Unsurprisingly, colleges across the country have taken up arms, by which I mean encampments, in sympathy with Columbia and its clones. House speaker Mike Johnson went to Columbia, because that’s where the cameras were, and announced it has to stop.
So too did Bibi Netanyahu, as if he gets a vote in the matter. Johnson called for the resignation of Columbia President Nemat Shafik for her failure to control her campus, while students rushed into Harvard Yard to set up a tent city on the fly. And at the University of Texas, Austin, troops were sent in to prevent students from seizing the campus in a massive show of force, with Gov. Greg Abbott saying the students belong in jail.
Rather than end the campus takeovers, the encampments metastasized. Can it be stopped? Should it be stopped? If so, what is the “right” response to return campuses to a state where Jewish students are safe, protesters no longer claim ownership of their tent encampments to the preclusion of others and students who want to be educated can receive an education?
Eventually, the students will get bored and leave. The cameras will be turned off and the reporters will move on to news. The elan of the moment will morph into tedium. None of this will have any impact on what is happening in Gaza, and none of the universities will change their investment policies or involvement with Israel. But the students involved, who are not only demanding wild control over politics and policy, are also demanding amnesty for their own. In the meantime, universities are doing what they can to get their campuses back, despite the refusal of students to walk away from their threats of dire consequences.
What should be the consequences?
Arrest for conduct other than physical violence will largely amount to nothing. At worst, it will be a proud note in a radical’s resume, proof of their standing up for a cause and being on the right side of history. Let’s face it, a trespass arrest just doesn’t mean a whole lot. As for arrests for violence, chances are that these will not be pursued and will quietly fade into oblivion as prosecutors and judges shrug at offenses that pale compared to “real” crimes.
Suspension will be more costly, losing a semester’s tuition and opportunity cost. It’s also quite likely that colleges will acquiesce to the demand for amnesty by suspending now and unsuspending later, making it more performative than real.
Expulsion is an academic death sentence, far harder to impose and far harder to undo. It requires a hearing and due process, or at least the pretense of it, and brings a young, unduly passionate student’s academic journey to a crashing end. Schools are very reluctant to impose expulsion outside of sexual misconduct cases because of the severity of the consequences. Should a student’s poor choice in the heat of mob actions really ruin his future?
The problem is that the students aren’t walking away, threats of consequences notwithstanding, and the threats of consequences are not only failing to have their desired effect but fueling yet more civil disobedience, more student seizures of campus, more sales of tents and keffiyehs on Amazon.
The time to stop these students was before you bred a generation of young people whose simplistic and emotional grasp of reality empowered them to believe they could do whatever the person chanting into the bullhorn told them to do. They are, if nothing else, dedicated lemmings, following orders like the good little soldiers they are without the capacity to decide between good and bad choices. They’ve been indoctrinated to believe they are privileged, and as the privileged, duty-bound to act on behalf of the oppressed lest they be complicit in the oppression. Nobody wants to have the mob chant “shame” at them.
And so the time to correct this problem came and went before the tent encampments rose from the once-green lawns now littered with feces and virtue.
Arrest them? Suspend them? Expel them? Ask them to leave nicely? Negotiate with them? Wait for them to get bored and move on? There are options, but none of them good. Calling for university presidents to “fix” the problem is ironically reminiscent of calling on Israel for a ceasefire. The students and Hamas have left the presidents and Israel with no good options, so what should they do?
Where arrests are taking place, I’d be curious how many are students and how many are bussed in from elsewhere and are professional troublemakers. IIRC, many arrested in the 2020 riots were not locals but were came from elsewhere.
Suspend. And lift the suspension only if they can pass a test on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Which I’m convinced, few of them can do.
/ end snark.
Yes, suspend. Make it clear ahead of time that any suspension will continue long enough for incompletes to be part of the student record.
Wait four weeks and allow the semester to end. Give them no attention-rewards beyond basic safety measures for students whose safety is really endangered. Hold classes. Hold finals. Require papers to be done. Grant the usual extensions & incompletes. Wait for fall tuition bills to arrive in mum & dad’s inboxes, along with whatever passes for report cards. Oh and pray for rain. Lots of it. Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.
I’m sending my grandkids to Hillsdale College.
(If you’re not familiar with it, they value education over performance art like the demonstrations at the ivy leagues. )
Does that place pay you to advertise for them? Did you attend? Or maybe you’re just parroting marketing copy. If so, you should quote it directly. Good on you for helping your grandkids all the same.
Unfortunately, suspensions at a minimum are the only way through this. The message has to get through that you can’t occupy public and private property simply because you aren’t getting your way. And to those who are barricaded in physical buildings preventing classes from taking place at all, expulsions are called for. What other sanction is appropriate for a student who explicitly prevents classes from taking place?
It will likely take several rounds of this to restore order, but something has to give. A university can’t function when students are running amok. If nothing else, suspensions and expulsions will get rid of the troublemakers and serve as a warning to other would-be revolutionaries. It’s almost as if these kids need an actual education on what forms of protest are legally allowed.
I agree and would take it one step further. If you are a foreign student, suspend their student visa and send them back home to their folks. Hit them in their wallets.
Suspensions until at least the end of the semester, with imcompletes or failures in all currently enrolled classes.
Expulsion for any specifically identified as committing violence or barricading buildings.
And any professors who sign a boycott of the school? Send them notarized letters with copies of the boycott and a note saying “resignation accepted”.
What is your basis to assume this: “none of the universities will change their investment policies or involvement with Israel.” It seems that it is widely assumed that these sorts of actions contributed to divestment from South Africa and an end to apartheid. It is a legitimate question as to whether those actions will achieve desirable results with respect to Israelis and Palestinians. Time will tell. There was certainly not a consensus at the time that the actions that are now widely seen as contributing to the end of apartheid in South Africa were effective.
“And so the time to correct this problem came and went before the tent encampments rose from the once-green lawns now littered with feces and virtue.”
I agree there’s nothing to be done. And so we Jews should just used to open antisemitism. And we Jews should just keep on voting for Democrats. While we are still allowed to vote.
Pointless disruptions of a cocked-up environment which largely ceased any real educational functions a long time ago. Ignore the ones that aren’t committing crimes, and expel the ones who are. Maybe Jewish women can fight back with Title IX complaints against all the misogynistic terrorists who stare-rape them. A few thousand Title IX complaints should give the university something to do, and help it round out its new Lhamonian “processes.”
I’d recommend a pretty simple process:
1) Announce a deadline by which the rules will be followed or consequences will occur (list said consequences).
2) Announce that any future major violations of the rules will not have warnings or deadlines.
3) When that deadline occurs, suspend all students breaking the rules. Arrest and ban from campus all non-students breaking the rules.
4) Implement the rules firmly, fairly, and promptly in the future.
5) Discipline all faculty who encouraged rule breaking. Most of them will have been sloppy in their email or other electronic communications.
If all else fails, do nothing. Hey look, it’s deja voodoo all over again. We recall Columbia University student protesters taking over the administration building in the late sixties. Their objections were right on then, time has proven. Vietnam was most certainly an illegal and unlawful war. 50,000 Amwrikan boys lost for no good reason. The current generation of students could well be correct this time around. Don’t bet against them. Columbia leads the way!
Go Columbia! Hey look, chalk it up to a “well-rounded education? ” We recall being bored out of our gourd sitting there listening to a dullard professor who was merely clocking in and clocking out for a measeley paycheck. Most so-called “higher education” is a glorified baby-sitting operation anyhow and a never-ending debt trap. We’ve forgotten almost everything we supposedly learned. Wound up in the trades anyhow cause no white collar outfit wanted us.
You made a mistake in your essay, but we’re not pointing it out, for fear of raising unwanted ire. Here’s another consideration: Just because you are of Jewish heritage does not mean you have to be pro-Israel. Ever hear of antisemitic Jews? We don’t know any, but they’re out there laying low under lines of fire, trust it. BiBi is a loose cannon and out of his mind, IMO.
Furthermore, he also serves who only stands and waits! Go Columbia student protesters. Me cousin Brenda sez, experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. True dat. Incidentally, her ex husband participated in the 1969 Columbia uprising and subsequently became some kind of professor there. Go figure?!?
Why should they stop and why should they be punished? [Ed. Note: Balance of “genocide rant” deleted.]
Or, it seems, you could just completely capitulate, and work with the folks commandeering your campus to form a “statement of wrongdoing committed by the university” as is currently being reported by the media. Curious to see how that works out for them, especially now that students are demanding the university cut ties to Israeli academic institutions and professors.
Yes there was a good option–ignore them until 23 May 2024.
Columbia’s website indicates final examinations are the week of 3-10 May 2024, and commencement was pushed from 15 May to 22 May 2024. The protests at Columbia would have ended organically if Shafik had simply waited until the end of the academic year. Instead she spent her only leverage when she prematurely called in the NYPD, and now has been left holding the bag.
It’s interesting to see how everybody gets unduly passionate if someone else is loudly disagreeing with them, and forget that at the base all of these interactions on college campuses are about leverage. SHG makes clear that university administrators don’t have any leverage over their students after suspending them and arresting them for trespassing. If fact, it seems bizarre that the obvious choice to suspend the protesters without removing them from campus housing wasn’t taken, as these students are now subject to both court summons and collegiate hearings (requiring them to remain nearby) without housing…when the underlying offense was to camp out on the quad…making additional camping on Columbia’s grounds almost inevitable.
Short of escalating to much worse levels of force (sending in the NYPD with nightsticks up to risking a 21st-century Jackson or Kent State), there aren’t many options for Columbia’s administrators to regain leverage over their students…at least until the academic year ends and the first option recurrs–telling everyone to go home. That won’t solve the issue of the arrested/suspended students, due to the court summons for trespassing, but they only number 108, right?
Unless you’re a Jewish student who believes Israel has a right to exist or Hamas terrorists aren’t the good guys. But who cares about them, amirite?