118 Comments

Each college needs to have a code of conduct and ENFORCE IT. All students, All teachers.

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There is no doubt in my mind that good college classes are filled with poor student choices. There were times when high school students with straight A report cards sent out applications to every prestigious college and prayed for acceptance. But even with great grades, most applications were denied.

Today some colleges hire professors straight out of prison. The Radicals of the 1960s and 1970s are now teaching how it is done. Grades alone won't get a student in, but extra-curricula activities might, and student activism is a plus.

I did not graduate high school. I got a GED, and I joined the army. I didn't know what to do with my life, and I understood that to be successful, I would need a better education. While still in the army, I began college. After the army, I used the $135 per month allowance from the G.I. Bill and up to three part-time jobs to continue my education. Sadly, we saw Kent State happen while I was still a student. At that point, I understood that student activism may be stimulating for the activists, but it cheats the ones who aren't interested.

There is no reason a regular student should have to put up with campus shenanigans. They came for an education, and some, like me, are paying for it without Biden's reimbursement.

If wealthy outside agitators are in the mix, they are there to guide the students in their 'resistance." This is more than a protest, it is an insurrection. And when Jewish students can't feel safe, and have their way to classes blocked, laws have been broken as well as civil rights violations. Those outsiders don't belong on campus and certainly should be arrested.

And the news reported who the sponsors of these protests are. We recognize those names. They are all well-known Democrats. They claim it's okay because it is a free speech issue. Even with intimidation factored in, the worst they can expect is a fine, and a ride to the police station to get a picture taken.

Rabble-rousers used to go to jail. Today, somebody else will pay their fine, and the best we can hope for is that a future employer will look at college records, not just class standings, and deny these troublemakers employment.

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Here’s the question I would like answered: how many students at Columbia were not involved in the demonstrations and simply wanted to get the education, and access to facilities, they signed up for? What’s the ballpark percentage of the student body, that falls into this category? What are those folks’ rights and why isn’t the press covering their story?

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I was struck by the festive, even joyous spirit these young people, and older ones too, had "emancipating" Hamilton Hall. I imagine the atmosphere was similar to that of the Hamas terrorists storming into Israel and killing, mutilating, raping and kidnapping their victims. But like in Gaza, there will descend a day after and there will be a reckoning and those responsible will no longer feel so joyous. One could hope.

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Free Palestine! Free Pizza!

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Suzi, I hope you were being sarcastic in your comment "Save for some pesky details....the encampment was kids being kids."

The pesky details are what define the kids. The pesky details of Naziism defined the Nazis.

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About the only saving grace of these protests at Columbia is that no students had to call the tampon ambulance like that poor, weak soul did at Vanderbilt.

That’s it. That’s the only saving grace.

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It's really almost amusing. In the likes of Tenured Radicals, or The Breakdown of Higher Education, the road to King-Slutsky (unfortunately this sounds like a fictional character from a Vonnegut novel) is mapped out with disturbing prescience. Aside from the intellectual pretzels required to call out "genocide" by calling for genocide, King-Slutsky's major and the title of her dissertation tell you all you need to know about how bizarrely separate from any real world Columbia and other such places are. It is important to study the Humanities--but "theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens” and the “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760–1860” is not what our ailing society need right now.

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One of the things that I object to is that these are young, impressionable students - who are being led by older, experienced individuals - with either a paid or political agenda that might not mesh with the student's or be in the student's best interests. But its easy to be young and inexperienced and swept up in the emotion of the moment - even as a smart, Ivy-league student. Its postulated that since the Human brain doesn't fully develop until the mid 20's, these kids are still in a relative stage of adolescence. In 40 years, will all of them look back at their actions with the same pride and perspective? Particularly if some of them end up with a criminal record limiting their future? I think not.

Outside agitators must be kept out of college campuses.

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Agreed. How do we keep the professors out as well, as that is where they learn all this nonsense?

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You have to consider the position of the people at the bottom, the little people as it were. For the Chancellor, or people at the top, the university is a major part of their lives, but they could be swooped off by another institution to serve as the leaders there ... but for the guy at the bottom, the university is his everything. The university is what put a roof over his families heads, its what feeds and clothes them, guarantees them a seat. If not for the university, they'd have nothing. You or I may like our jobs, but this guy's in love with it, he lives it. We may attend university, this guy lives it; the university gave him everything and he knows it, the university is his everything.

Now some fool wants to shit on this guy's university, this guy's everything? Pardon me whilst I open this can of Whoop-Ass and clean up that ugly little mess.

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The students think they know everything but the truth is, they know nothing.

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College makes you stupid.

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The purpose of college is to teach you HOW to think, most of what you learn that is important comes after college, during life. The problem is these colleges no longer teach HOW to think, they tell the kids WHAT to think.

Indoctrination instead of education.

That is 100% of the issue we are discussing.

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the keffiyeh veiled Brides of Hamas should ask Hamas for their noms, they have a larger endowment than Columbia

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May 2·edited May 2

"chants for globalizing the intifada (a call for globalizing a campaign of terror aimed at killing Jews)"

Sigh ... this is my SECOND TIME having to correct the kind of semantic inflation the word "intifada" is being subjected to in the Free Press:

https://www.thefp.com/p/ouster-of-penn-president-wont-fix-the-problem/comment/45168126

I am no admirer of the overprivileged, loudmouthed, gluten-free, airhead hooligans at Columbia University: they should be given criminal charges and those found guilty expelled. But the word "intifada" (which was popularised in Palestine in the late 80s and is Arabic for "shaking off" - i.e., that of an illegal occupation) is NOT intrinsically a call for the killing of Jews. Alarmist sloppiness of this kind is most unbecoming of the Free Press.

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Its you that is playing silly word games and gaslighting everyone.

Are you also one of those always correcting people on the true meaning of "woke"?

It doesn't matter what a word meant originally or in the late 80's, what matters is what it means today to the people using it.

"Global Intifada" means all the jews everywhere. No coincidentally, that is the Hamas charter.

Curious as to your motivation to obscure reality.

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For me it’s simple, as a hiring manager at a financial services firm, if I see a resume from Columbia, a quick, easy, hard pass! Not worth bringing that into our culture.

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They know they hate Israel. What more do they need to know.

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