Woody Allen once said that “80 percent of success is showing up.” Yesterday, Columbia University established its academic corollary: 80 percent of defeat is not showing up. In a disgraceful decision that deprived students of one of the most memorable moments of their lives, the university yielded to protesters who have occupied parts of the campus and buildings. Instead, graduates will be allowed to go to small-scale graduations.
It is a profile of cowardice that will stain the record of Columbia for years to come.
Notably, the graduation is ordinarily held on the space where students set up an encampment, but that space was finally cleared by police last week. It did not matter.
Columbia stated that “holding a large commencement ceremony on our campus presented security concerns that unfortunately proved insurmountable…Like our students, we are deeply disappointed with this outcome.”
“Insurmountable?” It is your campus. These are your students. Hold the damn commencement.
Columbia said the security advisers identified “too many variables” for holding the commencement and that adding security would only trigger the protesters.
So the solution, once again, is to do precisely what the protesters wanted.
Schools like University of Southern California said late last month that it was canceling its main commencement ceremony, citing similar security concerns.
Protesters disrupted the commencement at University of Michigan this weekend. However, Michigan did not yield. They handled the disruption and held their ground. They held their commencement.
The decision by Columbia is consistent with how administrators have approached disruptive protests for years. While some of us have called upon schools to suspend or to expel students preventing others from speaking on campus, universities have yielded over and over again. Indeed, citing security concerns became an easy way for schools to cancel conservative speakers while professing neutrality on the content of their views.
Faculty have not only encouraged but participated in such cancel campaigns.
Even classes have been stopped by protesters at places like Northwestern without any repercussions for the students. Northwestern (my alma mater) is the ultimate example of administrators picking the path of least resistance in the face of radicalized students. Recently, seven out of 11 members of the “President’s Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate” resigned in protest.
Under the controversial agreement, the school will admit five Palestinian students each year, support two Palestinian faculty members annually, create special housing for Muslim students, and add students to Committees to review purchases from Israeli businesses.
Columbia has been consistently ranked at the very bottom of schools for free speech due to its intolerance for opposing viewpoints and failure to protect a diversity of opinions on campus.
Even the dean of its leading journalism school has warned against the “weaponization of free speech.” One of Columbia’s centers publicly complained when Justice Brett Kavanaugh was allowed to speak on campus.
When Columbia finally drew the line at protesters damaging and taking over buildings, the response from many students and faculty was outrage.
After Hamilton Hall was cleared by police, the editors of Columbia Law Review asked for the cancelation of exams because they were emotionally compromised. The editors wrote that the clearing of the unauthorized encampment constituted traumatic “violence” that left them “irrevocably shaken” and “unable to focus.” They were joined by editors of five other law journals, including the Columbia Human Rights Law Review & A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual.
They portrayed the trauma as the appearance of counter protesters and police on campus, accusing a “white supremacist, neo-fascist hate group” of “storming” campus. The Columbia students told the university that “many are unwell at this time and cannot study or concentrate while their peers are being hauled to jail.”
Columbia then faced threats of protests at the commencement, so it solved the problem by doing what the protesters were demanding. Of course, it did not solve the problem. Columbia is the problem. It is an example of how administrators have yielded control over their campuses to the loudest and most aggressive elements in their community.
Higher education is not supposed to be an academic version of the Hunger Games where the last person standing wins in a contest of attrition.
It is perhaps only appropriate that Columbia’s final lesson for graduates should be a continuation of years of yielding to the demands of those who dictate what can be said or done on campus.
Many of these students were denied commencement ceremonies four years ago. They worked to get into Columbia and many of their families had to make huge sacrifices to allow them to study at the university. As protests ramped up, they found themselves barred from campus and told again to take remote classes. A Jewish professor’s access card was deactivated because his presence on campus was viewed as too inflammatory for the protesters.
When they are finally ready to celebrate that moment, they have been told, again, that commencement is cancelled. However, this is not due to a pandemic but protesters. They will have to go to smaller graduations that are less objectionable to the radical elements of the student body.
Henry David Thoreau once said “The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.” It has the same effect on higher education. There was a clear path open to Columbia. Hold the commencement and hold any disrupters accountable. In choosing to yield, President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik has abandoned not just these graduates but the integrity of Columbia.
Do you remember when Trump was castigated as an antisemite because he forwarded a Lock-Her-Up meme with Hillary behind bars? It was illogical, as Hillary Clinton is Christian, and the clip art used was labeled “sheriff’s badge”, and indeed the 6 pointed star is often used in law enforcement. Trump had Jewish family, friends, and was close to Netanyahu. He proved to be the strongest ally of Israel of any American president. Logic had nothing to do with it. He was accused of antisemitism, and nothing he did or said mattered.
Do you remember when there was a riot at Charlottesville, over whether to remove or keep a statue? Trump said there were good people on both sides of the statue debate, but that the Neo Nazis should be “condemned totally.” The media and activists dishonestly ignored the last half of his statement, and declared that Trump praised Neo Nazis, again accusing him of antisemitism. Logic or facts had nothing to do with it.
Today, we have President Joe Biden actively interfering in Israel’s war against genocidal antisemitic terror group Hamas, accepting the fraudulent fatality figures from Hamas, and threatening Israel for fighting those who would kill them all. Joe Biden has been pandering to the antisemites.
Today, we have the modern Middle East Nazi movement sweeping across America. It was inevitable, once success became considered evil. Although Jews have suffered from persecution, genocides, subjugation, harassment, and diaspora for thousands of years, arguably more than any other group of people, they committed the sin of overcoming adversity and thriving. On average, they value education, obeying the law, community, waiting to have children until marriage and then taking care of those children, and hard work. All conservative values that are proven to produce a middle class or higher economic success, no matter how they vote. Financial success wipes out a history of being discriminated against, in the calculus of the Left. It doesn’t matter that ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of Israel, and that they already gave up 85% of the land proposed for Israel to appease antisemitic Arabs. The Left views antisemitic Arabs as the oppressed, because Jews are more financially successful than the terrorist governance of Gaza has yielded for Palestinians. It does not matter that there are successful Israeli Arabs living in Israel, outside of Gaza and the West Bank. It doesn’t matter that Muslims are represented in Israel’s Knesset and Supreme Court. Facts don’t matter in an emotional argument.
Antisemitism is an extension of anticapitalism. The Left believes making a success of yourself is a crime, and that the government should oppress the cleverest, most driven, intelligent, and ambitious people so that everyone has the same outcome, except for the elites, of course. Thus belonging to a successful socioeconomic class is a more serious crime to the Left than Hamas gang raping, torturing, mutilating, murdering, and kidnapping Jews.
This is appalling.
KS: Well said, again.
Especially this: “Antisemitism is an extension of anticapitalism.”
There is that “extension” because both are collectivistic and anti-individualism. People need to grasp that, at root, this is a battle over fundamental *ideas*.
“Instead of Swastikas, they are wearing Keffiyehs.”
https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2024/05/what-does-the-holocaust-have-to-do-with-me/
Do you really think that if right-wing students were holding disruptive protests that the Columbia administration would be so passive?
The Columbia administration views any person with right wing views as a member of “white supremacist, neo-fascist hate group”. Dealing with “those people” is not insurmountable.
When your university trains them to be communists, you shouldn’t be surprised when they act like communists. If it was a legitimate university producing legitimate education, then I would say have the graduation with lots of armed security. If Hamas interupts, arrest them. If they attack, shoot them with tasers and rubber bullets. If they keep attacking, shoot them with live ammunition.
That’s what foreign traitors do.
“Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was Vice President of the World Bank, Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, and Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.
Born: Alexandria, Egypt
Spouse: Raffael Jovine (m. 2002) Resides in England.
Minouche Shafik nationality: American, British, Egyptian
Office: Member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom since 2020 ”
You have a foreigner running your crap, so it is crap.
Former husband: Mohamed Abdullah El-Erian is an Egyptian-American economist and businessman. He is President of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and chief economic adviser at Allianz, the corporate parent of PIMCO where he was CEO and co-chief investment officer.
FOREIGNERS WON’T LISTEN TO YOU, THEY WILL DO WHATEVER THEY WANT TO.
The president of Columbia is MUSLIM. It matters – obviously … given how this has played out. Are people afraid to state facts.