, particularly one video of a female student or a female somebody, being pushed down the stairs in front of Hamilton Hall, seemingly unconscious. Adams commented on the conduct of NYPD officers this morning on CBS. Take a listen.

Mayor Eric Adams: We used a level of professionalism, and we've made sure that a minimum amount of force was used to eradicate the problem that was taking place in CUNY and on Columbia's ground.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, what do you know about that incident seen on video? Have you heard of any other acts of violence on either the side of the protesters or the police at Columbia or City College last night?

Elizabeth Kim: What happened there was, there was a row of protesters who were standing outside Hamilton, that is, the Columbia campus building where a group of protesters had occupied. In order to get through that row of protesters standing in front, there was a little bit of a scuffle. You do see in a video that one person did fall down the stairs. Exactly how that happened, it's still unclear. The Columbia Spectator did report that the police were aggressively pushing people and reported that that one person had become unconscious at one point. I think that this is still preliminary reporting, but that was, I think, the starkest example that we saw last night of the use of force.

Now, one of the issues that was brought up to the mayor and the NYPD was that a lot of press were unable to really see what the NYPD was doing. Some press, they were cordoned off, and some of them were asked to be outside of the campus. There were some that were actually holed up in a building because the NYPD had asked people to be under lockdown.

There were not a lot of eyes and ears on this as it was happening. It's understandable, too, because the police are going into a building. They can't have press tailing them while they're entering what could be a very chaotic or dangerous situation, so that's understandable. I think in those exact moments, we don't know what's happening, and we don't really know for sure unless the NYPD would release their body cam footage, so then we could see exactly what's happening in the moment when they come upon, when they encounter the protesters and how they're bringing them outside. We were able to see them bringing the protesters outside the ones that they had arrested into buses, and that looked fairly orderly.

Brian Lehrer: I see you have another clip of the mayor this morning having to do with the flag at, I'm not sure if it's Columbia or City College. You want to set this up for us?

Elizabeth Kim: Yes. That's at the press conference with the NYPD. At one point, they played a video, and the video was basically to show that the police had basically, as the mayor said, used a minimal amount of force. Of course, take it with a grain of salt, because this is a video that's produced by the NYPD, and you don't really see any of the initial encounters with the protesters. It's basically them as the protesters are being led away into the police vehicles. In the final moment, you do see a police officer take down what I believe is probably a Palestinian flag and replace it with an American flag, and this is on the campus of Columbia. The clip that we're about to play is the mayor discussing that moment.

Mayor Eric Adams: That's our flag, folks. You don’t take over our buildings and put another flag up. That may be fine to other people, but it's not to me. My uncle died defending this country, and these men and women put their lives on the line, and it's despicable that schools would allow another country's flag to fly in our country.

Brian Lehrer: What do you make of Adams's comment describing students flying the Palestinian flag, or he really said any other country's flag on campus as despicable? I know he said it's in the context of taking down the American flag, but what do you make of it? Why did he go that far on the flag issue? A lot of people will say, well, a flag is just a flag. There's a lot of other serious stuff going on.

Elizabeth Kim: I thought that more than any other statement that the mayor has made, and he's made a lot of statements about the protests. That statement I thought really revealed his political attitude towards the protest, his disdain for the protesters. Prior to that, he had gone both on television and also at the press conference to say that he believes that there is a global movement to radicalize young people. That's very much how he sees it. He sees this moment as unpatriotic, which is, you hear him there, which is how he perceived the taking down of the American flag and putting up another flag. This at the same time is from the mayor who has gone to a record number of flag raisings in New York City to celebrate the cultural diversity of the city. That really gives you a sense of how he reads these protests.

It's not in the vein of, I think, how the general thrust of these protests, it's an anti-war protest. It's a protest to argue for divestment, and these are not. I don't think anyone would say these are radical principles. Have there been problematic issues of overt and indirect expressions of antisemitism? Sure. I think on the whole, the general thrust of these protests have been about something else. It's about the violence that is going on in Israel. It's about something that has happened that's very common on college campuses all over when they want to express themselves about a war or any kind of political position. The mayor has taken it in a very different direction, I think.

Brian Lehrer: I think in fairness to what a lot of Jewish students and some faculty members and others perceive, it's not just about the war in Gaza, it's an attempt to delegitimize Israel overall. I think we saw that in the CCNY encampment mission statement that we covered yesterday. Similarly in some of the Montclair State stuff we were talking about with Congresswoman Sherrill before, and they have a right to try to do that, too, I guess, but it does go to try to delegitimize the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, I think, to a lot of these protesters who were calling for full BDS, and when you look at some of the language in these mission statements.

Elizabeth Kim: That's very true, Brian. What I would say about that is that conversation has been going on for decades. I understand that this is a moment where it has reached the peak level of sensitivity. That is a common conversation that has been ongoing at Columbia and other campuses. I don't know whether that is-- is that a radical? Is that a very part of the radicalization of young people going on across the country? I'm not sure about that.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's what the mayor says, and a lot of people would disagree.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, with our lead Eric Adams reporter, Elizabeth Kim, covering the mayor, his Tuesday news conference as usual, but also the mayor out this morning, talking about the NYPD's role at Columbia and City College last night and ongoing. Michael in Manhattan, a Columbia grad, he says, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Thank you. I am from Columbia College. At root this is young people wanting to dialogue, dissent, and express themselves about a situation going on. People are being killed, and President Shafik, who needs to go. It has dealt with them in a peremptory manner. Her credibility's lost. She's called the cops in, said she wouldn't call the cops in. Then she brought such a force that was embarrassing for all humans, all caring humans last night. It was like hundreds of cops against unarmed students who only wanted to dialogue.

They went to the negotiating table, and what did Columbia say? "Well, we'll show you a list of our processes we use in terms of divestment." That's not negotiating, that's not real negotiating. That root of all is Israel never does anything wrong. That's the root of all of this. Then the mayor talking about, there's only one flag, the American flag. What has the American flag stood for? We don't want to get into that Vietnam supporting dictators, so there's no purity in the American flag, Mr. Mayor.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, let me ask you a follow-up, a two-part follow-up. One on, oh, Israel never does anything wrong. There are a lot of Jewish New Yorkers, Columbia students and others, who are passionately opposed to what Netanyahu is doing in Gaza, and consider it a series of war crimes and everything else, but still might feel that the way to influence the campus, the university policy, is not to take over an academic building and demand that they change their policy, like try to bully them, critics would say, into changing their policy. "We're not leaving this building until you divest from Israel." That that's not the way to have a policy conversation. What would you say to that?

Michael: I would say that that was the last recourse. After threats of 2:00 PM deadlines, extended deadlines, "We're going to send in the cops," the student said, "You know what? We don't have any choice. This is our last resort of self-expression." As your guest said, this is not uncommon for students to take over a building. What are they going to do there? That's been done before.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, let me leave--

Michael: How is that such a big threat?

Brian Lehrer: Michael, thank you very much. Another caller, Bill, in Beacon, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bill.

Bill: Hi. I just wanted to shout out to the staff at WKCR and the J-School, who did a fantastic job all day yesterday.

Brian Lehrer: WKCR, for people who don't know, the Columbia campus radio station. Go ahead.

Bill: Yes, did it all day and all night, and a lot of details that understandably aren't reported by other people, especially the fact that the campus was not open at all to anybody who didn't have a Columbia ID for two weeks before this thing. The idea of outside agitators is a bit of a stretch.

Brian Lehrer: Bill, thank you. That's an interesting point, Liz, because that is true that they had shut down the campus to anybody who didn't have a Columbia ID, student, faculty, or staff. That had been going on since around the beginning of the encampment, so how had outside agitators who may not have been in the encampment have gotten in to be part of the Hamilton Hall takeover? It's a fair question.

Elizabeth Kim: That's a good question. I would point out that it's a fairly large campus and there are multiple entrances. I don't know that it can ever be completely airtight. It's possible that there could have been people who stayed even prior to the more heightened security checks, for example. They could have just stayed in campus. They could have stayed with perhaps a friend who does live on campus, but I'm not sure. What the police are saying and what the university has also said was there was the presence of people who are not affiliated with the university. Who they are, we should know, or the police should be releasing that information, ultimately, so we can get a real breakdown.

Brian Lehrer: For sure. One who's more supportive of Mayor Adams's actions in this context as we continue to take multiple points of view, as always, Nick, you're on WNYC. Nick, in Great Neck, hi.

Nick: Hi. I give Mayor Adams an A+. I think his conduct has been pitch-perfect. I don't believe in defining deviancy down. Seizing a building is not an act of peaceful protest. It's an act of hooliganism. I'm very disappointed in your guest, Elizabeth Kim, just basically heaping praise on these protesters like their paragons of virtue.

Brian Lehrer: Well, Nick, I don't think she was heaping praise on the protesters. I think what Liz did say, as a matter of historical analysis, that I'll ask you about as a follow-up, is that this has happened many, many times at many, many campuses, taking over of particular buildings. Is there kind of a moral panic, maybe we should call it here over, "Oh my God, they've taken over a building," such that the NYPD has to be called in to evict them by force. Nick, you get a response.

Nick: No, I go back to there was a statement Patrick Moynihan once popularized the expression "defining deviancy down." I don't believe seizing a building is ever right. It's been done before, but that doesn't make it correct. It's just a dissent into hooliganism, and it's not justified or defensible in any circumstance. I think your opening segment yesterday, when you had a woman from CCNY who refused repeatedly to denounce the October 7th attack by Hamas was shameful because she wants us to recognize the humanity of the Palestinians when she refuses to recognize the humanity of the Israelis who were attacked by Hamas.

Brian Lehrer: Nick, thank you. Thank you very much. Here's a clip, Liz, of your question at Mayor Adams's Tuesday news conference about comments that NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell made on Twitter regarding student protesters. This is Liz's question, then we're going to play the mayor's response.

Elizabeth Kim: Chief Chell has also been opining on the character of the students. I'm going to read something that he wrote recently. "Actions have consequences. No more suspensions. Let's try expulsion of these entitled, hateful students. Pack your belongings and get out. Let's remove faculty and staff who have replaced their educational licenses for a license of hate. You're fired." I'm asking about it because obviously this is his opinion, but on the chance that the NYPD does have to go in, doesn't this create a lot of tension when they do have to go in while he's putting out his opinion on what these students and faculty are standing for?

Brian Lehrer: Here is the mayor's response.

Mayor Eric Adams: We have very opinionated of not only chief commissioners, reporters, students, dishwashers, candlestick makers, everyone has an opinion in New York, 8.3 million people, 38 million opinions, and they love sharing it. I find that when you share your opinion, it's not bottled up. Let's just share our opinion, but let's be kind while we do it. Lovingkindness would get us through this all.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, what do you make of Mayor Adams's answer there? I guess it's true, of course, that 8.3 million people in New York may have 38 million opinions, but when it's the Chief of Patrol of the NYPD in his position of authority, and he's throwing these sort of culture war barbs at students, like calling them entitled, maybe it's a different thing.

Elizabeth Kim: Right. I didn't expect the mayor to give a very different answer than the one he gave, but I did want to read that, there was a social media post, I did want to read it to him because it's a very slippery slope. He's given the NYPD a lot of leeway on what they say on social media. Initially, he had said he felt that it was their right to push back against so-called bias journalism or inaccuracies that they saw in reporting, but as that post indicates, it's a lot more than that.

It's like one of the members of the top brass who's basically criticizing and characterizing the protesters at a moment when the NYPD, and it turned out that they did have to go in, and Chief Chell was there on Columbia last night. He was there as part of the team that was leading the police going into the encampments. You cannot help but wonder what kind of atmosphere this fosters. Of course, is Chief Chell entitled to his opinion? Absolutely. Does he need to broadcast it in that way in this particular moment? That's the question I was putting to the mayor.

Brian Lehrer: To write off the student protesters as "entitled," well, the students at City College are not entitled. People heard yesterday and today, I've been very critical of the mission statement of the encampment at City College, but we're not going to call CUNY students entitled, and yet he seems to be lumping the protesters into that boat, even though he was at Columbia in particular.

Elizabeth Kim: Right. You would expect that police officers are expected to respond in a moment of need or crisis. They should be able to respond to everyone. I think what the mayor was trying to say is that he believes that Chief Chell is a professional and that he would respond dispassionately. Why put that out there in the first place? I think as we begin to examine how the arrests play out, I think there's going to be a question about how do the police feel about the protesters. I think we already know a little bit of how the mayor feels about the protesters. He's expressed his criticism of who he thinks they are. This opens up a whole can of worms now that I think gives the protesters ammunition to criticize the PD's response to them.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we're going to have to leave it here. I know we wanted to get to some other topics, including your exclusive report, which I'll just do a shout-out on that New York City will begin handing out flyers to migrant families to discourage children from selling candy in the subways and on the streets. There's a lot behind that implications for the kids, obviously, a debate about what's in the kids' best interest and other things. Listeners go to Gothamist and read Liz's reporting on that. Maybe we'll catch up on that when you're on next week after the mayor's Tuesday news conference, and of course, other things that happen between now and then. Liz, thank you for today.

Elizabeth Kim: Thanks, Brian.

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