Supposed “elite” universities run by liberal bureaucrats have been far too soft on illegal, antisemitic protests and the students who take part in them. It is past time for expulsions to be on the table.
Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia University, expelled two students over a January event in which students disrupted the first day of a History of Modern Israel class to hand out their antisemitic propaganda posters. It is a good first step and one that the university should stand by, given that Columbia hasn’t even had the guts to stand by suspensions for these kinds of protests. In response to the expulsions, dozens more masked antisemites stormed Barnard’s Milbank Hall, where the president’s office is.
Barnard’s solution is the same one it found with its two previous offenders: expel every student who participated.
Universities such as Columbia have allowed students to participate in illegal protests, including occupying buildings or other areas on campus and preventing students from accessing them. Those students have done so on behalf of antisemitic terrorists in Gaza and fake claims of “genocide” against the Palestinians. By allowing those students to blatantly violate university policies while they enthusiastically support the terrorists who were recently parading the corpses of Jewish babies through the streets, these universities are turning themselves into bastions of antisemitism.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO INVESTIGATE ANTISEMITISM AT FIVE UNIVERSITIES
The solution is to remove every student who takes part in these disruptions or occupations from the student body. It is to remove every administration or university staff member who takes part in these protests, promotes them, or otherwise peddles antisemitism on campus. That includes deans who issue private “apologies” to the trustee boards and defend their antisemitic teams, which Columbia is familiar with given its recent history. The weak suspensions that get quickly rolled back and the even weaker public statements that mean nothing while this behavior is tolerated are not enough.
If Barnard and Columbia truly cared about antisemitism, there would be far more than two expulsions on the university’s discipline list. Anything less is a surrender to the antisemitic terrorist-supporting students that university leaders allow to control the campus and to the antisemitic advocacy groups that threaten legal and cultural consequences that they can’t follow up on aside from their petulant whining.
