I’ll write more about this tomorrow, perhaps, but here’s what I was going to put in tomorrow’s Nooz:
*One day after Columbia University’s President and some of its trustees testified before Congress on endemic antisemitism at the University, and after President Shafik promised to double down on antisemitism, the school has started arresting lots of pro-Palestinian demonstrators engaged in illegal protests. I guess those nasty Republicans put the fear of God (literally) into Shafik, who doesn’t want to go the way of Liz Magill.
The authorities moved Thursday afternoon to quell a protest at Columbia University, arresting dozens of demonstrators who had constructed an encampment of about 50 tents on campus. The arrests, which drew a new crowd of students to support the protesters, came the day after university leaders pledged to Congress that they would crack down on unauthorized student protests tied to the war in Gaza.
Police officers, clad in riot gear and prepared with zip ties, began taking protesters into custody just before 1:30 p.m. as scores of demonstrators gathered in front of Butler Library. “Since you have refused to disperse, you will now be placed under arrest for trespassing,” a man repeatedly called through a loudspeaker. “If you resist arrest, you may face additional charges.”
The scene played out less than 24 hours after Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, and other top officials insisted to Congress that they would take a harder line in handling the protests that have embroiled campuses across the country since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. Leaders at two other elite schools, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, lost their jobs after similar appearances last year.
Here’s what else to know:
Hundreds of students and others rallied with the protesters inside and outside of the school overnight and through the morning. “They can threaten us all they want with the police, but at the end of the day, it’s only going to lead to more mobilization,” said Maryam Alwan, a senior and pro-Palestinian organizer on campus, speaking from the tent encampment.
Police officers loaded at least three buses with demonstrators, who cooperated as they were taken into custody, though other protesters shouted “Shame! Shame!” Organizers had said they expected to be arrested.
Dr. Shafik angered some students and professors during her appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Wednesday, when she largely conceded that she felt some of the common chants at pro-Palestinian protests were antisemitic. In a letter sent on Thursday afternoon as the arrests began, Dr. Shafik said she “took this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances.”
About time, I’d say. Without punishment there is no deterrent, which is my own University’s problem with protestors like these. And foreign students are especially liable, as they could lose their visas if suspended (that’s why MIT didn’t arrest any of its protestors). Colleges are loath to suspend foreign students, or have them arrested, because foreign students pay pretty much the full fees at colleges, whereas Americans often get big breaks on tuition.
And, mirabile dictu, one of the students who has been both arrested and suspended (from Barnard), is Isra Hirsi, the daughter of none other than Congresswoman and notorious antisemite Ilhan “Follow the Benjamins” Omar. (Omar was in fact on the House committee that grilled the Columbia people.
Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is among several Barnard students who have been suspended for participating in a pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University.
The camp, which includes dozens of tents pitched on the campus’s South Lawn in protest against Israeli actions in Gaza, has created a standoff between administrators and students on the Ivy League campus. Dozens of students were arrested on Thursday, after the university notified them that they would be suspended if they refused to move and the students vowed to remain in place.
Ms. Hirsi posted on social media around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday that she was one of three students suspended so far for participating in the protest, which began on Wednesday, the day the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, appeared before Congress to discuss antisemitism on campus.
At the congressional hearing, Dr. Shafik told lawmakers that she would enforce rules about unauthorized protests and antisemitism. Ms. Omar, who is on the committee that held the hearing and who did not mention that her daughter was among the pro-Palestinian protesters, was one of several Democrats who questioned Ms. Shafik about her actions toward Palestinian and Muslim students.
Ms. Hirsi, 21, said on social media that she was an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the student coalition that has been pushing the university to cut ties with companies that support Israel. Such divestment is the key demand of protesters in the encampment. She is also involved with the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of two student groups that was suspended in November for holding unauthorized protests.
“I have never been reprimanded or received any disciplinary warnings,” she wrote. “I just received notice that I am 1 of 3 students suspended for standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing a genocide.”
Ms. Hirsi is a junior majoring in sociology. Two other Barnard students, Maryam Iqbal, 18, a freshman, and Soph Dinu, 21, a junior majoring in religion, were also suspended, protest organizers said.
Who would have thought that testifying before a hostile group of Republicans in Congress would make college presidents straighten up and fly right? I disagree with the hostile treatment of Presidents, but it’s time to start enforcing the “time, place, and manner” aspects of protests, speech, and demonstrations. It’s also time to enforce behavior codes (and speech codes, if schools have them, which they shouldn’t) uniformly, for it was the lack of uniformity that got Liz Magill fired from Penn and started the process that resulted in Harvard’s Claudine Gay being let go. My preference is the Chicago Free Expression principles, but those don’t allow you to say anything, anywhere, and at any time on campus.
Pro-Palestinian protestors have been coddled too long (even at the University of Chicago), and unless they get serious discipline from their colleges, they’ll just keep disrupting everything. This is a lesson that Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, learned, perhaps from being Provost here first. What a pity that threats like those of Congress are what make colleges reform and apply their rules uniformly!
I’m not sure what effects these protests have in the first place. Many decades ago I lived in the DC area, and whenever some protest group took to the streets and blocked traffic and made everyone’s lives a little more unpleasant, my reaction was that whatever they were protesting would get my vote of approval.
I think that these tactics also tend to backfire in the broader electorate. Whenever Democrats are perceived as supporting radical Left positions, it loses them votes from the center.
Might be a “not” missing there.
All the woke/Left protestors are victims. Which is the highest achievement in their world. And as a result, don’t believe in consequences.
Maybe that will change although this is NYC where 10+ arrests prior to yet another one isn’t enough to get them incarcerated. They’ll be out in time for appetizers and dinner today.
Indeed. Nellie Bowles writes today about a student, arrested and suspended who has lost his student housing as a result. He is struggling with finding new housing that will accept his emotional support rabbit!
I believe that if you require an emotional support rabbit you may not be robust enough to attend protests which will get you arrested. And….putting the burden of supporting your defective emotions on a poor innocent rabbit is probably animal abuse. I bet he’s a vegan too.
Good news.
Thank you Jerry.
Cornell West has located an opportunity
https://twitter.com/i/status/1781051902278689147
All that’s missing is Shaun King.
I’m puzzled about the role of the police here. What laws are the students breaking that the municipal police would arrest them on private property? And why would the police arrest them now, this late in what is described as a standoff between protesters and the administration? Was this a police decision that just happened to coincide with the president’s appearance in Congress? Or did the university exercise some eyebrow-raising authority as a private entity to direct the public’s police, which normally even elected politicians can’t do, leaving this up to police commanders.
Do the municipal police enforce university conduct codes? Do the university’s private police (if any) have the power to arrest and lay criminal charges?
In Chicago the charge was “Criminal Trespassing”, and yes, you can be charged with that on your own campus if you’re told not to be in a certain place for a good reason but refuse to leave.
You know why the cops arrested them now: the House hearing yesterday and the President’s promise to clean up Columbia’s act.
Municipal police can enforce University conduct codes like criminal trespass (see above). And some campus police, like those at the University of Chicago, have full police powers of arrest and can indeed arrest our own students (as they have).
Thanks. A thoughtful lawyer (are there any other kind?), Andrew Roman, has written recently in his blog, Andrew’s Views, about the difficulty we have in Canada hoping our police will deal constructively with protests that illegally disrupt and obstruct the lawful activities of others, but don’t descend into violence or display of firearms that would force them to act. I’ll have to ask him if he is following this story at Columbia.
As far as I know, the OPP busy themselves with bringing coffee to such protesters rather than arresting them.
Other media reports — I can’t read the NYT — quote Mayor Adams as saying that officials from Columbia made a written request to the City of New York to clear the protesters from the university’s property. So it appears that the police did somebody’s bidding. (In Canada, the only external bidding they can obey is a Court injunction.). If the protesters were already breaking the law and were not arrested before, why now? Did the president’s uncomfortable reception in Congress count as sufficient stimulus for the the police to act on the university’s request? Or were they being restrained from enforcing the law before yesterday? By whom? I’m sure my confusion is all down to my not understanding the relation between the American police and the civil authorities on the one hand and between them and property owners on the other.
Like Andrew Roman, I’m dilating on this because illegal protests that interfere with lawful use of public and private property grow from the tradition of “good trouble” where the expected police response—arrest of lawbreakers—is strategically intended to garner support for the protesters, especially if several get seriously injured or killed, and deflect criticism to the police. (You put small children in the path of fire hoses because they get thrown around for the cameras.). The police have long since learned not to be drawn and so protests like this, which can go on for months, are now regarded as falling within the democratic right to protest instead of being acts of civil disobedience for which you expect to be arrested and sentenced to jail.
I also suspect that some people who were around back then have a blind spot that comes from the causes they were illegally demonstrating for then—civil rights, pulling out of Vietnam—being more just, to them in retrospect at least, than the the causes being illegally demonstrated for today.
Finally, it seems to vary. Matt Walsh observed that the police in San Francisco waited five hours before arresting a handful of protesters blocking the Golden Gate Bridge, yet police in Florida arrested similar protesters immediately. I surmise the SF police perceived more political risk in acting than the Florida police did. Or, alternatively, the SF police were being told not to act by the political leadership, which is the same thing I suppose.
I think that I heard the president say yesterday that they had closed the campus, allowing only students, faculty, those with Columbia ID in. The real question to me is whether students will be suspended, their opportunity for education taken away, for a significant period of time…like a semester with re-entry contingent on formal application at the end of that time.
An interesting development – thanks!
Thank you for this late-breaking news. Maybe yesterday was simply a hard four-hour look in the mirror for President Shafik along with a feeling of some support from at least two fellow-witness trustees to have real penalties. More of the discussion from the Republicans seemed aimed at coddling faculty, but there was significant emphasis on meaningless sanctions of students from both sides of the aisle.
Good.
As a foreign student at Georgetown* I was always very careful not to do anything illegal like demonstrating badly, or in my personal life like…umm… smoking. 😉
They might have even warned us kids at our intro, but I knew anyway.
I do hope they deport these students – preferably to Gaza.
D.A.
NYC
*Studying Middle East politics, no less!
Most incompetent “genocide” in history:
https://jwbliliephoto.net/M/Palestinian_Terr_Pop.png
The events at the Columbia University have even attracted attention in the German media.
I retain many of your old posts to re-read as situations evolve. Might it be possible to somehow forward your 29 Dec 2023 post on Matti Friedman to some relevant characters including University presidents as well as activist leaders. Very prescient post at the time and even more so today. It’s appalling that today’s so-called intellectual leaders can not fathom this simple fact. Hope there is a way to spread Matti’s clear understanding. Thanks Jerry for all your dedication!