Said Columbia lawprof Vincent A. Blasi, "who has spent decades studying civil liberties issues, said the university had articulated a 'reasonable' policy to govern protests and had every right to punish students who violate it," quoted in "Faculty Group at Columbia Says It Has ‘Lost Confidence’ in the President/The campus chapter of a faculty organization said it would 'fight to reclaim our university.' Students were undeterred by the crackdown on their protest" (NYT).
Of course, the university doesn't have to do everything within its power. It could tolerate students doing more than they have the right to do. Traditionally, universities have stood back and allowed at least some student transgressions. So one could be "confident that the students have no First Amendment claim to stay in that space" and still have "lost confidence" in the administration for choosing to send in the police to remove the students. I don't think Professor Blasi would say that the university had a duty to remove the students, so it is appropriate to judge the administration for the choice it made.
The group that announced its loss of confidence — "We have lost confidence in our president and our administration, and we pledge to fight to reclaim our university" — is the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
ADDED: Also in today's NYT is "Columbia, Free Speech and the Coddling of the American Right" by Lydia Polgreen:
[Columbia’s president, Nemat] Shafik wrote to the N.Y.P.D. requesting that officers clear the quad, declaring the protests “a clear and present danger” to the university. If there was danger, the police seemed to struggle to find it....
For the students I spoke to, the invocation of safety was especially galling.... “The only violence on campus was the police carrying people away to jail,” one student told me. “It was an absolutely peaceful protest. Last night we had a dance circle. There has been nothing aggressive or violent.”...
The previous day, Shafik had prostrated herself before the bad faith brigade that is the Republican-led House of Representatives. In testimony before the House’s education committee, Shafik seemed determined to avoid the fate of two other Ivy League presidents whose shaky performances led to their ousters....
In a world where almost any kind of advocacy on behalf of Palestinian self-determination risks being interpreted as antisemitism or a call for the destruction of Israel, her statements cast quite a pall. Her actions on Thursday drew instant rebuke from professors and other defenders of free speech on campus....
I am old enough to remember when our public conversation was preoccupied with the coddling of college students, their unwillingness to confront hard truths and their desire for safe spaces, shielded from challenging ideas....
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45 comments:
Attempted coup by the faculty.
A university is a place of learning. While students can learn (sic) their way around the world, including the demonstrably limited awareness of how society works, anything which disrupts the learning process established by the university should be suppressed by the university.
The university is the place where you can say anything that you believe to be true. The actual problem is prohibition of opposing voices.
Dave Begley said...
Attempted coup by the faculty.
Powerful people, those faculty freedom fighters, but they need an experienced putsch pirate like DJT to lead the pack.
An insurrection…
I would think that always following the university rules of protest would inoculate them from any potential unfairness outrage, given the variety of issues about which people protest.
The universities and their professors must stand for something. Education doesn't seem to be on the table any more.
He's right you know.
My betters, those at elite universities, with multiple degrees, are quick to analyze and cluck cluck about the rednecks and their propensities to choose violence first to settle scores.
High Schools spend $millions training high schoolers about de-escalation, and non physical engagement. How to use your voice to address conflict.
But the left? Violence first and forever. Debate is for mealy mouthed loosers, debate only recognizes the other side has any right to be heard. The other side has no right to be heard.
Is it only students who have the right to occupy University spaces in protest? What would this faculty group say if I and a passel of my friends decided to occupy the hallways outside of their offices? What if non-Leftist students did this?
Would they have the same response?
I'm expecting a Concealed Carry Holder to be surrounded and assaulted by these genociders, then draw his piece and carve an exit with it. Too bad for the genociders.
The pro-terror - pro-Hamas leftists are vile sub-human scum.
That's why they wear masks. They kinda know it.
Gadfly -
This topic is not about DJT.
btw - shouldn't you be out on a ledge - with some lighter fluid?
The President of Columbia has been on the job for all of six months. This is the first real decision she has made. While radicals in the faculty may assert a loss of confidence, I’m quite sure a significant majority of alumni give her a big thumbs up.
Question: will Chinese, Korean, and Indian students still want to come to Columbia and deal with the pro-terror madness?
"We have lost confidence in our president and our administration"
What if the board develops a spine, declares no confidence in its faculty, and starts closing some departments--like Middle Eastern studies?
I don't care about opinions of the president or the administration. The students and the faculty ARE the University. The administration exists to serve them. (The same is true, of the US Federal administration, in relation to the citizenry.)
The folks paying the bills, may, however, have a slightly different point of view, and they, too, have rights.
I wrote it the other day- the reason the students are facing opposition from the universities has nothing to do with any kind of legitimate principle with regards to proper exercise of first admendment rights- the problem for the students is that they are actively opposing the policies of Democratic executive branch in an election year. If Trump were still president with the exact same policies with regards to Israel and Gaza, the university leadership would not only not push back, but would actively encourage the students to increase their activism.
In reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty I noted a complete silence on the subject of dance circles.
These spoiled little commies should be thrown out of school.
Maybe a few years of flipping burgers or digging ditches would teach them that they are owed nothing in life...
I took Blasi's First Amendment course in my second year at Columbia Law. He was a great teacher (probably still is).
The crackdown at Columbia, if it does not let up, has been a LONG time coming and it has a LONG time to go to do the job. The disruptions of speakers, for example, began decades ago and from that an increasingly disruptive and belligerent attitude and tolerance of that attitude metastasized. A key moment occurred in 2017 when Bret Weinstein, himself then a radical leftist, simply invited protesting students to debate with him and was shut down by the cult-like screaming of a mob. The bigotry and bluster and incipient violence we can see at Columbia now is coming from poorly informed students who somehow have convinced themselves they are the anointed. The core feature of today's uprising of the privileged children are the chants ("Globalize the Intifada," yada, yada, yada). These tiresome ranting rhymes are the absolute enemy of the number one requirement of any university - a readiness to, and desire to, hear the other side. Draconian measures of restorative enforcement and punishment will be needed if these elite institutions are even to survive.
the American Association of University Professors [Degree-Hunters]
While predicted that the "degree-hunters" would wane and those committed to investigation and research would return to dominate, the opposite happened. This went doubly when the "degree-hunters" of the 1960s and early 1970s took over the professoriate. It takes 40 years to change a university/college as the old guard retire/die out, so we can look to 2060 or so if higher ed in the US is to save itself from the secular religious schools they have become
The graduate schools, apart from the professional schools, have suffered in considerable measure from the fact that they have been attended by a large body of students who are not primarily scholars or investigators. For the last twenty or thirty years every ambitious American college has felt that it could not maintain fair academic dignity unless its teachers were able to write after their names Ph.D. The graduate schools have been invaded, therefore, during the comparatively short period of their existence by an army of degree-hunters who desired the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as a preliminary to obtaining positions as teachers.
[...]
In the orderly process of development, the time will come when the degree-hunters will lessen in numbers and when the graduate and professional schools will represent essentially what the university represents in Europe-a school whose students have already had their undergraduate experience of sports and of class rivalries, as well as their grounding in fundamental subjects, and have now entered upon a life with the primary purpose to bend themselves intelligently and energetically toward study, toward research, toward professional attainment.
—Are Our Universities Overpopulated? HENRY S. PRITCHETT, Scribner's Magazine Vol. 73, 1923
The Leftists who run the Ivy League are trying to square the circle. They LOVE protests that promote Leftwing positions and causes and trot all the cliches we heard during the Summer of 2020 regarding Antifa and BLM. Any breaking of the rules is tolerated.
But....their big donors do NOT like Pro-Palestine protests. So, if you want to protest Putin and call him out for committing "Genocide" = thats OK. If you burn an American Flag and accuse the USA of committing Genocide in [insert country] = thats OK. But you'd better NOT burn an Israeli flag. Or accuse Israel of Genocide. Because that's bad. And you will be shut down. No tolerance for you.
A bizzare attitude. You'd think Americans citizens should be allowed to attack or support any foreign country they wish. But it seems not. Guess we're a colony of Israel.
The logic of "protest" is that it must transgress in order to impress. Wherever the line is drawn, that is the line it must cross. Under the circumstances, it hardly matters where that is. Draw it where it is most convenient to defend it.
"Of course, the university doesn't have to do everything within its power. "
Like not prosecuting rioters who loot, slash and burn whole neighborhoods in the name of 'a cause'?
They have the right to say whatever they want. They don’t have the right to try to make me listen to it.
The mission of a business is to make money, and Google or others is free to fire protesters as they wish. The mission of a university is to train students in coursework, do research, and also provide opportunity for cultural and social growth for the students.
The latter is the color that allows student protest. I think the duty to allow protest and speech applies to administrations, that is the “motte” or strong point in the argument. Then we get to the “bailey” or the stretch point, can you physically confront others and destroy posters, can you break windows and try to assault speakers you don’t like. Can you bring normal university operations to a standstill.
It seems to me that free speech, is a right but free speech can’t be a blanket approval for violence or harassment of others. I am no expert but I would think that this distinction has been well explored in law. So I would prefer rules, punishable by suspension or being expelled, that prevent protest from becoming verbal or physical violence, or that interfere with reasonable operation of the school.
Of course, the university doesn't have to do everything within its power. It could tolerate students doing more than they have the right to do. Traditionally, universities have stood back and allowed at least some student transgressions.
Isn’t that the crux of the problem? If a university has “a reasonable policy to govern protests”, the issue becomes the exercise of its discretion rather than the policy. Most allowed; some not. Some subjects are suitable for protests, occupations, sit-ins, free cities, bullhorns, commencement behaviors…and some are not.
In this case, donors are sitting on their checkbooks so call the police.
- Krumhorn
What is the matter with academics like you, Ann? Even private schools survive on taxpayer funds.
You're not special. Your precious idiot students aren't special. You follow the fucking law, the wholefucking law, like the rest of us, or you should all lose your campuses, tenure, jobs, and oh so precious pensions after doing a crap 1/2 or less for decades.
You people should at least know the law. But you don't have to because you're the Mandarin class.
Let's vote to take that away from you. You come back on campus, actually do real work for 40 hours a week, eight hours a day like the rest of us until you've actually earned your wages, then retire.
You're not special.
And actually, the university has to do everything within its power to enforce the law. You aren't special. You're also taxpayer subsidized institutions, which raise your obligation to seek real police to enforce real laws.
How ignorant. Jesus Christ you're destructive intellectual slobs.
Jewish and pro-Israel students and faculty are very much embracing the language of wokeness, according to which "feeling unsafe" or "excluded" is a cognizable injury which the university administration has a duty to address, and in which words are violence from which the university must protect them. In turn, Palestinian supporters, like the editors of the Columbia Daily Spectator, are driven to a total role reversal, in which they assert that the Jewish students are not in actual danger and therefore have no legitimate complaint.
Some of the older supporters of Israel, like Elise Stefanik or Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador, who writes in today's WSJ, may be adopting a woke perspective disingenuously, but there's no reason to question the sincerity of the Jewish students. They're doing what they have been taught, and applying what they learned in school to their own lives, as educated people are supposed to do.
Let me add that, as a Columbia student, but far from a millennial, neither the pro-Palestine demonstrations nor the occupation of the south lawn appeared at all threatening to me, although some of the rhetoric is certainly anti-Semitic. But I come from a generation that was taught to say, "Sticks and stones . . . ."
universities should suspend and expel a LOT more. it's going to take a LOT to get the message through and correct behavior.
RCOCEAN, please. . .
BLM and Antifa, first of all, have not devoted much time to university campuses. Moreover, most campus disruptions have been over outside speakers, individual profs, etc. They have by and large not targeted universities as institutions, and in fact the universities' own DEI inquisitor/bureaucrats are often the allies of campus radicals. What is unique about the pro-Hamas mobs is their direct demands on universities to implement anti-Israel punishment, and even more unique, their targeting of other student groups and individuals, Jews in particular, for bullying and outright threats or acts of violence. The stepped-up tone of hysteria and intolerance among these hateful and appallingly ignorant students constitutes a new level of threat not seen since the days of the Black Panthers or Weather Underground. It is approaching storm trooper dimensions, and I fear, unless clamped down on hard we will be there fully very soon.
If I am a guest in your house and you choose to light a cigarette, I have no right to demand you stop smoking. It’s your house and your rules. I can either leave or stay. Conversely, if someone lights a cigarette in my house, I can and will demand they extinguish it or take it outside. It’s my house and my rules. Likewise, is a guest in my house verbally or physically assaults me, I’m going to throw them out with violence if necessary. This student was a guest at the dean’s house. She used her opportunity to verbally assault her hosts. Kicking her out was completely appropriate.
"If I am a guest in your house and you choose to light a cigarette, I have no right to demand you stop smoking."
But the question is: Must the host demand that you stop smoking? May the host opt to tolerate your smoking?
That's my point. But I will tolerate your comment here, though it is inconsistent with my expressed preference that commenters respond to material raised in the post. I could delete your comment, but I don't have a duty to do so. I have a right. It is my blog.
What is so weird about the anti-Semitic turmoil at Columbia/Barnard is that for almost a hundred years, both schools have been strongly associated with NYC’s Jewish intellectual crowd. So many of the famous professors and most of the Nobel laureates who populated the place were and still are Jewish. Lionel Trilling and the rest of the Partisan Review crowd could hardly recognize the place if they could see it now.
If you've lost Prof Blasi, you are in trouble. When I took his Con Law class at Michigan, he suggested after Reagan's election that the entire Supreme Court should resign to let Carter name younger justices. (People were crazy back then too!) If he thinks that Columbia can do this, then you know that these students are in trouble.
“But the question is: Must the host demand that you stop smoking? May the host opt to tolerate your smoking?”
You can tolerate anything you like in your own home. But the quad at Columbia is a semi-public space, where all students and faculty are entitled to go about their business without being harassed or impeded by self-righteous assholes. Columbia has a duty to ensure they can.
Turtle Island Times:
Over the last forty years university faculty selection committees have been systematically refusing to hire conservative or Republican professors. There is no other explanation for facts such as almost total dominance of Democrats and liberals on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin as measured by party donations while the tax-paying electorate of the state is almost evenly divided between the two parties as shown by voting patterns. A group like the AAUP must know of this process and that makes their concern over free speech for a student group upholding the position of the Democrats on Gaza suspect. The AAUP isn't a group of liberals or they would not sit by while faculty selection committees turn down conservatives merely because they are conservatives. It's a group of Dem ideologues. And these ideologues are supporting the SJP by their silence on what the SJP really stands for. The SJP supports genocide in Israel (From the River to the Sea) and the destruction of the uS which it calls Turtle Island.
Backup quotes from https://nationalsjp.org/about
This organization is dedicated to eradicating Israel (From the River to the Sea) and the United States which it refers to as "Turtle Island."
Here are quotes from the website of National Students for Justice in Palestine:
https://nationalsjp.org/about
"... organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine emerged across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada) as a way to educate, advocate, and mobilize in support for Palestinian liberation.
...
National Students for Justice in Palestine supports over two hundred Palestine solidarity organizations on college campuses across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada)
...
National Students for Justice in Palestine will facilitate the SJP National Network, the body coordinating all aspects of campus-based Palestine solidarity organizing across Turtle Island.
...
We seek a political framework that addresses collective liberation from Palestine to the Rio Grande."
The protests are not so much Pro-Palestinian or about liberation: there is no expression or discussion of Palestinian ideals, no defense of any beneficial changes brought to Gaza by Hamas since Israel left in 2005, no defense of the less than stellar PLO rule of Abbas, who was elected in 2005 to a four year term but instead has created a corrupt government which exists to continue his family's wealth in perpetuity through his sons and cronies. Palestinian activists claim there was a country of Palestine which so far has been run by authoritarian factions. No one talks about how Palestine is going to be liberated from that.
At Columbia the so called protest consists of a lot of nasty rhetoric about "Zionists" and screaming about revolution and intifada and Free Palestine, all which essentially means the destruction of the state of Israel. I wouldn't describe this action as "peaceful" or producing a dialogue or a learning opportunity befitting a university. The methodology is intimidation and the goal is to remove Israel's ability to defend itself. That doesn't seem like something the university is obligated to tolerate. It's not educational or enlightening.
Without achieving a peaceful solution and living in cooperation with Israel, I don't believe the Palestinian people will actually have improved lives. If Israel ceased to exist the lives of Palestinians would more than likely be just like the lives of the rest of the Arabs in the Middle East. But don't expect any of the protestors to discuss this reality.
See: "How Poverty and Inequality Are Devastating the Middle East. Hundreds of millions of people are ensnared in a cycle of poverty, despair, and hopelessness that will haunt the region for generations to come"
"About 250 million people out of 400 million across 10 Arab countries, or two-thirds of the total population, were classified as poor or vulnerable.
• “Mass pauperization” in the Middle East makes the region the most unequal in the world
• A poor family in the Middle East today will remain poor for several generations
• With governments in the Middle East unable to deliver basic services and opportunities, young people are turning to religious, sectarian, and ethnic organizations like Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood to fill the void..."
https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/why-mass-poverty-so-dangerous-middle-east/
So the notion that the future of the liberation or freedom of the Palestinian people depends on the destruction of Israel imo is not defensible.
But the question is: Must the host demand that you stop smoking? May the host opt to tolerate your smoking?
As Smilin' Jack notes, of course the host can chose to tolerate someone smoking. As a number of other people have pointed out, that simply shifts the argument to which guests are permitted to smoke, which aren't, and how the host is making that choice.
Lydia Polgreen is a professional liar. These agitators always start with the little dances and hackey-sack, and then the real attacks start.
Get you finger paints ready for the cute little murals y'all can paint on plywood where someone, public or taxpayers, once paid for glass.
Columbia U. started this. It would be ironic if they ended it.
I don't think Professor Blasi would say that the university had a duty to remove the students
The little monsters are advocating for genocide, so yes, the University DID have a duty to remove them
ADDED: Also in today's NYT is "Columbia, Free Speech and the Coddling of the American Right" by Lydia Polgreen:
The hypocrisy would be galling, if I'd ever thought the people of the Left had any morals or human decency.
But I'm not that stupid.
Hey Lydia, when people were blocking conservatives from speaking on campus, were you you. What's that, you were cheering them on, because you're a Nazi?
Thought so.
For the students I spoke to, the invocation of safety was especially galling
After all, that's their go to line for censoring conservatives. how DARE someone use it against them?
In a world where almost any kind of advocacy on behalf of Palestinian self-determination risks being interpreted as antisemitism or a call for the destruction of Israel
That's because ALL "advocacy on behalf of Palestinian self-determination" IS "a call for the destruction of Israel".
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is a call for the destruction of Israel, and the murder of every jew who doesn't escape fast enough.
Unless you're calling for Hamas to unconditionally surrender and release all the remaining hostages, you are supporting Hamas, and defending / excusing / justifying / supporting their mass rape, mass torture, and mass murder of innocent Jewish civilians on Oct 7.
Unless you're calling for the destruction of Hamas, and freeing the people of Gaza from its dictatorship, your "advocacy on behalf of Palestinian self-determination" is an assault on teh safety of every single jew at Columbia.
Now, in a world where no conservative had ever been censored at a US college or University on "safety" grounds, that wouldn't just fit shutting the nazis down.
but in this world?
You took away our free speech. That means there is no free speech, for anyone.
Enjoy the consequences of your choices, scumbag
"Columbia, Free Speech and the Coddling of the American Right"
Yep, if there's one thing American universities do these days, it's make things easy on conservatives!
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