By Kelly Sloan | Special Contributor
What is it about Columbia University that seems to attract anarchic, fanatical madness?
One may recall the 1968 campus revolt, which ultimately took the University well over a decade to recover from. Twenty years after that ignominy, a new generation of malcontents tried to replicate the whole thing, in the course protesting… oh, who knows, Nicaragua, or Ronald Reagan or something. Today of course, we are treated with headlines of the campus again being shut down by swarms of leftist goons, this time in support of Hamas and their declared goal of wiping Israel off the face of the Earth.
Columbia, of course, isn’t the only university so infested. Similar scenes are playing out at Yale, Harvard, Tulane and others around the country, but Columbia has been one of the most obnoxious. There is no pretense even attempted; the unabashed admiration for Hamas and the barbarity they inflicted on Oct. 7, and the rank antisemitism that accompanies it, is brutally explicit.
Jewish students have been threatened, beaten and worse, in scenes that evoke 1930’s Germany. We see the photo of the sign, pointed at Jewish counter-protestors, saying “Al-Qasam’s next targets,” and read of the student at Yale who was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag. And on it goes. And it does so with near impunity; for no one in this day and age will prosecute students merely for intruding on the civil rights of others, so long as those “others” do not happen to be in a politically-favored class.
We ought not be surprised at the accommodationist approach taken by at least some college presidents toward the lawlessness on their campuses. Some of them are likely veterans of the campus lawlessness of the 1960’s, and add in a touch of nostalgia to whatever ideological sympathies they may already share with the guttersnipes.
It’s not just college faculty either. How many rioters were prosecuted in Colorado after the street violence of 2020 that desecrated the Capitol, destroyed businesses, injured more than 100 police officers (some severely,) and left parts of downtown Denver looking like a slightly gentrified version of Mogadishu, or Sarajevo in the 1990s. That’s right, not one. But the trial against the police department for violating the civil rights of rioters is proceeding swimmingly.
With this kind of official societal response to disorder, what did we expect when the beleaguered class of 2024, which graduated high school in Covid and knew little normalcy in their formative college years, got infected with the revolutionary fervor of the far left, which breeds in chaos? Well, all that notwithstanding, what we should expect is for the government to do its job – the one of very few jobs it legitimately has – and instruct these young people that actions have consequences.
Some places have done that. In Texas (where else?) video shows police at the University of Austin calmly and professionally moving into the crowd to arrest their leaders. The university’s president issued this statement: “Peaceful protests within our rules are acceptable. Breaking our rules and policies and disrupting others’ ability to learn are not allowed… Our rules matter, and they will be enforced. Our University will not be occupied.” Bravo.
Contrast that to an email sent out by Columbia University President Minouche Shafik Thursday night, in which she spoke of the great progress being made in – get this – talks with the occupiers.
“For several days, a small group of faculty, administrators and university Senators have been in dialogue with student organizers to discuss the basis for dismantling the encampment, dispersing and following university policies going forward. We have our demands; they have theirs. A formal process is underway and continues.”
Well that ought to send them a strong message. What should happen is that the college president should call in the police, who should disperse the vagrants, arrest their leaders and the district attorney should prosecute them. And the police should stick around for as long as possible, with as much force as needed, to reestablish order and ensure the safety of all students and faculty so that the university get back to business. Then of course President Shafik should resign, and someone take up the mantle who will see to it that the university is a place of actual education, not an ideological cesspool breeding fanaticism.
Alexander Hamilton once wrote that “the hope of impunity is a strong incitement to sedition; the dread of punishment, a proportionally strong discouragement to it.” What we are facing on the campuses is indeed sedition, and it is the duty of the government of a free people to deal with it accordingly.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.