For the time being, university authorities have lost patience with protesters disrupting campuses to demonstrate bigotry against Israel and solidarity with Hamas murderers.
Some institutions such as the University of Florida did not let matters get out of hand and ordered suspensions as soon as the motley crew of terrorist cosplayers broke the rules. Others, Columbia University foremost among them, dithered before taking necessary action. Officials let the mob rule for weeks before calling in the police to clear students and visiting vandals, rioters, and encamped trespassers.
But my first words, “for the time being,” are important. Will the panjandrums who run America’s palaces of higher education hang tough or default to limp appeasement?
The signs are not good.
Offending seniors at Columbia, for example, will reportedly be ineligible to graduate. This doesn’t mean they’ll be denied degrees, only that they won’t walk across a stage in mortarboard and gown to receive their scrolled certificates. The horror!…The horror! Could anyone, let alone revolutionary poseurs, be deterred by such slight consequences? Some of us chose to skip our ceremony voluntarily because we had more interesting things to do.
Many students and faculty spent this semester breaking the rules, creating havoc, contemptuously ignoring administrators’ polite requests and weak warnings because they didn’t believe they’d pay a price for their mayhem.
They were probably right. It’s likely that “authorities” who so grievously sacrificed their authority will try to dodge further controversy by giving protesters a pass, crossing their fingers, and hoping the recent unpleasantness will fade from memory once everyone disperses for the summer.
But appeasement encourages more of the same. It has done so repeatedly since the 2020 riots following George Floyd’s death. Affray, trespass, intimidation, theft, and vandalism have been legitimized as political dissent.
Student and faculty demonstrators are so blind to the moral realities of their actions, so ignorant of or uninterested in the facts of the conflict they claim to care about, and so unflinching in their entitlement that they will learn nothing from a slap on the wrist other than to resume hostilities later a little bit louder and a little bit worse.
Hundreds have been arrested. Students who’ve broken university rules, damaged property, fought the police, blocked classes, and made campus life a miserable impossibility should be expelled. Faculty who encouraged them and likewise broke rules should be sacked. Outside agitators who have committed crimes should be prosecuted.
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As in criminal cases, proper punishment should start at the maximum penalty and reduce only with genuine mitigating factors. You don’t start with weak compromise. Those running universities, who are stewards of their institutions’ reputations and standing — perhaps their most important attribute — should impose the severest punishments permitted under the rules to which matriculating students subscribe.
A shorter way of putting it is, where the rules permit, throw the bums out.
