Expect “more aggressive protests and potentially violence this fall” on campuses

Expect “more aggressive protests and potentially violence this fall” on campuses

The likelihood of upcoming violence and protests was the subject of an Op-Ed in The NY Post Kemberlee and I recently published, The Red-Green Alliance Is Bringing Mayhem To The DNC and Campuses:

What to expect on campuses also was the focus of my interview by Tiffany Meier at NTD Evening News:

Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)

Meier: Earlier we spoke with William Jacobson, law professor at Cornell University, and founder of the Equal Protection Project about [Columbia University President Minouche] Shafik’s resignation. William Jacobson, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you on the show.

WAJ: Thanks for having me on.

Meier: Now, to begin, what is your reaction to Shafik resigning and how likely are we to see other university presidents follow suit?

WAJ: Well, we’ve already seen several of them, and I think that it’s the schools that are in the hot seat, the schools where there’s a lot of trouble and where there’s congressional scrutiny and political scrutiny. So I wasn’t shocked she resigned. She performed very poorly when she appeared before Congress.

Columbia has been a complete disaster as a campus, very aggressive protests, and she didn’t seem to know how to deal with them. So it’s not at all shocking that she’s bowing out. Same thing happened at Cornell, where I teach, that president didn’t have the congressional problem, but bowed out. I don’t think she could handle it.

Meier: And on that note, what is your assessment on how these universities handled antisemitism on campuses in the wake of these pro-Palestinian protests?

WAJ: They didn’t really know how to deal with it. I think they were unprepared for it. I think ideologically they have thrown in essentially with the Palestinian cause and they didn’t realize what the impact would be on campuses. And of course, we know in UCLA a judge just ordered the UCLA campus to not allow protesters to bar Zionists and Jews from areas of campus.

So I think the administrations have been an abject failure. They should have seen this coming, but apparently they didn’t.

Meier: In terms of protests, what can we expect to see on college campuses this fall?

WAJ: I think it’s going to be what happened last year, but on steroids. I think that what we’re going to see at the DNC in Chicago, those very aggressive protests bordering on riots, are going to happen on campuses. I think a lot of the students that I’m observing, the anti-Israel students who are also, in many ways the anti-American students, are extremely frustrated. They built their encampments, they built their tent cities, and it had virtually no impact on any of the campuses. Yes, it did intimidate a bunch of people and it did cause legal problems for the schools, but no schools have really changed their policies. None of these schools are boycotting Israel.

And so I think they’re frustrated and I think that frustration’s going to play out in more aggressive protests and potentially violence this fall.

Meier:  On that intimidation note, in your view, what will it take for Jewish students to feel safe on college campuses and go to classes?

WAJ: Well, I think it’s going to be enforcing the rules equally as to everybody. I don’t think Jewish students or any other group of students are entitled to any special treatment. But when you have rules on campus, for example, at Cornell, that prohibit the use of bullhorns inside academic buildings, they should enforce those rules and they didn’t at Cornell. And same with Columbia, and same with other places. If you have rules that you can’t set up an encampment, those should be enforced. They should be enforced neutrally. They should be enforced against everybody.

So I think what’s going to change the situation on the campuses is if the schools start actually enforcing the rules that they already have, which prohibit these sort of intimidation tactics.

Meier: On that last part, what do you think is at the root problem of how universities have been handling it? We’ve been hearing from some sites saying that, you know, the root causes is Marxism, but what’s your view on this?

WAJ: As somebody who’s been on a campus for 17 years and who studied this problem for 30 years, I think that the campuses ideologically have been captured.

You can call it whatever you want. You can call it critical race theory. You can call it anti-colonial theory. You can call it diversity, equity, and inclusion. There’s a lot of names that get put on it, but at its core, it’s a group identity ideology that has captured the campuses more so than any place else. And so everybody is pigeonholed into a group. You’re white, you’re Asian, you’re black, you’re Hispanic, you are mixed race, whatever it is. And that inevitably will lead to balkanization of the campus and inevitably will lead to conflict and inevitably will lead to the dominant party on campus, which is the left, exerting their political power on a group ideology basis.

And that’s many ways why Jews have been cast aside on campuses because they’re portrayed as white oppressors, which of course is untrue, but that’s fits into the whole ideology. So I would chalk it up to ideological capture by group identity ideology on the campuses.

Meier: William Jacobson, thank you so much for your time.

WAJ: Great, thank you.

 

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