Some sensible views of David French on college protests

April 29, 2024 • 9:30 am

Here are a few misconceptions about college protests being bandied about the internet (in bold) with my responses below them (all text is mine)

a.) If the protests are “peaceful”, then colleges shouldn’t do anything about them

The criterion for colleges to allow free speech, as construed by the courts for state universities, are that speech much be expressed in a “time, place, or manner” in which it doesn’t interfere with the functions or operations of a university (the speech, of course, is not regulated; this rule is ‘content neutral’). Thus state universities can restrict how, when, and where speech can be expressed given the limitations above. Private universities can do the same if “time, place, and manner” regulations are part of their own policy. Note that illegal demonstrations can be peaceful but still prohibited, as when there is loud shouting that disturbs classes or sit-ins that occupy university buildings. Many people who should know better, like AOC or Ilhan Omar, seem to think that peaceful protests on campus must be allowable protests.

AOC instantiates this view below, especially because the protestors were warned but refused to leave. Apparently she wants chaos on the campus. Columbia has already gone to all-hybrid classes, and I suspect that they will cancel graduation, an important time in the life of all students.

Calling in police enforcement on nonviolent demonstrations of young students on campus is an escalatory, reckless, and dangerous act.

It represents a heinous failure of leadership that puts people’s lives at risk. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 24, 2024

This same kind of error is made by many faculty when they sign petitions defending illegal and disruptive demonstrations, like those at Columbia. Here they are prioritizing social justice over the function of their own university. As Jon Haidt would put it, they want to work at Social Justice University, not Truth University.

b.) If the protests are legal under the First Amendment, then colleges must allow them

Again, protests that are legal in public may still be illegal in government institutions like state universities if they interfere with university functions.

c.) Under no circumstances should cops or security people be called to remove protestors

If a disruptive protest is prohibited but protestors refuse to leave, they may and should be gently removed by security or police. Universities don’t like this, but what other way is there to break up an illegal protests that interferes with University function?

d.) Because protestors are practicing “civil disobedience,” they should neither be asked to leave nor be punished with suspensions or arrests

Civil disobedience, as discussed by David French in the article below, means deliberately violating a law that you consider immoral, doing so peacefully, and being willing to accept the punishment. The paradigm for such demonstrations are the civil rights marches and sit-ins of the Sixties. They worked because, by taking their punishment, be it jailing, water hoses, or police dogs, the protestors moved the U.S. morally, showing Americans graphically how segregation was illegal and its proponents immoral. It’s thus almost funny that one of the demands of current protestors, who say they’re engaged in civil disobedience, is that they not be punished for their behavior. Further, what “immoral” law are they violating? Only the “time, place, and manner” restrictions of colleges, though of course they are protesting what they see as Israel’s so-called genocide in Gaza. (And of course they’re protesting their college’s supposed investments in “genocide”.) But they are removed by police not for these things, which constitute free speech, but for illegal and obstructive disruption of a university. The same holds for deplatforming speakers, which is usually not a First-Amendment violation but can be so in government institutions, or for colleges that have a “free speech” policy and take it seriously.

All of these matters are discussed in a new op-ed by NYT writer David French. The NYT original is here, but if you click on the headline below, be able to read it.

French has had a varied career. He grew up in a small town in Kentucky but then went to Harvard Law school and became a lawyer, first a private litigator, then a constitutional lawyer, and finally serving as an Army lawyer. He adds this:

My most recent book, “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” outlined the dangers of polarization and the need to engage with people who have opposing viewpoints. I’m an evangelical conservative who believes strongly in a classical liberal, pluralistic vision of American democracy, in which people with deep religious, cultural, and moral differences can live and work together and enjoy equal legal protection and shared cultural tolerance. In both my personal and professional life I strive to live up to the high ideals of Micah 6:8 — to act justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly before God.

We’ll leave aside the God bit as it’s not relevant here. What is relevant is his new piece, which should be sent to every college president, provost, and chancellor in America. If you subscribe you can read it here, but I’ve put an archived version as the link to the headline below, so click on that if you want to read it.

The upshot is that French thinks that universities must observe three principles during this time of protest.

a. Universities must protect free speech
b. Universities must respect peaceful civil disobedience, but
c. Universities must “uphold the rule of law by protecting the campus community from violence and chaos. Universities should not protect students from hurtful ideas, but they must protect their ability to peacefully live and learn in a community of scholars.”

You may notice a bit of conflict between principles b. and c. That means that breaking the rules may be permitted unless it leads to violence and chaos; I interpret “chaos” as the kind of disruption that’s going on at Columbia University. An example of peaceful civil disobedience on campus is the existence of a small encampment of a few tents at Vanderbilt University, the place where Chancellor Diermeier had students expelled and arrested for both sitting in in a campus building and also for injuring a worker as they stormed into the building. Clearly Diermeier (our former Provost) is respecting the right to protest, even though it violates campus regulations, by leaving the small encampment alone.

I’d quote the whole article if I could, but will limit myself to giving French’s take on the issues above. If you’re on a campus, be sure to send this articles to the Powers That Be. French’s quotes are indented. Here’s the gist of French’s “way out” of chaos on campus:

There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission. Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?

The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law. That means universities should protect the rights of students and faculty members on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.

That also means showing no favoritism among competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities. All groups should have equal rights to engage in the full range of protected speech, including by engaging in rhetoric that’s hateful to express and painful to hear. Public chants like “Globalize the intifada” may be repugnant to many ears, but they’re clearly protected by the First Amendment at public universities and by policies protecting free speech and academic freedom at most private universities.

Note that repugnant chants must be tolerated, even if they’re anti-Semitic. I, for one, would not want to punish students for shouting “Gas the Jews,” something that the Columbia protestors come close to. That’s offensive but allowed by the First Amendment. Of course, if the repetition of such sentiments by many create a climate of harassment on campus, that’s a different matter, and a Title VI violation.

It’s a pity that the American public, and especially Representative Stefanik, doesn’t realize that calls for genocide can indeed constitute legal speech. The Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn were accurate in saying that such calls were legal “if expressed in context,” but none of those schools have explicit First Amendment-based speech codes, and the three schools had been irregular and hypocritical in violating what speech codes they do have. This is why it’s essential for all schools to adopt the Chicago Principles of Free Expression—and over 100 of them have done so. (Remember, we’re a private university, too.)

French on time, place, and manner restrictions:

Still, reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.”

Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space. If one group is permitted to occupy a quad indefinitely, for example, then that action by necessity excludes other organizations from the same ground. In that sense, indefinitely occupying a university quad isn’t simply a form of expression; it also functions as a form of exclusion. Put most simply, student groups should be able to take turns using public spaces, for an equal amount of time and during a roughly similar portion of the day.

. . . But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness. No matter the frustration of campus activists or their desire to be heard, true civil disobedience shouldn’t violate the rights of others. Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.

French on the meaning of civil disobedience (his bolding below)

Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment-protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences. There is a long and honorable history of civil disobedience in the United States, but true civil disobedience ultimately honors and respects the rule of law. In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

. . . . There is a better way. When universities can actually recognize and enforce the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness, they can protect both the right of students to protest and the rights of students to study and learn in peace.

In March a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.

But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline, three were expelled, and one was suspended.

The students demanding amnesty are not practicing true civil disobedience. They want to express their principles but aren’t willing to take the penalty for expressing them in an illegal way. It doesn’t help them, either, that their claim of immorality—that Israel is practicing genocide—is not only wrong, but really does apply to the very entities they worship: terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. This blatant hypocrisy is called out all too rarely.

French on the importance of viewpoint neutrality:

The message was clear: Every student can protest, but protest has to be peaceful and lawful. In taking this action, Vanderbilt was empowered by its posture of institutional neutrality. It does not take sides in matters of public dispute. Its fundamental role is to maintain a forum for speech, not to set the terms of the debate and certainly not to permit one side to break reasonable rules that protect education and safety on campus.

Vanderbilt is not alone in its commitment to neutrality. The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”

Contrast Vanderbilt’s precise response with the opposing extremes. In response to the chaos at Columbia, the school is finishing the semester with hybrid classes, pushing thousands of students online. The University of Southern California canceled its main stage commencement ceremony, claiming that the need for additional safety measures made the ceremony impractical. At both schools the inability to guarantee safety and order has diminished the educational experience of their students.

Only about four universities beside Chicago has adopted viewpoint neutrality (Vanderbilt and UNC Chapel Hill are among them), but this principle is just as important as our Principles of Free Expression in keeping open discourse alive at Chicago. Every university should adopt Kalven as well as our principles of free expression. Colleges where I have friends who tell me that their institution refuses to adopt institutional neutrality include Williams College and Appalachian State University. There are many more: for some reason, colleges wish to retain the ability to take political, ideological, and moral stands. Believe me, there is no upside in doing so, for it sets a very bad precedent as well as chilling speech.

Our own encampment by Students for Justice in Palestine is, says the grapevine, set for Wednesday. The plans apparently call not just for setting up tents, but also occupying buildings—acts that violate campus regulations. I hope to Ceiling Cat that our administration finally grows a spine and enforces those regulations, especially because they have arrantly refused to enforce illegal demonstrations in the past. Right now, our administration appears to be adhering to what French says is a losing strategy:

At this moment, one has the impression that university presidents at several universities are simply hanging on, hoping against hope that they can manage the crisis well enough to survive the school year and close the dorms and praying that passions cool over the summer.

That is a vain hope. There is no indication that the war in Gaza — or certainly the region — will be over by the fall. It’s quite possible that Israel will be engaged in full-scale war on its northern border against Hezbollah. And the United States will be in the midst of a presidential election that could be every bit as contentious as the 2020 contest.

But the summer does give space for a reboot. It allows universities to declare unequivocally that they will protect free speech, respect peaceful civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law by protecting the campus community from violence and chaos. Universities should not protect students from hurtful ideas, but they must protect their ability to peacefully live and learn in a community of scholars. There is no other viable alternative.

**************

Just for fun, here’s one example of how allowing chaos on campus, and demanding that universities take ideological stands, destroy their academic mission. I don’t want our university to wind up full of faculty like this USC gender-studies professor, whose tweets are now protected (h/t Anna Krylov, who’s at USC). Kessler is using the demonstrations to destroy her mission of educating by canceling their final project and promising that she’ll give all her students a good grade. She’s doing this clearly because she’s pro-Palestinian, as well as a chowderhead (see more here).

Oh, and USC has canceled graduation.

Finally, some advice to Columbia University:

a. If the protestors return, as they have, continue to arrest and suspend them. Your actions have been inconsistent, and that prolongs the demonstrations.

b. DO NOT NEGOTIATE with the protestors.

Pro-Palestinian demonstration on campus; Jewish students counter peacefully

April 28, 2024 • 9:15 am

As a warm-up for the Big Encampment planned to start here on May 1, UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP, a consortium of students including Students for Justice in Palestine) planned a big divestment rally on Friday afternoon. It was raining, so attendance was sparse, but the protestors were determined and marched from the administration building to various other buildings on campus. Here’s the poster that advertised it.

Below videos I took. I think this demonstration was legal since they didn’t block access to the administration building, but many demonstrators (behind me as I filmed) covered their faces, as they are cowards and don’t want to be identified. (After all, they could get arrested or suspended for civil disobedience, and they don’t really want people to know who they are.) Many are wearing keffiyehs, the hipster swastika. And, of course, their “demonstration” consists not of arguments or real speech, but chanting over and over again. That is the only thing they know how to do.

The “Paul” this bawling protestor refers to is our President, Paul Alivisatos. I’m not sure where all the photographers came from.

Their goal is to get the University of Chicago to diverst from Israel. They will not succeed, but I guess they feel virtuous with the shouting and marching. Note the recurring references to “genocide”. Of course they mean “genocide by Israel,” but the real genocide—the avowed determination to destroy another people—is enacted by Hamas, not Israel.

The students behind me as I filmed. “Hands off Rafah” can be loosely translated as “Let Hamas continue to rule Gaza.” That is an implicit endorsement of genocide, since Hamas’s charter and actions explicitly aim to destroy all the Jews. Perhaps these students are unwitting tools of the real genocide. Note that they’re all wearing masks. That is not because of covid!

Meanwhile, the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper that might be called “The Voice of Hamas”, reports on the demonstrations with a photo BLURRING THE FACES OF THE DEMONSTRATORS! That is deliberately done to help the protestors: they can’t be identified in case they were doing something illegal. And in the Maroon the report includes only quotes from people in favor of the demonstration; there are no dissenting voices. This is why I believe the Maroon is “all the pro-Hamas news fit to print.” An excerpt:

“As a coalition of organizing groups, we have asked several times over the years for the University to disclose and divest from these unethical investments. We are a university that still continues to invest in fossil fuels at the cost of perpetuating climate change. We are a university that continues to militarize this campus with more police rather than listening to its community,” said Sarah, an organizer with UCUP, speaking to the crowd outside of Levi Hall. “It is our duty, our moral imperative, our responsibility to stand up for the Palestinian people. It is our duty to show up, it is our duty to be here right now.”

Many students expressed uncertainty about whether the rally and protest movements on campus would spur the University to take action, but said they felt that participating in the protest was a means of expressing their dissent against UChicago’s role in the war in Gaza.

“I’m just doing my part as a student. I know that the University is complicit in the genocide that is currently taking place in Gaza, and as a UChicago student, I am mainly concerned with how UChicago is implicated in all of this,” one of the protestors, a fourth-year political science major, told the Maroon during the march. “There has never been such a large movement for Palestinian liberation in the U.S., and I’m gonna try to be part of it—whatever I can contribute.”

And so on. Note the blurred faces below. Do you know of any real mainstream newspaper that does anything like this? And they still haven’t come through on their promise (last November!) to publish a long piece by a pro-Israeli student. As far as I know, my op-ed in a January issue is the only opposition piece that was printed.

Meanwhile, the Jewish students erected two banners and then departed. The contrast between the angry, hateful demonstrators and the peaceful but determined counter-demonstrations, instantiated in these banners, is striking.

Another one, appropriate for Passover:

This is an announcement from the university-affiliated Hillel foundation, posted on Friday. Note the call for peace and denigration of hatred. (“Shabbat” is of course the sabbath.)

But where was my box of free matzos? I love ’em when they’re slathered with sweet butter.

Four new articles on Columbia’s encampment

April 26, 2024 • 10:20 am

Today we’re having a short warm-up protest at Chicago in preparation for the Big Encampment that’s supposed to start on May 1. I’ll try to document today’s event later with photos and videos. (I’m betting that the students will be masked.) And the demonstrators still seem to think that this kind of protest will make the University divest.

As for the continuing encampment and “liberated zone” at Columbia, I have two things to say. First, Columbia President Namat “Minouche” Shafik didn’t enforce last night’s midnight deadline for protestors to leave. Instead, she’s continuing to “negotiate” with them, which worries me. What is there to negotiate? Is she negotiating over the pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ demand that Columbia divest from Israel? If she gives in on even part of that, it will hearten demonstrators everywhere and spur on more disruption. I think it’s more likely that she’s negotiating when and how they can dismantle the encampment, as implied in this NYT article.

Not even 12 hours after Columbia’s predawn assertion of progress in its negotiations with the demonstrators, a protest leader all but dismissed some of the university’s claims.

To extend talks, according to the university, the protesters agreed to remove a significant number of the tents erected on the lawn. Columbia also said the protesters had pledged that non-students would leave the encampment, and that they would bar discriminatory or harassing language among the demonstrators.

But on Wednesday morning, an organizer announced to other students at the encampment that they would not be “doing the university’s job of removing people from this camp for them,” insisting that demonstrators would not become “cops to each other.” And the organizer declared that the protesters were “committed to staying here and having people stay here.”

Second, the biggest of Shafik’s problems is that she’s caught between Republican lawmakers, who are watching her closely and will haul her back before Congress if she allows demonstrations—and their attendant anti-Semitism—to continue, and on the other side the Columbia faculty, which is largely against Shafik for calling the cops on a “peaceful protest”. I think the faculty are mistaken because they misunderstand what “free speech” is. In my view the protestors can speak freely and even call for the death of Jews, but they should not be allowed to violate campus rules by camping on the quad and harassing other students. (The harassment is documented in nearly all the articles below.) The demonstration, at least inside Columbia’s gates, may be “peaceful,” but “peaceful” doesn’t equate to “legal” on most campuses. There are, as the courts have ruled, “time, place, and manner” regulations that can apply on campus.

At any rate, it now looks as though the Columbia Faculty Senate won’t even attempt to censure Shafik, but instead will try to pass a more tepid measure that won’t lead to her removal: a resolution “expressing displeasure with a series of her decisions, including summoning the police last week to arrest protesting students on campus.” Right now I’m not sure what should happen to her, but am willing to wait to see what she does. If the students continue to insist on camping on the quad and harassing both visitors and those who are “visibly Jewish,” I think Shafik should call the cops again. The demonstrators cannot be talked out of their views, although one article below says that constructive dialogue is needed. I would argue that in this case such dialogue is not possible, and will give some evidence why.

At any rate, I’ve found four articles worth reading on the Columbia crisis, which has prompted lookalike encampments across America. I do this because I think these protests are in many ways as portentous as the protests by students of the Sixties against the Vietnam War, which did help end the war. The difference is that the current protestors are no longer calling for a ceasefire: they’re calling for the extermination of Israel and, in some cases, killing Jews. They’re also implying that the intifada should be “globalized,” in other words, extend Islamism throughout the world. Further, because I put the tragic deaths of Palestinian citizens at the door of Hamas, not Israel, I don’t agree with the main tenor of the protests. Why aren’t the protestors, for example, calling for Hamas to rectify one of its many war crimes and release the hostages?

But I digress. Below are four articles and a brief excerpt from each. The first two are from The Atlantic and the second two from the Free Press. Although these are largely paywalled, if you click on the headlines you should be able to access the archived links. You should read them all if you have time: they’re not long.

First, from The Atlantic. I start with this one because the optimistic author believes that since the Sixties colleges have failed as liberal institutions, no longer encouraging discourse. At the end, Packer suggests that the disruptions of the last eighty years could have been prevented had students been prompted and trained to “talk with one another”.

An excerpt:

But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.

. . . Along, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

. . . The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”

Here’s Packer’s well-intended but misguided call for dialogue. But perhaps he thinks it’s too late for that, and if that’s the case, he’s right:

Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

A second piece from The Atlantic; click to read:

The dynamics of the “zone” are well known by now: the poking of flagpoles into the eyes of Jews, the prevention of “outsiders” from discussing things with the Tenters, the elimination of “Zionists” from the area, and so on. I’ll highlight a few indications that dissenting speech is demonized and the speakers expelled from Tent City:

“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”

Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students, who are Jewish and pro-Israel.

There is a “leader” who must be consulted if you want to enter Camp Hamas, much less talk to its inhabitants.

As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state.

Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”

. . . Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.

This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”

I for one have never claimed that the protests were violent; they aren’t except for sporadic and rare instances of pushing or physical coercion. Yes, in that sense they are “peaceful”. But should they be permitted because they are instances of “free speech”? My answer is “no, because they aren’t.” They violate campus rules for time, place, and manner of speech, and I’d have the same objection if pro-Israeli students were doing the same thing.

This one’s from the Free Press, and since its boss, Bari Weiss, is Jewish (and wrote a book on anti-Semitism), you’re not going to expect much sympathy for the demonstrators in that venue. There are actually three short articles here: one by Bari, one by Jonathan Lederer, and one from Sahar Tartak, the woman who was poked in the eye with a flagpole at Yale University. (Links are archived.).

From Lederer:

On Saturday night, the situation on campus hit a new low. Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war.

For an hour, 20 of us stood on the sundial in the middle of Columbia’s campus with Israeli and American flags and sang peaceful songs such as Matisyahu’s “One Day” and “V’hi She’amda”—a much-needed ode to the hope and perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of enemies who seek our destruction.

Even as we sang lyrics such as “We don’t want to fight no more, there will be no more war,” we were met with hostility. Masked keffiyeh-wearers came to us face-to-face, trying to intimidate us. They chanted, “Fuck Israel, Israel’s a bitch!” We were told, “You guys are all inbred.” They threw water in our faces. These groups are not fairly described as “pro-Palestine.” They are active supporters of Hamas and they say so explicitly: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” one group chanted by the gates of my school. “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”

One keffiyeh-masked protester came up to my friends and I and held up a sign with an arrow pointing toward us that read: “Al-Qassam’s Next Targets.” Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas.

The latter is, of course a veiled threat, and may be a violation of free speech. But clearly there’s antisemitism afoot.

Another Free Press article. I like the title:

I said I’d give evidence that the protestors aren’t willing to discuss things. It’s anecdotal, of course, but that’s how it must be (there must be at least one protestor in America open to debate). First, here at Chicago a Jewish group apparently reached out to Students for Justice in Palestine to host a joint event, one that had financial support. The Jewish group never got a response.

Further, the end of the article above shows the complete disdain for debate held by both the inhabitants and the Chairman of Columbia’s Tent City. There’s also evidence of well-funded outside groups contributing to the welfare of Tent City. Of course they don’t care if Hamas and Hezbollah are dancing with delight at their antics.

And it doesn’t seem to occur to these young people—supposedly the best and brightest in the nation—that the leaders of Hamas are using them. As Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said during an interview with an Arab TV station in January: “Palestine [is free] from the river to the sea. That is the slogan of the American students.”

. . . . At NYU’s protest, The Free Press watched one activist carry a generator stamped with the words People’s Forum, a radical NYC-based organization funded by a multimillionaire Marxist with ties to the Chinese government.

. . .A retired law enforcement official who has helped advise the federal government on issues of national security told The Free Press that groups egging on this movement “root themselves by and large on college campuses, because their greatest and most impressionable audience is the students.” And their organizing powers can be seen in the encampments—which have matching tents, identical chants, and shared tactics and guidelines at universities across the U.S.

“You can clearly see it in the uniformity and the sophistication and the appearance of the protest,” he added. “There’s an organizational character to it that we’ve seen many times before.”

Finally, the futile attempt of one student to engage the protestors:

On Tuesday afternoon, Isidore Karten, a 23-year-old recent Columbia graduate, walked into the camp holding an Israeli flag, hoping he might be able to change some of the protesters’ minds through conversation. He says anytime someone tried to talk to him, a “safety-trained” volunteer in a yellow vest quickly intervened.

“Whenever we start to get common ground, the organizers will come over and be like, ‘No, you can’t talk to them,’ ” says Karten, who tells me Hamas murdered his uncle in 1996. “It’s as if they can’t have their own opinion and they have to just blindly follow.”

To paraphrase Johnnie Cochran, “If they won’t debate, just leave the hate.”

A post I retweeted:

It's not peace they want, but more war. And yes, this is the Hezbollah flag: https://t.co/YhVQ1GEpgn https://t.co/82BXWGHAjN

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 26, 2024

. . . and a 3.5-minute video from Columbia, NYU, and Yale by Tom Gross. Yes, they chant, “We love Hamas and their rockets, too!”; and no student interviewed think that Hamas should release the hostages.

Campus newspaper: SJP plans Columbia-like disruptions at the University of Chicago

April 25, 2024 • 9:00 am

Yay! It’s the University of Chicago’s turn to experience pro-Palestinian pandemonium! Tents on the quad! Occupation of buildings! I was feeling left out since the kiffeyeh-clad and Hamas-loving members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) hadn’t shown up here for a couple of weeks, but I did predict that they were up to something big. At first I thought it would be a demonstration during convocation, which is on June 1, but it turns out I was a month too late: the demonstrations are apparently planned for May 1 (May Day!).

This information, which of course could be erroneous but looks real, was obtained by someone who infiltrated an SJP chatgroup here, and dug up a lot of information about their plans. The details are given in an article in the conservative student paper here, The Chicago Thinker, I’ll give the text and some revealing screenshots:

Startling group chat messages exposed by the Chicago Thinker reveal that on Wednesday, May 1, Students for Justice in Palestine at The University of Chicago (SJP UChicago) plans to emulate recent protests at Columbia University. It becomes the latest development in a wave of protests at colleges across the country, including Yale and New York University, as tensions around the Israel-Hamas war rise.

At UChicago, SJP protestors are aiming to take over the university’s Main Quad and camp out for an extended period. A Telegram group chat details their plans to occupy campus buildings and get arrested for trespassing in order to draw attention to their cause. The demonstrations will last “at least for… two nights.”

The texts also reveal that National Students for Justice in Palestine is playing a crucial role in organizing the protest. Members of the group are offering media support and are sharing experiences from their involvement in the events at Columbia.

Below are some mediocre-quality screenshots of chat messages from the Thinker as well as an “onboarding form” for prospective protestors. The first entry comes from a National Students for Justice in Palestine member, showing what we already knew: the protests across the U.S. (SJP has 200 campus branches) is coordinated by the National SJP organization. I always wonder who’s funding this group.

“PYM” in the second note is the Palestinian Youth Movement, apparently also involved. Since many of them are not students, there will clearly be some trespassing if this takes place. Note to campus cops: be sure to check IDs.

If you want to camp out, or help in other ways, SJP asks you to fill out this “onboarding form”:

SJP UChicago’s strategy takes further inspiration from similar events at California State Polytechnic University, where students barricaded themselves in a university building on Monday evening. Police have been unable to remove them and the occupation has forced administrators to temporarily close the university, meaning students are to enter school buildings for classes or work. Students occupying the building published advice for other protestors. Leaders in the SJP UChicago group chat summarized these points and are encouraging people to replicate them.

“1. Occupying buildings is more effective

2. Being in buildings gives us lots of materials (tables, unhinged doors, chairs) to use as barriers

3. We’d be a lot more defenseless and easy to scatter if we occupy the quad

4. Being inside frays the police across the building and its entrances

5. Could also be more comfortable for campers bc shelter, bathrooms, water, etc

6. Come prepared with goggles, gas masks, etc.”

But of course occupying buildings is about the worst thing that students can do in terms of future punishment, and classes will be in full swing on May 1.

Here are more screenshots from the chat. It looks like the paper’s leak will deprive them of the discretion they desire, and someone’s going to be banging their head on the fifth-floor cubicle. (Of course, this all may be an elaborate ruse, but I suspect that SJP is going to do this some time. After all, the Chicago branch doesn’t want to be left out!

And the final bit:

According to a statement from UChicago published on December 21, 2023, in the wake of the Rosenwald Hall SJP sit-in, “University policies protect the right to protest while making it clear that demonstrations cannot jeopardize safety or disrupt the University’s operations and the ability of people in the University to carry out their work.”

Multi-day building occupations violate this policy and present a significant threat to all students on campus.

SJP UChicago has organized multiple “orientations” and “trainings” to equip members for the protest. Among themselves, they demand “DISCRETION” regarding members’ identities and plans.

Here’s another “scoop,” this time from an upcoming demonstration at Princeton, the subject of an article in the National Review. The instructions bear some similarity to the ones in the chat above, no doubt because SJP National is spreading advice and information.

Huge SCOOP by @abigailandwords for @NRO:

Princeton students are planning an encampment.

A recruiting document shows they know they’re breaking the rules but don’t expect serious consequences.

They say they “have a trained security team, pro bono legal support, and ‘faculty… https://t.co/CefmoGQFii pic.twitter.com/P8dv7BNe9R

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) April 24, 2024

An excerpt from the National Review story on Princeton:

Princeton University students are preparing to establish an anti-Israel protest encampment, according to documents obtained by National Review. The students claim to have pro bono legal support and trained security.

A draft of a press release titled “Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment Demands” states that the “goal” is to “put pressure on the Princeton University administration to divest and disassociate from Israel, and to call attention to the University’s active contribution to ongoing genocide and human rights catastrophe.”

The group is demanding that 1) Princeton call for an immediate cease-fire and “condemn Israel’s genocidal campaign,” 2) commit to full transparency in its investments 3) dissociate and divest its endowment from direct and indirect holdings in companies that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign, occupation, and apartheid policies,” 4) divest from private fossil-fuel companies 5) disclose and end research funded by the Department of Defense 6) “refrain from any form of academic or cultural association with Israeli institutions and businesses 7) “cultivate affiliations with Palestinian academic and cultural institutions” and 8) stop sponsoring and facilitating programs like Birthright Israel trips and Tiger-Trek Israel, and relations with the Tikvah Fund.

. . .National Review obtained a message sent by an organizer affirming the plan to continue with the demonstration.

“Many of you have probably seen the email from VP Calhoun. We want to begin by affirming that this action is still on, and we will not be deterred,” the organizer wrote in a group chat. “This is a partial bluff. No university that has arrested or suspended students have done so without multiple warnings. These would be incredibly bad optics for Princeton and the email is a strategic move to weaken us.”

“We have multiple criminal defense attorneys on call ready to support us and work through any arrests that may ‘occur.’ We have people committed to jail support as well,” the organizer wrote, adding that “‘arrest’ is not the same as ‘pressing charges.’”

Multiple criminal defense attorneys on call! These are clearly not public defenders, who are not “on call.” So who is paying for all this? The President of Princeton issued a statement about the planned disruptive demontrations, and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to tolerate them if they’re disruptive.

At any rate, as I want to highlight two things I wrote. First, in a recent post called “J’Accuse”, I recounted four instances in which SJP and its confrère organization, UChicago United for Palestine, held four illegal demonstrations on our campus. In only one of them (a sit-in in the admissions office) were students punished, but the “punishment” was risible (they were arrested for trespassing, but then for some murky reason the city dropped the charges, and then the University simply asked the arrestees to write a “my demonstration experience” essay, which turned out to show the students doubling down on their protest). In the other incident, SJP deplatformed a group of Jewish students who were having a demonstration in the Quad, and the Jewish students levied a formal complaint against SJP. In response, the University did virtually nothing, just putting it on record that the SJP organization had transgressed and gave the group an “official warning” that would be considered if SJP transgressed again. Big whoop!

In the two other demonstrations, a “die-in” in a campus eatery and the blocking of the administration building, the university did nothing. There were cops and administrators there, but, as I was once told by one of them, the University is loath to “lay hands” on demonstrators.

What this all adds up to, of course, is that illegal protestors face no real deterrent to continued actions here. Indeed, SJP has said that are NOT deterred, and will continue their activities, legal or not.

Apropos of that, let me emphasize again that I’m all in favor of SJP, or any other student group, conducting legal protests on campus. We are, after all, the premier “free speech university,” though our national ranking on free speech by FIRE dropped in a year from #1 to #13. But freedom of speech demands, at least on campus, that speech be conducted in the proper “time, place, and manner,” and that here you cannot deplatform other speakers or interfere with the normal functions of a university.

A camp-in and sit-in on May 1 violates many of these structures. I would suggest that the administration, which apparently already knows about these plans, gird its loins and for once get ready to levy meaningful punishments on those who endanger free speech and academic access. There is no other way to deter future disruptions.

In a January 24 letter to the main student newpaper, the Chicago Maroon, I asked, “Should Students for Justice in Palestine be a Recognized Student Organization?” If they proceed with this planned demonstration, the answer would clearly be “no.” The proper punishment for illegal “camp-ins” or sit-ins is expulsion of SJP as an RSO from our University, plus the arrest and suspension of demonstrators.

Will this happen? My guess is “no.” Our administration has shown little taste for cracking down on illegal demonstrations, perhaps because they don’t want national attention. (In addition, if we suspend foreign students, they lose their visas and have to leave the U.S., depriving the University of the large tuitions that such students pay.) Still, I suspect that donors are paying attention, too.

But the main point is that if we are to retain any reputation as a free-speech school, we cannot allow others to disrupt speech and the academic activities of our campus. In the end, it is our reputation for free inquiry, unimpeded by those who shout down others, bang drums, and generally disrupt campus life, that us gain a national reputation.

All I know is that I wouldn’t want to be in the President’s shoes now, because he’s got some hard decisions to make. For the entire academic community of America will be watching.

Oh, and if the campers think that their charade will persuade the University of Chicago to divest from Israel, they’re dead wrong. Our investments are kept secret from all but the trustees, and they’ve never bowed to protests. The demonstration will be, as nearly all of them are, performative.

McWhorter et al.: some new articles on Columbia University and similar college protests

April 24, 2024 • 10:00 am

I’ve collected several articles on the troubles at Columbia and other American campuses; two of these I found in Tom Gross’s newsletter. If you click on the headlines, you can access them all for free, as I’ve used archived links. I also give a brief excerpt from each article below the headline.

In my view, this is a far more troublesome time for colleges than the period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war protests of 1968 and after, for the protestors are not only bigoted and calling for the extermination of Israel, but seem opposed to all Western values—almost as if they would be delighted to live under Hamas. They’re certainly extolling Hama and Iran, both purveyors of terrorism.

And, if I don’t miss my guess, this trouble will spread off campus, for campus is where what is ideologically “cool” begins. (As Andrew Sullivan said, “We’re all on campus now.”) Arresting or expelling the protestors won’t solve the problem, for arrested protestors are energized protestors.

The solution? I don’t know, but I put the blame on universities themselves, which, by buying into and selling DEI to campuses throughout America, have promoted the divisive idea that Jews are settler-colonialists who don’t deserve a state.

I’m not afraid that concentration camps will come to America, but these protests have exposed not only the ugly underbelly of anti-Semitism among many Americans, but also the hatred of Western values of young people, probably instilled in them by colleges themselves or adopted as the au courant ideology. As you’ll see in the second article, the protests are of course applauded by foreign terrorists and extremists Muslims, for the college students camped out across America are playing precisely by the Islamist rulebook.

The points that in common among these articles are that the student protests of today are not similar to the civil-rights and antiwar protests of the Sixties, as the ones going on now are pervaded by bigotry, hatred, and a wish to destroy a people. Further, several articles argue that preventing the disruption of society and academia in this way, or refusing to even call out the hatred, will ultimately redound to a weakening of American—and therefore Enlightenment—values. This is not going to end soon.

First, in the NYT, John McWhorter is appalled by the demonstrations, but lays them at the door not of antisemitism but of DEI:

Excerpts:

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

. . .On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

This Wall Street Journal column is important, for it’s by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that translates articles, speeches, and sermons from Arabic into Hebrew, English, and other languages. MEMRI thus has its finger on the pulse of Middle Eastern Muslim society. Stalinsky notes that those who promote terror in the Middle East are also promoting these college protests (I suggest that they’re funding them, too), and certainly approve of them, for the protests will move worldwide Islamism forward. Globalize the intifada!

Excerpts:

What is most discouraging is the lack of attention to what the protesters are demanding, which goes far beyond a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Take the March 28 re-election fundraiser for President Biden in New York featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, which was disrupted by shouting in the auditorium. That made headlines, yet the protesters’ chants, including “Down with the USA” and the “Al-Qassam are on their way,” a reference to Hamas’s miliary wing, received no coverage. Neither did their physical threats to attendees outside, a common tactic. Also ignored are the flags and posters of designated terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—displayed at protests in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive actions, which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the West. As early as a decade ago, during the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Hamas’s Interior Ministry issued guidelines to social-media activists on framing events for a Western audience.

. . . Every senior Hamas leader has also acknowledged the importance of the protests and said that influencing U.S. and Western policy is part of the organization’s strategy for destroying Israel. Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader abroad, on Oct. 10 urged supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.” On Oct. 31, he said that the organization’s friends “on the global left” were responding to its appeal. On March 27, he called for millions to take to the streets in protest, saying there had been an unprecedented shift in global public opinion.

. . . Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets. They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.

. . . On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called “Resistance 101” on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations. At the event, former PFLP official Khaled Barakat referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.” On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Mr. Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.”

. . . The collaboration between senior terrorists and their growing list of friends in the U.S. and the West has real-world consequences. These groups are designated terrorist for a reason. They don’t plan marches and rallies—they carry out terrorist attacks. And when the U.S. and Western activists, including college students, see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals, they may consider their next steps—which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping.

From Bret Stephens in the NYT, who begins his story with the visit of two Jewish Yale undergraduates, one visibly Hasidic, to the center of campus protests, where they were “yelled at, harassed, and pushed”. Like McWhorter and others. Stephens notes that Jews are treated much worse in these demonstrations than other minorities would be, for DEI considers Jews as “white adjacent”. Stephens not only sees administrators’ lack of action as a form of “bigotry,” but also argues that history will show the demonstrators ineffectual and wrong. And donors will speak with their wallets:

Excerpts:

Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.

But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.

At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”

. . .The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

. . . Crispe’s and Tartak’s defiance commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals — and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry — history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner.

From the Harvard Crimson, published at a university where protests are muted, but a student organization was expelled for illegal demonstrations:

An excerpt from the above:

The Crimson reported on Monday that the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended for “violating student organization rules”— but that doesn’t mean that student organizing efforts will suddenly cease. It’s likely that, like on campuses across the country, the opposite will occur.

While inflated accusations of antisemitism on college campuses may undermine the ability to call it out where it actually exists in the pro-Palestine movement, the antisemitic scenes unfolding at Columbia University — and now other campuses, too — are as blatant as ever.

The ongoing demonstrations are led by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (whose post-Oct. 7 statement makes the PSC’s words seem benign) and conducted in partnership with an organization called Within Our Lifetime and a few other campus groups.

WOL’s demonstrations at Columbia this weekend were advertised as “Flood Columbia For Gaza,” seemingly referencing Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

. . .Pro-Palestine groups must acknowledge that proud extremist antisemites are joining campus protests at universities much like ours, and confront the fact that their hateful and violent theories of change are seeping into on-campus advocacy.

These extremists do not care about promoting peaceful coexistence and ending the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. They are there because these protest spaces have opened a conduit that is permissive of violent extremism and overt eliminationist antisemitism. It seems student organizations have allowed it, or at the very least, turned a blind eye in the name of coalition-building.

That said, the students who were arrested for their specific encampment protest within Columbia’s gates — while their words and choices may be objectionable to some — were largely non-violent. Even the police said so.

But non-violent is not the same as non-hateful, and a peaceful act does not negate overt antisemitism and intimidation of students on Columbia’s campus.

. . .The chaos at Columbia — which blurred the lines between student and non-student protestors and unleashed a whirlwind of antisemitism reminiscent in tone to the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, V.A. — is a prime example.

If they are dedicated to peacebuilding, pro-Palestinian campus organizations — as they determine the goals of their movements, how to frame their rhetoric, and with whom to build coalitions — must reckon with an irrefutable fact: Over seven million Jews live between the river and the sea, too, and they sure as hell aren’t going “back to Poland,” where over 85 percent of the Jewish population was murdered in death camps.

Simplify their existence to settler-colonialism all you want, and the fact still stands.

A lasting ceasefire, Palestinian liberation, and any positive future in the region will not come from demonizing and attacking Jews and Israelis. It will not happen through eliminationist slogans and events where “Zionists are not welcome.” Boycotting Starbucks probably won’t do it either.

Until that reality is fully recognized in the ethos of pro-Palestine student organizations, their voices and demands will fall on deaf ears. They will be co-opted by violent and hateful extremists, making administrators all the more emboldened to repress their non-violent demonstrations.

Author Nekritz says that pro-Palestinian demonstrators will attain their goals only when they “treat other people with respect, afford our opponents dignity, and foster conversations across deep disagreement.” Good luck with that!

Below: Brendan O’Neill at Spiked is not known for gentle persuasion, and his anger is on view in this article. He sees the Columbia protests, as do others here (as well as I) as a harbinger of the dismantling of Enlightenment values after the entitled, propagandized, and antisemitic college students of our era grow up. (Note: that is of course not all college students, or even a majority, but does include the most vociferous and activist ones.)

Excerpts:

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

. . .We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.

How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.

From the Wall Street Journal, where author Jason Riley is an opinion columnist. And as he’s African-American, he adds a civil-rights perspective to his piece, and calls for authority to curb illegal demonstrations:

Excerpts:

In 1957, white mobs in Little Rock, Ark., in defiance of the Brown ruling, were preventing black students from safely attending school. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to do something about it. In a prime-time television address, the president explained that “demagogic extremists” and “disorderly mobs” were thwarting the law and that he had an “inescapable” responsibility to respond if Arkansas officials refused to protect black students. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts,” he said. Then Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division.

The particulars then and now may differ, but the same principle is at stake. The federal government was obligated to come to the aid of an ethnic minority group being threatened by mob violence. Jews in 2024 deserve no less protection than blacks in 1957. And if university officials can’t handle the situation, or won’t let police deal properly with the unrest, Mr. Biden needs to step up.

. . .Mr. Biden’s response to antisemitism is also tempered by political expediency. The young people acting out on campuses are a crucial voting bloc that Democrats worry about losing to independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said on Monday, before quickly adding: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” That sounds like someone who knows how badly he needs Michigan, a state with a large Arab-American population that has soured on him for supporting Israel.

Contrary to what Mr. Biden suggested, the outrage over what is happening to Jews isn’t the result of ignorance or a misunderstanding. Rather, it stems from yet another viewing of a movie Jews have seen too many times. It’s the one where those in a position to do something choose to do nothing.

Biden’s statement was craven: an attempt to placate everyone. The man is incapable of condemning attacks on one side without offering a bouquet to the other. He’s certainly desperate to get as many votes as possible, but I’m tired of his waffling. The fact is that the demonstrators at Columbia are worthy of condemnation for their act alone. It’s as if he said, “I condemn the attack of ships in the Red Sea, but I also condemn those who don’t have empathy for the Houthis.”

Pro-Palestinian protests grow angrier, more violent, and more hateful as they spread across America

April 22, 2024 • 10:00 am

Over the last two weeks, demonstrations by pro-Palestinian protestors have spread across America, most notably on college campuses like Yale and Columbia, but also in many cities, where protestors block bridges and streets. And the protests have grown more intense and more hateful. The inevitable chanting has become darker, morphing from hatred of Israel into hatred of Jews. In some places (see below), violence against Jews has erupted as well. Sentiment among protestors is shifting from defense of the Palestinian people to approval of Hamas and Iran—and of violence and terrorism.

The four pieces below from Commentary and The Free Press (click each to read) discuss this trend. As Seth Mandel notes in the first piece, the protests, unlike those of the Sixties which were against the Vietnam war, now seem to be calling for war.

At Columbia University, the protestors, who were booted off campus, with many suspended and arrested, have returned, and a rabbi connected with the school has told Jewish students that, for their safety, they should go home and stay there. Nemat Shafik, the President of Columbia, has canceled in-person classes for today, with all classes becoming virtual, while New York’s mayor Eric Adams has condemned the antisemitism being emitted around Columbia. But in general, campus authorities have done little to quash illegal acts by protestors (even Shafik has apparently decided to let the protestors occupy the campus illegally).

As one example, about a month ago we were hearing chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Globalize the infitada,” words that are fairly threatening but can be twisted by ideologues to imply that they’re not really calling for violence. Now, however, the articles below recount chants and words like these, which allow for no innocuous interpretation.

“Their god is CAPITAL and God is our Witness.” [a sign in a Chicago protest referring to the supposed money-grubbing of Jews]

“Never forget the 7th of October”. “That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, not 10,000. . . The 7th of October is going to be every day for you.” [yelled to Jews at Columbia]

“Iran you make us proud.” [from NYC]

“Yemen, Yemen, make us proud; turn another ship around!” [widespread]

“Resistance by any means necessary!” [this has been around for a while but is spreading]

“Go back to Poland” [shouted to Jews at Columbia]

“Uncultured a** b****es, go back to Europe. You have no culture. All you do is colonize.” [from Columbia, reported in The Jerusalem Post]

“Zionism will fall, brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel will fall”. . . . “US imperialists, number one terrorists.” [ibid]

“Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” [Columbia]

Fuck Israel, Israel a bitch / Bitch we out here mobbin’ on some Palestine shit / Free Palestine bitch, Israel gon’ die bitch / Nigga it’s they land why you out here tryna rob it / Bullshit prophets, y’all just want the profit [“blasted at Yale” as recounted by Sahar Tartak]

“We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets, too.” [from Jonathan Lederer’s piece below]

“Al-Qassam make us proud, kill another soldier now.” [Al-Qassam is the military arm of Hams, and the soldiers refer to the IDF]

“There is no god but Allah, and the martyr is Allah’s beloved!” [like the above two, overheard by Lederer]. Arabic slogans are becoming increasingly common, and I suspect that many Americans who shout them have no idea what they mean.

You can read all the article below in a short while, as none of them is long, but all are scary. Click each to read, and I’ve given just a few words excerpted from each. At the bottom of the post I proffer a few of my own thoughts.

An excerpt from Mandel’s piece:

Yesterday’s protests at Columbia highlighted a key difference between the left-wing protests of generations past and the current demonstrations: While both cheer America’s enemies, the 2024 version is ostentatiously, undeniably pro-war.

. . .“Never forget the 7th of October,” they shouted at Jews at Columbia last night. “That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, not 10,000… The 7th of October is going to be every day for you.”

This kind of enthusiasm for the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, complete with sexual torture and the dismemberment of young children, is important to note for several reasons, only one of which is that it highlights these protestors’ uncontrollable urge for the Mideast war to go on forever. It’s also notable because it’s honest: The Hamas-a-thons all around the country have been clear about what their participants want. Screeching bloodlust so explicit it would have made Nazis blush has become the ticket to ride in progressive activist circles.

. . . At yesterday’s Capitol Hill hearing on anti-Semitism at Columbia, Rep. Ilhan Omar said the ongoing protests shouldn’t so much be characterized as anti-Israel vs. pro-Israel but anti-war vs. pro-war. She was right, but not in the way she intended. Israel’s supporters never wanted this war. President Biden never wanted this war. But for the anti-American and anti-Israel demonstrators on college campuses and all around the country, war is all they desire.

From Bari Weiss’s piece, a summary of the other two pieces and a call for action:

Students—all of us—have a right to protest. We have a right to protest for dumb causes and horrible causes. At The Free Press, we will always defend that right. (See here and here, for example.)

It is not, however, a First Amendment right to physically attack another person. It is not a First Amendment right to detain another person as part of your protest. And while Americans are constitutionally protected when they say vile things, like wishing upon Jews a thousand October 7s, we are certainly free to criticize those who say them. We are also free to condemn institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth who have abandoned that mission, and who stand by and do nothing meaningful to stop scenes like the ones of the past 48 hours.

The students who support terror have given in to madness. Refusing to condemn them is madness.

There are courageous students who see that madness clearly. Please read these essays by Jonathan Lederer and Sahar Tartak.

Lederer was brave enough to assemble a group of Jewish students in the middle of the fracas at Columbia:

On Saturday night, the situation on campus hit a new low. Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war.

For an hour, 20 of us stood on the sundial in the middle of Columbia’s campus with Israeli and American flags and sang peaceful songs such as Matisyahu’s “One Day” and “V’hi She’amda”—a much-needed ode to the hope and perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of enemies who seek our destruction.

Even as we sang lyrics such as “We don’t want to fight no more, there will be no more war,” we were met with hostility. Masked keffiyeh-wearers came to us face-to-face, trying to intimidate us. They chanted, “Fuck Israel, Israel’s a bitch!” We were told, “You guys are all inbred.” They threw water in our faces. These groups are not fairly described as “pro-Palestine.” They are active supporters of Hamas and they say so explicitly: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” one group chanted by the gates of my school. “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”

One keffiyeh-masked protester came up to my friends and I and held up a sign with an arrow pointing toward us that read: “Al-Qassam’s Next Targets.” Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas.

. . . At least two solid objects were thrown at me from close range, one of which hit me directly in the face and the other in the chest. Finally, I succeeded in grabbing my flags and ran to rejoin my friends. We ended up being chased out of campus and told to “go back to Poland,” a poignant reminder that even in America, antisemites wish to condemn Jews like me to our ancestors’ tragic fate.

Tartak is “visibly Jewish,” and ran into trouble when she went to a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Yale with a “visibly Jewish” friend. (She’s okay now). There are videos in this piece and the one above.

I was stabbed in the eye last night on Yale University’s campus because I am a Jew.

By April 20, the students’ encampment had grown to roughly forty tents, sleeping bags, umbrellas, and a stereo. On Saturday night, a student in a Class of 2026 group chat encouraged Yalies to come and show their support for Yalies4Palestine. As a student journalist for the Yale Free Press, I went to check it out. Other reporters from the Yale Daily News were already on the scene.

I should say here that I am a visibly observant Jew who wears a large Star of David around my neck and dresses modestly. I went over with my friend Netanel Crispe, who is also identifiably Jewish because of his beard, black hat, and tzitzit.

When we approached the anti-Israel protest accompanying the tent encampment to document the demonstration, we were quickly walled off by demonstration organizers and attendees who stood in a line in front of us. No one else documenting the event was blockaded this way.

In every direction we moved, demonstrators stood in front of us, arms linked, yelling along with the crowd. (Watch this video and ask yourself if this would happen to a student who did not look visibly Jewish.)

. . .Before too long, the protesters encircled me in addition to the human blockade. Their arms linked, and they danced in a circle around me so that I was pinned between them, the human blockade, and a wall. Some other demonstrators noticed this and joined in on the taunting.

They pointed their middle fingers at me and yelled “Free Palestine,” and the taunting continued until a six-foot-something male protester holding a Palestinian flag waved the flag in my face and then stabbed me with it in my left eye.

*******************************

Why have the protests intensified and grown from anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian to open calls for eliminating Israel and killing Jews? Why, as Mandel asks, do the protestors now seem to desire war, and apparently a war not just on Israel, but on the entire West? Truly, it is a call for a globalized intifada, and apparently one meant to destroy all Enlightenment values of the West and restore Islamism.

I have no firm answers except to say it appears to be a concatenation of several factors exacerbated by the war between Israel and Hamas. For one thing, Israel is winning and will win, and that must anger the protestors no end. (Not to mention the help that the U.S. is giving Israel, defending it against Iran’s attack and now giving $17 billion to help defend Israel.) There is a faddishness of the protests, too, with some students simply going along with what seems to be the dominant political ideology on campus. And the dominance of that ideology can surely be laid largely at the door of DEI on campus, which sees Israel as composed of white oppressor-colonialists, not as another oppressed minority.

Calling the police on illegal protests certainly riles up the participants, for one commonality of all “progressives” is a hatred of cops, and when the cops come it will appear to be a vindication of the protestors’ ideas. (They’ve just started arresting protestors at Yale.)

And behind it all is money, money from people or groups I don’t know of but are surely funding groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Within Our Lifetime, the two main groups, both well funded, behind campus demonstrations. (Didn’t you notice that all the tents on the Columbia campus were the same? Who bought them?) SJP, for example, has over 200 branches on American campuses, and a national headquarters that surely coordinates and plans demonstrations. Who funds them? Could money be coming from Iran or other places in the Middle East, who sense, along with the American groups, that this is their moment to strike? Who knows?

What do the protestors hope to accomplish with these raucous demonstrations? People who are inconvenienced are naturally ticked off, and those people are not likely to buy into the slogans above. There may be a small effect in persuading Biden to pressure Israel about the war when he sees both American Muslims and young people becoming more sympathetic to Palestine and more critical of Israel. But the demands of the demonstrators—mainly for colleges to divest from everything Israeli (especially armaments)—aren’t going to be met.

Palestinian students, of course, have a personal interest in the war, but many of the demonstrators (most of the ones I’ve seen in Chicago) are not Palestinians, but Americans or non-Palestinian foreign students. It may well be true that what we’re seeing is the biggest example of college virtue signaling yet. But of course what starts on campus spreads to the rest of America, as we saw with DEI.

While it may be true that only a fraction of the protestors really believe in the things they are chanting, it takes only a small group of dedicated believers to leverage change, and in this case it’s change for the worse. For it’s not only the existence of Israel that’s at stake, but the Enlightenment values behind the American project. Already many academic institutions are threatened by these protestors, and what is next? One can hardly call Columbia these days an “academic institution.”

If “globalizing the intifada” is truly a goal of many protestors, then it’s time, as Bari Weiss said, to stand up against the madness. Too many Americans who despise the goals of these protestors remain silent, for they don’t want to stick their heads above the parapet. But if ever there’s a time to do that, it’s now. If not now, when?

The hatred is not limited to American protestors. This is in Ottawa:

“October 7th Proves We’re Almost Free!”. The crowd goes wild.
“Long live October 7th!”

Today, downtown Ottawa. No more euphemisms, they are openly promoting terrorism and violence towards Jews. This is intolerable and it is time for Canadians to speak up. pic.twitter.com/RVfnHEKReS

— Jaime Kirzner-Roberts (@jaimekr) April 21, 2024

Students Supporting Israel is the only group that Vanderbilt rejects among 11 applicants for its Multicultural Leadership Council

April 16, 2024 • 11:30 am

What a life! First I defend the speech rights of pro-Palestinian student who may well favor the elimination of Israel, and now I’m back again at Vanderbilt University, where, according to both the student newspaper and the Jewish paper The Algemeiner, students have rejected precisely one out of 11 student groups that applied to joint the school’s Multicultural Leadership Council (MLC): Students Supporting Israel. Wouldn’t you know it!? (One other group, Vanderbilt United Mission for Relief and Development, is awaiting a vote.)

There are two articles that say largely the same thing, so I’ll quote from the shorter Algemeiner piece. But let us not forget that Vanderbilt become an “Our Hero” school when its Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier (Chicago’s former Provost) had students removed and arrested after occupying the administration building for nearly a whole day, protesting Vandy’s supposed complicity in supporting Israel against Gaza. Many of the students were also given interim suspensions, and there’s no sign that those suspensions will be lifted. It was not free speech that Diermeier was opposing, for he’s a big advocate of such speech (after all, he’s from the University of Chicago). He was enforcing “time and place” regulations for protest, and it’s simply against Vandy’s rules to sit inside the administration building.

According to these two articles, the rejection of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) was a decision of Vanderbilt students, not the administration, and I guess they just don’t like Israel. After all, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, both hate-filled groups favoring the elimination of Israel, are already members of the MLC (so is a subgroup from Hillel, but I bet it’s been a member forever).

Click below to see the piece from the Vanderbilt Hustler, the student newspaper:

Click below to go to the Algemeiner piece:

I’ll quote from The Algemeiner, but you can check the other piece, too:

According to The Vanderbilt Hustler, [Students Supporting Israel] is the only one to be rejected from this year’s applicant pool, an outcome that SSI president Ryan Bauman said is evidence of febrile opposition to dialogue and coexistence among some segments of the student body. The only Jewish group to be admitted, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), is a fringe anti-Israel organization that did not condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel and has long celebrated terrorism against Israelis.

Among the nine groups to be admitted to the MLC this year were the Taiwanese American Student Association, Vanderbilt Pride Serve, the Vanderbilt Association for South Asian Cuisine, and the Vanderbilt Iranian Student Association. One of the 11 total organizations that applied, Vanderbilt United Mission for Relief and Development, is still awaiting an upcoming vote.

As a requirement of its application, SSI was told to deliver a presentation to the MLC but given only a few minutes to do so. Afterward, the group was cross-examined by the MLC — of which Students for Justice in Palestine is a member organization — about their opinions regarding “genocide” and “apartheid,” an apparent attempt to use the proceeding as a soapbox for anti-Zionist propaganda.

“We told them that we didn’t show up to discuss politics,” Bauman told The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday. “We told them we were there to celebrate Israeli culture and further the pro-Israel movement and invited them to have other dialogues at another time. We were then told to leave, and they held a closed session. And as you can see, it resulted in us being rejected by a wide margin.”

Is there any reason besides antisemitism or anti-Zionism that SSI would be the only group to be rejected? If you know Jewish Voice for Peace and especially Students for Justice in Palestine, you’ll know that they’re to a large extent hate groups who favor the abolition of Israel (SJP also celebrated Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel). Is it too much to ask for a group supporting Israel to be added to the mix? Apparently so.

One more note from The Algemeiner:

This is not the first time that Students Supporting Israel has been denied membership in a student organization. In 2021, the president of Duke University’s Student Government vetoed a vote approving recognition of SSI, an incident which set off volleys of criticism and a sharp rebuke from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

“Grant them the same access,” Brandeis Center president Alyza Lewin said at the time, warning of potential civil rights violations. “Treat them no differently than any other student recognized organization. If the university chooses not to intervene and does not make sure that SSI gets equal access and it is understood to be no different than any other organization, there could be potential legal liability for the university.”

That also holds for Vanderbilt, whose reputation for fairness could be besmirched by this act. As I said, I don’t blame the administration, which has been exemplary. Chancellor Diermeier also adopted the position of institutional neutrality as embodied in The University of Chicago’s Kalven report, making Vanderbilt one of only a handful of schools to take this essential position. Pity his efforts are being tarred by a bunch of hypocritical students.

Luana Maroja fights a proposal to eliminate grades for first-semester students at Williams College

April 10, 2024 • 9:45 am

My partner in crime, biologist Luana Maroja at prestigious Williams College, is once again making heterodox statements that will peeve a number of students—and perhaps faculty. But she is brave.

In this case, some Williams students got the bright idea last winter that the College should do away with all grades for first-semester students because those students want to play and socialize without any “pressure”. Further, the stress of getting grades could supposedly damage their mental health.

But of course one of the motivations (see below) also seems to be achieving “equity”—a motivation designed to cast opponents of the suggestion as bigots or racists. The “equity excuse” has been made by a number of colleges to not only eliminate grades for incoming students, but also to omit standardized tests like the SAT as requirements for applying to college. In its place some schools have installed “holistic admissions”, a way to get around the Supreme Court ruling that colleges cannot use race-based admissions. In fact, required standardized tests seem have the effect of boosting minority achievement, by highlighting those students who do particularly well in comparison with others.

It appears, and this is not rocket science, that most student groups at Williams are in favor of the proposal. They don’t really want to bust their hump first semester; they want to play and hang out. Luana, of course, thinks this is slacking off, as you can see from her letter, which was published this morning in The Williams Record (the student newspaper). I agree because I’m an old-school professor, but Luana is young. It appeared today because the faculty will be discussing the propsal this afternoon.

Click below to read it:

I’ll quote the first four paragraphs of the letter, but the whole letter is about three times longer:

This winter, the student members of the Committee on Educational Affairs (CEA) brought an argument that the College should adopt a mandatory Credit/No Credit (C/NC) grading policy for students in their first semester at the College. On April 3, faculty were informed about this argument, which will be a topic of discussion at the faculty meeting this afternoon.

This suggestion was based on similar policies at peer institutions, like Swarthmore, MIT, and Wellesley, where first-year students still receive letter grades on all course components, but receive “credit” or “no credit” designations on their official transcripts (i.e. shadow grading). The argument claims that grade-induced academic expectations are stressful and that students’ mental health and social relationships will improve under a C/NC system while keeping students’ long-term academic performance intact.

What proponents of the argument fail to realize is that adopting the policy could, in fact, result in significant academic harm, especially for students who do not come from elite academic backgrounds. Although there will not be a motion to adopt the policy at this afternoon’s meeting — the CEA brought this topic to the general faculty for discussion to build consensus on the “underlying value of the goals” — I think it is important to share my opinion here, because many students are not familiar with this argument and many professors who share my feelings are afraid to voice opposition due to the framing’s focus on mental health, grades, and minorities.

The argument claims that grades given in the first semester harm various marginalized groups. It asserts that “isolation, stress and a myopic focus on academics … are differentially demanding for marginalized students, whether based on their racial identity, class, sexual orientation or any otherness.” While I appreciate the empathy for marginalized groups, this framing stifles debate. Because the argument is framed as “reducing harm towards minorities,” professors and students opposed to the argument will be afraid of voicing concerns or offering arguments against it lest they be perceived as callous or bigoted.

As Luana points out later, she herself, as a Brazilian student entering an American graduate school (Cornell), and coming from a dysfunctional educational system, well knows motivating value of assessing merit. You can’t do that with a pass/no pass system.

	Leslie MacMillan on I have landed!
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	ThyroidPlanet on I have landed!
	Frau Katze on University of Wisconsin-Milwau…
	Barbara Knox on University of Wisconsin-Milwau…