Is that a good thing? It’s debatable. At Columbia, pro-Hamas demonstrators disrupted the first day of classes:
Dozens of screaming anti-Israel protesters swarmed Columbia University as classes kicked off Tuesday — resuming the chaotic demonstrations that paralyzed the Upper Manhattan campus at the tail end of last semester.
The rowdy demonstrators formed a picket line and banged drums as scores of students waited in lengthy lines to pass through security and gain access to the Ivy League school in Morningside Heights.
The pro-Hamas crowd was blocking entrances to the campus so students couldn’t get in. As we have noted before, the local unit of the United Auto Workers is viciously anti-Semitic. Not sure how that relates to representing their members. But then, unions don’t generally represent their members:
This guy gets the world’s smallest violin:
“As we prepare to begin a new semester, Gazan students have no universities left to which they can return,” said Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups.
Sadly, that isn’t true.
The number of anti-Semites turning out to demonstrate appears to be down significantly from last year. Maybe the fad is dying out. In any event, it isn’t a hard problem to solve. Anyone who 1) obstructs access to the campus, 2) camps out on campus, 3) occupies a building, or 4) assaults or threatens a Jewish student should be arrested. If he is a Columbia student, he should be criminally prosecuted and expelled. If he is not a Columbia student, he should be criminally prosecuted, barred from the campus and, preferably, jailed. The same holds for every college and university across the country.
The solution is obvious, but it isn’t one that most university administrators, and many prosecutors’ offices, are willing to implement. So our decline continues apace.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.