Columbia University

A big part of the social contract for a modern society is an agreement that citizens will grant the state a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in exchange for that state protecting its subjects, including from mobs within the state and other illegal behavior. The expectation is that the rules will be enforced fairly and equally, or the contract loses legitimacy.  The United States has a First Amendment that protects speech to a level that doesn’t exist in other countries, including speech that is openly supportive of terrorism and mass murder. In this regard, the groups organizing campus protests are putting on a fine civics lesson for everyday Americans exhibited by the main groups behind many of the current college protests we are witnessing.

New York I’m on Columbia’s campus today. Sorry, I mean, “The People’s University for Palestine.” I graduated from the university in May 2020. My alumni ID allows me access. A couple of days ago, student protesters started occupying the South Lawn, in front of Butler Library. The police force was called in. Some arrests were made. The police were able to clear the eastern half of the lawn, but the western half remains occupied. Students have pitched tents. Hand-painted signs hang from clotheslines that stretch around the lawn. “Welcome to the People’s University for Palestine.” “Free All Palestinian Prisoners. Ceasefire Now.” “While You Read Gaza Bleeds.” “Admitted Students Enroll in Revolution.” Palestine flags and keffiyehs are everywhere.

Undoubtedly the best moment in the testimony of Minouche Shafik, the President Columbia University, before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week was elicited by Representative Jim Banks. Why, he wanted to know, was the word “folks” spelled “folx” throughout an official guidebook for the School of Social Work? Shafik coyly suggested that perhaps the authors did not know how to spell, which might well be the case. But you cannot watch her squirming response without feeling the hot, sticky, and slightly nauseating air of disingenuousness wash over the proceeding.  “Folx,” as Shafik must be aware, is just the latest instance of weaponized orthography disseminated by the academic left. Think “Latinx” and you are on the right track.

As a left-wing sympathizer to the Palestinian cause, I cringed when I heard reports that college students around the country, including at Columbia University, my alma mater, had expressed support for Hamas’s murder of Israeli civilians on October 7. My first thought was that “woke” students had lost their minds — confusing the perfectly legitimate defense of Palestinian rights with the usual laundry list of “resistance” clichés that pay little attention to history, morality or the subtleties of the English language.

To start a fire, you need a match, something that burns and air. So to speak. If you don’t have a match, you can use flint, but that takes patience and skill. What you burn should have a low combustion point. And the air should have sufficient oxygen. Starting a fire, like starting anything, has predicates: the things you need before you can truly started. But when it comes to education, some people believe we can go directly to the steak sizzling on the grill, never mind the preliminaries. This hastiness never works out very well. The latest example is the slow death of “balanced literacy.” That’s the approach to teaching children how to read that was championed by Professor Lucy Calkins, from her perch at Columbia University’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.