Gaza

A friend wrote me to ask, “Why is this mess happening on campus?" Here is my response.  Let me offer some thoughts, as a long-time professor, in hopes they spur your own.  Let's begin with something apolitical: young people love expressions of group solidarity. Some protests are like football games, held conveniently in the spring when spirits soar. Let's all join in, especially if it is costless virtue-signaling. And in the absence of any serious punishment, that's what it is.  These demonstrations happen a lot more often when the weather is nice. It's a lot easier to pitch tents on the quadrangle in April or October than in January and February. It’s a lot easier to sit on the Golden Gate Bridge, too.  But why the hatred of Israel and so often of Jews?

Cockburn wasn’t sure how he would occupy his time after the season finale of The Bachelor aired last month. As it turns out, following daily updates from the pro-Palestinian encampment on the University of California, Los Angeles campus is better than anything on TV. The latest scene — banana warfare —is particularly absurd. The encampment, which began on April 25 with 100 students, has swelled to over 400 protesters. Organized by UC Divest, the activists are demanding that the university system divest from companies associated with the Israeli military, cut ties with Los Angeles Police Department and academically boycott Israeli universities.

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.

University of Southern California’s 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, will not be allowed to deliver a speech at the university's commencement ceremony due to, according to the school’s provost, security concerns. The cancellation comes following a wave of criticism over what groups such as US-nonprofit StopAntisemitism labeled “her authoring [of] an antisemitic social media post on her Instagram account.” This is a textbook attack on the principle of free expression in the name of security. The move is designed to avoid controversy and save face by unjustly silencing those whose beliefs and speech differs from that of other, often more powerful, groups.  You don’t have to agree with Tabassum. You may well see her position on Israel-Palestine as radical and impractical.

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.

“I am enormously sad that we have students who are so rude as to come into my home, in my backyard, and use this social occasion for their political agenda,” said hapless University of California Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Last week, Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, were humiliated at a home dinner they hosted for third-year law students when Malak Afaneh, a Palestinian-American student who is co-president of the Berkeley chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, produced a microphone she had brought with her and launched into a speech protesting the dinner and, apparently, her host.