WASHINGTON
Kudos to President Donald Trump’s administration for canceling $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
“Since Oct. 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on their campuses — only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon, also a member of Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, said in a Friday statement.
A report by Columbia’s antisemitism task force addressed how toxic pro-Palestinian protests have polluted university life. One student, a university report noted, captured 750 antisemitic online posts written by Columbia students.
With Trump in the White House, expect long overdue change.
Over the weekend, ICE officials detained a Columbia University Apartheid Divest leader, Mahmoud Khalil, even though his lawyer told The Associated Press he has a green card and is a legal permanent resident.
“Columbia Expelled Student Protesters For the First Time in Over 50 years. But Activists Won’t back Down,” read a Friday headline in the Nation.
“The last recorded expulsions for non-peaceful demonstrations were in 1968,” the Nation reported. Subsequent student sit-ins, takeovers and blockades occurred “without (students) suffering the same disciplinary outcomes as those opposing Israel’s war on Gaza.”
Like that’s a good thing.
“Students have a right to protest in all settings, including academic ones, particularly when those protests center liberal movements and call for universities to divest from genocide and warmongers, “ a spokesperson for CUAD told The Nation.
According to a university website, Columbia’s undergraduate tuition is $71,150 — and yet this bastion of higher learning apparently teaches students that (a) there is little need to distinguish between peaceful and non-peaceful protests, (b) they have a right to break laws that apply to others, and (c) they are especially entitled to break laws if they are progressive.
And where did students get that idea? Just maybe from the adults who taught them.
Four students face expulsion, Barnard College President Laura Ann Rosenbury wrote in The Chronicle for Higher Education, after they forced their way into a college building and left $30,000 in damage “to a building that houses not just the offices of the president and the dean of the college, but also multiple classrooms and the offices that seek to further diversity, equity, and inclusion at Barnard.” It makes you wonder if the students could read.
Warning. This is what happens when academic big shots sell a college education as a protest opportunity. Education optional.
“I think they should call the police immediately,” Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told me.
Call it equal justice for social-justice warriors.
In my dreams, overly partisan professors see what they have done to higher learning and take up pottery. Then college presidents hire professors who see their calling as instilling rigor and a lifelong love of learning, not coddling young adults with fad curricula. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
I’m not holding my breath. As McGuire observed, “How do you fix a problem when you can’t even see it?”
Contact Review Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.
