Commentary
“I’m scared,” says a female Columbia student to her friends in a video posted on social media. They were trying to get past a man carrying a large Palestine flag and yelling at Jewish students to “go back to Poland” in an apparent reference to that country’s Nazi occupation, during which almost 5 million Jewish and non-Jewish Polish citizens were killed during World War II. The incident occurred on April 21 on a street near Columbia University.
On April 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared the situation on elite U.S. campuses to “German universities in the 1930s.” He said on X (formerly Twitter): “They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty.” He described the situation as “horrific” and “unconscionable,” saying “it has to be stopped.”
He’s right. Massive “pro-Palestine” student protests are making veiled calls for violence, attracting off-campus racists, barring conservative Jewish students from parts of university property, and paralyzing normal university operations. At Columbia, Yale, and New York University (NYU), the protests have devolved into violence or intimidation to the point that their federal funding should be in question.
Universities are attempting to rectify the situation by moving classes online, arresting and suspending student and faculty protesters, and closing open spaces and yards to prevent activists from establishing tent cities. However, this just energizes the protests, drives them underground, and spreads them to other universities and even high schools. Crude attempts at repression do not address the underlying problem of misleading radical professors who teach biased versions of politics and history that send young students onto a path toward violence and criminality.
Congresswomen have rightly demanded the resignation of university presidents who fail to control their students and threaten the federal funding of universities that do not comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI requires that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
The universities are already arguably in noncompliance. A Columbia rabbi advised Jewish students to stay away from campus until order is restored. There is a video of a Jewish student being denied access to parts of Yale University by self-appointed student security guards associated with protesters. One conservative claims to have been stabbed in the eye by a Yale protester. NYU faculty arguably led student protesters in battling police at a protest that included bottles and chairs used as missiles or clubs against officers.
On April 21, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) wrote to Columbia’s president that “Columbia’s continued failure to restore order and safety promptly to campus constitutes a major breach of the University’s Title VI obligations, upon which federal financial assistance is contingent, and which must immediately be rectified.” Ms. Foxx said that if the president does not rectify the danger, the president will be held accountable.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) wrote on X the same day: “While Columbia’s failed leadership spent hundreds of hours preparing for this week’s Congressional hearing, it clearly was an attempt to cover up for their abject failure to enforce their own campus rules and protect Jewish students on campus.” Ms. Stefanik wrote that Columbia’s leadership lost control of campus and put the safety of Jewish students at risk. She called on Columbia’s president to resign.
Some Republican senators have gone so far as to advocate using the National Guard to protect Jewish students. According to Columbia student protesters, the university administration threatened as much to try and clear their second encampment after the first was removed, and protesters were arrested on April 18. After a midnight April 24 deadline, however, the encampment still stood.
The universities have themselves to blame for students and faculty that obstinately advocate violence, criminality, and antisemitism to the point of their own arrest. Administrations have allowed the hiring of too many radical left and communist professors, whose formative period was in the 1960s and 1970s, without at least salting them with conservative perspectives that could have provided ideological diversity and balance to student views. Old guard leftist professors molded graduate students with near impunity from the 1970s to the present. Those students are now professors molding the next generation.
One Columbia professor, Joseph Massad, wrote of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in glowing terms. He received his doctorate from the same university in 1998. Despite public criticism of his support for terrorism, he is apparently still at the university, including in a leadership position.
Radical professors mislead students into thinking about the world in a backward manner such that they support or ignore the dangers of communist dictators and terrorists around the world, and hype the supposed transgressions of American and Israeli “imperialism.”
Terrorist organizations understand this more than the average college student. On March 30 on a Hezbollah TV station, a former terrorist official said that “‘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,’” according to Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
Until the universities reform themselves, including through efforts at greater ideological diversity, we can expect them to continue being radical leftist echo chambers whose views become more extremist over time. Such reforms can best be effectuated by threatening their funding at the federal level or tying federal funding to permanent conservative professorships that would provide students with a much-needed alternative view of the world.
