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 ReformLast 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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