Dumping Cement Into Sewage System, Columbia University Radicals Deploy Tactics They Studied Months Earlier at Event Hosted by Campus Org
31st January 2025
Late Wednesday night, Columbia University’s leading anti-Israel group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), shared a video of its latest act of anarchy. At Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), toilets were clogged with cement. A Columbia Business School building, meanwhile, was soaked with red paint.
Columbia quickly released a statement calling the acts of vandalism “unacceptable and abhorrent,” adding that such acts “will not be tolerated at Columbia.” Just months before, however, Columbia’s student radicals met within the walls of a recognized student organization to train each other on all things anarchy. Included among the suggested readings was a manual written for “aspiring revolutionaries” that outlined the sewage cementing and graffiti soaking tactics used on Wednesday. And the student organization that played host appears to be in good standing with the school.
The apparently premeditated nature of the attack suggests Columbia could have impeded it by cracking down on the event’s attendees and its host, Alpha Delta Phi (ADP), a literary society. While the ADP house is controlled by an outside organization and technically off campus—it sits between several other houses and dorms that Columbia owns—Columbia recognizes ADP as a student organization, according to its website, and provides it with services like WiFi, Ph.D. student Alon Levin told the Washington Free Beacon.