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Columbia University is Lost

Columbia University is Lost

“The American flag up the tentpole outside of what once was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s office was taken down, replaced with the green flag of Hamas.”

It’s difficult to see how Columbia comes back from the images of the last few months. The school allowed this to happen and it’s so damaging.

Liel Leibovitz writes at City Journal:

Columbia Is Beyond Reform

Last week, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, was called to testify before Congress and explain how Alexander Hamilton’s alma mater had become a hotbed of anti-Semitic vitriol. She delivered the Ivy League equivalent of the Bart Simpson defense: I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove a thing. The smart set praised Shafik for her evasiveness—the presidents of Harvard and Penn were far less astute—and considered the case against Columbia closed.

The kids had other ideas.

No sooner had Shafik left Washington than hundreds of students—about 800, by the latest count, or one-fifth of the undergraduate student body—put up dozens of shiny new camping tents and renamed the Morningside Heights campus the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The American flag up the tentpole outside of what once was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s office was taken down, replaced with the green flag of Hamas. Students with loudspeakers chanted slogans like “There’s no God but Allah, and Allah loves martyrs.” An Israeli-Arab who stopped by to explain, in Arabic, why cheering on murderous terrorists was a bad idea was punched in the face and left with his mouth dripping blood. Jewish students were told to “go back to Europe” or were greeted by a kaffiyeh-clad classmate holding a sign saying “al-Qassam’s next targets,” a reference to Hamas’s military wing. Things eventually deteriorated so badly that the university had to cancel in-person classes. As of this writing, the situation is still unfolding, not only in Columbia but also at Yale, where a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye; in Michigan, where students are handing out pamphlets advocating “death to America”; and elsewhere.

Two urgent questions, both obvious, suggest themselves. The first: How did we get here? The second: What do we do now?

Answering the first question fully would require a comprehensive analysis, but for brevity’s sake, a simple reminder is in order: What we’re seeing on college campuses these days isn’t an aberration, some strange phenomenon that emerged, like a monster from the deep, with little or no warning. It’s the result of decades of deliberate planning by a complex network of administrators, lawmakers, NGOs, and media outlets, eager to convert our universities from seats of learning and inquiry to beachheads in the war for absolute political power.

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Comments

Alum should cease donating to the endowment until shafik is replaced.

This President is too weak to lead Columbia–you don’t negotiate with terrorists or criminals–you provide them the information they need to decide whether they will obey the law or not–if they do, then fine; if they don’t, then send it the police to make arrests, prosecute the nonstudents, and expel the students.

This group doesn’t understand anything but force

    Stuytown in reply to rochf. | April 30, 2024 at 8:10 am

    I think you’re assuming that the president of Columbia wants the protests to end. I wouldn’t make that leap of faith. She’s likely a sympathizer.

Why would any parent put up large stacks of to send their student there? Be interesting to see the enrollment figures for the fall semester.

    The Gentle Grizzly in reply to JimWoo. | April 30, 2024 at 7:25 am

    Because the parents see that magic name Columbia and that’s good enough for them.

    Eric R. in reply to JimWoo. | April 30, 2024 at 6:32 pm

    Even if applications drop by 50%, that would mean that Columbia still only accepts 15% of its applicants instead of the present 8%.

The degrees issued by these “universities” have become worthless:

“He imagines a hiring manager looking at resumes from a recent graduate of Columbia and a recent graduate of the University of the North Carolina. The Columbia graduate, the manager thinks, is ‘more likely to be coddled, more likely to hold strong political opinions that will distract from their work’ and ‘more likely to have benefited from grade inflation and perhaps dubious admissions policies.’”

https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/go-state-u-why-pay-a-premium-for-a-polarizing-degree

hat tip Instapundit

caseoftheblues | April 29, 2024 at 7:51 pm

Hard to say what’s more worthless…. Columbia… and frankly all Ivy League degrees or the students at these schools. Every last one of these institutions are rolling dumpster fires. No graduate from any of those schools should ever rise higher than an assistant manager at a chain fast food place (apologies to hard working common sense filled fast food asst mgrs) They absolutely should no longer be handed the reigns of power in our country. I really think we have hit upon why things have gone to absolute crap in out government and country.,, the garbage/graduates being vomited out of these schools and waltzing into positions of power

While we obviously don’t have the answer to “What is everything we have to do” we actually do have some answers to “what do we do”.

1. No more foreign governments are permitted to contribute to American Universities.

2. Enforce Civil Rights Act for Jews and Whites

3. Ron DeSantis has shown us the way, now lets go further and farther with regulating Universities

As for how we got here?

A lot of it does have to do with Republicans embracing libertarianism and as a result losing all leverage over public institutions.

Truth sometimes hurts but the 20th century Republican Party was in no way libertarian, had substantial influence over all of the nations institutions and was significantly more successful.

Constitutional and Lawful government is in no way the same thing as small government.

Ronald Raegan used the iron fist of the state to neuter the ability of your phone company to get political (Enjoy the fact that the CEO of your phone company isn’t censoring your calls? Thank Ronald Raegan for being a constitutional conservative instead of a libertarian).

We aren’t just eating the fruits of the lefts long march, we also have the results of the Republicans stupid march into libertarianism that enabled the purge of the institutions by surrendering all power, and where voters gave Republicans power not using it.

TLDR version

More like DeSantis for our politicians and perhaps further than he goes, stop with the Ron Swanson larp he is a satirical figure written by liberals.

For those who are unaware, Columbia University was the first academic institution in this nation to become a hotbed of Communist activity, dating back to the mid-1930s. It is not without reason that when “The Frankfurt Four” petitioned FDR to be allowed to escape Hitler and emigrate to the US, they were invited by Columbia University to become professors there. I invite the readers here to do their own research on what I have posted, especially about The Frankfurt Four. I promise it will be very enlightening.

Anonymous Bosh | April 30, 2024 at 8:52 am

How did we get here? Two ways: gradually and then suddenly

First EVERY picture of the terrorist should include comments like “they really should complete their showers and leave their bath towels at home” Second, at no point should anyone say they are “protesters” They are not. They are terrorists. They back the terrorists in the middle east, so by association they are terrorist too. All those in the encampments should be arrested, and if a student of college (whether its that college or another), expelled with forfeiture of all scholarship and monies the college is owed. All credits earned by the student at the college will be ignored. They will have to start college afresh. This would apply to all those who are college employees. Also any and all faculty who takes part should be immediately fired, tenured or not. Do this and suddenly the problems in the colleges will be severely diminished.

Columbia has lost all respect. We’ll see how that plays out for them in the coming years.