Over the course of two years (2014-15), Columbia Prison Divest (CPD) successfully ran a campaign for Columbia’s divestment from two private prison corporations: G4S and Corrections Corporation of America (later rebranded as CoreCivic). While doing so, they retained a strong abolitionist messaging and focus: they emphasized that the problem was not just private prisons but all carceral institutions. They engaged in a successful inside/outside organizing strategy by conducting consistent, broad, effective, and radical political education initiatives; organizing bold direct action to pressure the obstructionist administration; and navigating the institutional disengagement and repression embedded in the University—always with the end goal of divestment and the core value of abolition.
What you can find in this page:
- A timeline to orient yourself to major moments in the campaign
- Oral histories (audio and transcripts) to gain an in-depth contextual understanding of the inner-workings of the movement
- Key strategies and tactics, their definitions, and their use within CPD
Read the timeline below to orient yourself to the major moments in the campaign and explore the oral histories below to gain an in-depth, contextual understanding of the movement.
Further Study:
Divestment Victory at Columbia University | @theLFShow: A short documentary about the CPD movement, reflecting on bureaucratic repression, and connecting CPD with the anti-expansion Manhattanville protests.
Columbia IRAAS Symposium: Key CPD organizers speak with former student activists from Columbia’s anti-apartheid movement on the 30th anniversary of the 1985 “Free South Africa” Blockade of Hamilton Hall.
Founder/Principal: Kelsey Kitzke BC’23
Project Advisor: Sandra Moyano-Ariza
Project Assistants: Ramya Arumilli BC’25, Sophia Bartley BC’26, Eve Thompson-Brown BC’28
Contact: bc.cu.student.organizing.
Timeline
2013 The discovery
The starting point
By requesting the list of university investments for an undergraduate “thesis,” students discover that Columbia has $10 million invested in the private prison industry.
2014 A campaign takes shape
CPD campaign launches out of Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI) by reading a letter of divestment demands to President Bollinger’s office.
CPD members present to the ASCRI for the first time.
CPD’s Week of Engagement “People, Prisons & Profit” features movie screenings and campus conversations.
ASCRI stalls private prison divestment to the fall.
CPD delivers a second letter to President Bollinger demanding that he use his presidential powers to immediately bring divestment to the Board of Trustees.
With Columbia’s collaboration, the NYPD raids the Manhattanville and Grant housing projects, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 young Black and Brown men.
Summer 2014
Eric Garner is murdered by police officers in New York City on July 17, 2014. Michael Brown is murdered by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Street protests for Black lives spread across the country and amass international media attention.
CPD holds a rally on Low to pressure the University to continue the divestment process.
On National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality, students hold a silent protest while President Bollinger walks to class.
CPD presents to the ACSRI for a second time.
Black students hold a die-in at Columbia’s annual tree-lighting ceremony. Columbia calls the NYPD riot police and barricades protesters.
2015 The push to divest
CPD co-hosts a ACSRI-required “Community Engagement Panel” on Private Prison Divestment and uses the opportunity to stage a direct action.
University Senate Student Affairs Committee votes in support of divest.
ACSRI votes unanimously to recommend divestment to the Board of Trustees.
Students hold a silent protest at the University Senate Plenary calling on the Board of Trustees to take up divestment.
CPD holds the second annual Week of Engagement “Divestment Pending Abolition.”
CPD stage a day-long sit-in outside the President’s office demanding he put divestment on the Board of Trustees agenda.
The decision
After a year and a half of campaigning, the Board of Trustees announces Columbia’s official decision to divest from private prisons.
Oral histories
Asha Ransby-Sporn
This oral history contains information on Asha’s beginnings in Black youth-led anti-incarceration and anti-carceral movements in Chicago; the scale and scope of CPD’s student engagement and political education tactics; community-led organizing work connecting policing and carcerality with gentrification and displacement; CPD’s die-in at the annual campus tree-lighting ceremony; CPD’s theory of change, strategic goals, and tactical decision-making; and why CPD’s campaign was easier to win than other anti-institutional fights.
Ella Every-Wortman
This oral history contains information on CPD’s approach to the inner-institutional ASCRI process; CPD’s internal structure and recruitment process, including criteria for core organizers; risk evaluation for direct actions; the role of white organizers in the campaign; the campaign’s strategic pressure on the University President; and subsequent attempts to launch other divestment campaigns at Columbia and other universities.
Dunni Oduyemi
This oral history contains information on Dunni’s position as a student journalist and role handling the campaign’s messaging, communications, and media relations; the beginnings of the CPD campaign out of Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI); maintaining the radical, abolitionist core politics of the campaign while crafting messaging persuasive to institutional actors; CPD’s relationship with concurrent divestment campaigns on campus; direct action strategies; the threat of and response to NYPD repression; leveraging the University’s PR interests while resisting liberal cooperation; and reflections on the utility of the campaign’s win.
Strategies and tactics
Political education
CPD’s PE initiatives primarily focused on educating the student body on the prison industrial complex, the concept of abolition, Columbia’s financial investments in the carceral state, Columbia’s use of the police state in the extraction of West Harlem, and how students were directly invested in the prison industrial complex through Columbia’s endowment. PE actions included frequent tablings; “engagement weeks” of film screenings, panels, teach-ins, etc.; class raps (speaking in classes); and recurrent social media content.
“We did really regular teach-ins on issues. We’d talk about the private prison industry, we put that in context, and then we talk about the University’s investments. We did a lot of class raps. At some point, like every day of the week, we were sending someone to some professors’ class to speak to them about our campaign.”
“I remember a lot of student interest in policing and prisons, and a lot more attention to abolitionist politics rather than criminal justice reform. So I think, in a way, we were trying to integrate a lot of that into our campaign.”
Inside/outside strategy
Inside/outside strategy refers to a dual approach where organizers build a collective movement amongst the people (working “outside”) while tracking the movement’s position and learning to navigate bureaucratic systems within official structures of power (working “inside”). CPD pushed divestment through the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ASCRI) (established as the “official” process for divestment in 2000) while simultaneously organizing the student body to build political pressure against the University’s inaction.
“The sole purpose of the ACSRI is to slow down any potential divestment. So as soon as that presentation was done, we were trying to enact pressure in other ways to speed up the process, put pressure on Bollinger to bring the issue of divestment directly to the trustees.”
“We knew that the priority should always be the actual organizing of students and using our voices rather than getting bogged down in the administrative process. Trying to make sure that it was a student movement and not like, ‘okay, we just sent our proposals to the ACSRI and ticked a few boxes.’ That wasn’t the campaign.”
Strategic direct action
Student organizers strategically used direct action to catalyze demand from the student body and resist the intentional stagnation of the bureaucratic divestment process. CPD’s direct actions consisted of noisy rallies, sit-ins, and tactical confrontations with the administration. Direct action is meant to interrupt “business as usual” and should be used as a way to apply pressure as part of a broader campaign, not be the campaign itself.
“We would try to use demonstrations as a moment of putting pressure on the administration to move faster, trying to make our coalition even bigger, and then also just trying to capitalize on different moments that were already occurring on campus.”
“We coordinated for hundreds of students to do this die-in in the walkway where the trees would be lit up. And so the trees were lit up, the crowd turns, and then you audibly hear like a gasp, because we had prepped all these students to lay down and were holding kind of prop tombstones as a part of the protest, calling out people who’ve been killed by police violence, people who died in the custody of some of the private prison companies that we were targeting.”
Risk, care, and participation
Direct action includes risk: anything from being emotionally activated during an action to facing university disciplinary action to experiencing state violence and arrest. Any direct action must include risk assessment for all those participating. CPD understood that different people have different risk tolerances and, importantly, different risk factors (i.e. race, gender expression, citizenship and immigration status, etc.) and so might participate differently.
“In a show of solidarity, folks who weren’t participating in the die-in, mostly white students, were trying to stand around as sort of the first layer of defense or security.”
Further reading
See the Ruckus Society for more resources on planning direct actions.
Community and student solidarity
The CPD movement brought in community members and aligned student organizations to create robust networks of student solidarity. These networks provided critical information for organizing that grounded the movement outside the boundaries of the University.
“Once those [NYPD] raids happened, there were some big community meetings that brought together students, parents, residents to really talk about how we should not let this idea of student safety be weaponized against other people in the community.”
“There was a campaign to divest from fossil fuels around the same time. I do remember that we were frequently in conversation with different leaders from that group. We would go over what the ACSRI’s process, how do you go about it… There was solidarity amongst us all.”
“Yeah, so we had been working closely with SJP throughout the campaign and doing solidarity events, but they hadn’t officially launched a BDS campaign yet. And so, actually, one of the direct responses that came out of the CPD win was the launching of Columbia University Apartheid Divest [CUAD].”