Are government moves on Columbia a crackdown on hate or free speech?
Officials from a trio of federal agencies
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'We expect your immediate compliance with these critical next steps,' they brusquely added. On Thursday, Columbia was
It was the day after the $400 million for Columbia was canceled that
Then, on March 13, Department of Homeland Security personnel, armed with judicial search warrants,
Predictably, there has been a cacophony of alarms. Free speech advocates cast the administration's moves as a brazen assault on the First Amendment, and the White House has been accused of waging war on higher education.
'If the federal government can show up and demand a university department be shut down or restructured,'
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Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong wrote to students that the dorm raid had left her 'heartbroken.'
Reality check: No university has an innate entitlement to federal funds. Asking Columbia to make changes in order to qualify for taxpayers' cash is no assault on free speech. It's a decision by government to not fund what it has deemed dangerous to citizens.
And, with all due respect to deJesus's annoyance over having to show her student ID, outside agitators have repeatedly
As to Armstrong's heartbreak at the dorm raid, she can take solace in the fact that, as she herself noted, 'no items were removed, and no further action was taken.'
President Trump has a habit — or perhaps it's a stratagem — of overreaching, of delivering an immediate dose of 'shock and awe' to spur a reset in situations in need of one. His proposal for the Gaza Strip — which
—
sounded to some ears like ethnic cleansing; it has since been walked back to a plan of voluntary resettlement of homeless Gazans. Broad tariffs declared to have no exceptions were then fine-tuned to include, well, exceptions.
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Something similar may lie in the administration's recent moves regarding the anti-Israel domain, a sea of seething hatred and anger in which antisemites like to swim.
Khalil's case will be decided in a court, perhaps the highest one. The government hasn't laid out its case against the Algerian national in any detail, but the law does allow permanent residency
The student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest advocates for the
How far from reality, and whether any rhetoric of his (he has defended Palestinian
None of the administration's recent actions, though, should be allowed to obscure a pertinent fact: Jews on campuses have been made to feel physically threatened by protesters against Israel who either openly or subtly support the murderous group Hamas.
The popular chant 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' is an old Hamas slogan; it advocates the destruction of the Jewish state. And, as has been demonstrated by countless attacks on synagogues, Jewish institutions, and random Jews worldwide, Israel has become a convenient, one might say 'kosher,' proxy for Jews. Hey, history, here we go again.
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Were it 1940 and the screams and placards were in support of the Third Reich or — leave Jews aside — were it 1920 and university students were chanting KKK slogans advocating lynchings, would we be extolling the glories of free speech? Would we be outraged by lawful efforts to quell the expressions of hatred?
Those are questions we do well to ask ourselves today.
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