Columbia University has earned the outrage heaped upon it in recent weeks. The pro-Hamas demonstrators’ protracted takeover of the campus featured assaults, the destruction of property, and the cancellation of in-person classes. Columbia became a cauldron of antisemitism in which the harassment of Jewish students was so rampant, many of them had to leave their dorms or the campus altogether for their safety.
The university’s president, Minouche Shafik, was bafflingly hesitant to acknowledge the antisemitism and slow to call the New York Police Department until, after weeks of coddling the mob, the threats of violence became too much even for the hapless administrators who are in charge. Of course, the demonstrators are far from done, and Columbia has cancelled its main commencement ceremony. The university already faces a class-action complaint alleging the disruption of education in breach of Columbia’s contractual obligations amid “verbal threats, physical intimidation, and even assaults” Jewish students have had to endure on campus.
The university also faces a boycott by thirteen federal judges who signed a letter to Shafik on Monday demanding corrective action and stating that they would not hire law clerks from future classes “absent extraordinary change” by the university. “Columbia has . . . become an incubator of bigotry. As a result, Columbia has disqualified itself from educating the future leaders of our country,” the letter read. “[A]t a minimum,” the judges called for “1. Serious consequences for students and faculty” whose disruptions and threats broke university rules; “2. Neutrality and nondiscrimination in the protection of freedom of speech and the enforcement of rules of campus conduct;” and “3. Viewpoint diversity on the faculty and across the administration—including the admissions office.”
The phenomenon identified by the letter is, of course, a longstanding problem. As I have pointed out previously, many institutions of higher learning have become far-left monocultures in which the free exchange of ideas and pursuit of truth have succumbed to the forces of ideological indoctrination. Before Hamas’ sadistic attack, this dynamic played out in numerous episodes of cancel culture in which speakers who did not align with the prevailing campus orthodoxy were shouted down. That happened previously to Kristen Waggoner at Yale Law School and to Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School. Those two incidents also led to announced law clerk hiring boycotts at the respective law schools.
And while conservatives are typically the targets of this disruption and abuse on campus, the bad behavior now extends beyond political beliefs to heritage and religion. Berkeley Law School’s dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, was caricatured in an antisemitic cartoon by the Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, an act that was clearly offensive, yet he defended as their First Amendment right. Still, they took it further, and when Chemerinsky and his wife opened their home to graduating law students for dinner, a leader of the group found it appropriate to disrupt the meal with an anti-Israel speech delivered through a microphone. Arguably this was the inevitable end product of cultivating a monolithic ideological culture, with little interest in hiring conservative faculty.
Yes, too many law schools—and universities in general—have become training grounds for bad conduct. Students oblivious to their own privilege deem it their right to disrupt campuses and harass their ideological targets while considering themselves immune from university rules and laws against trespass, vandalism, and assault. It has taken generations of institutional and ideological rot to bring us to a place so dark that it is today’s perpetrators of genocidal hate—Hamas—rather than their victims who find allies on college campuses. It should be no surprise that destructiveness and coercion are hallmarks of the style of protest favored by Hamas’ cheerleaders—a group that makes no secret of its anti-Americanism.
Universities are supposed to provide their students an open forum for foundations of learning that are essential to professional development. They are not supposed to indoctrinate them into one political ideology or to crush dissent. The schools that are the worst perpetrators, whether public or private, receive substantial sums of taxpayer dollars. With every depressing development in the story of the long-term decline of higher education comes the question whether anything will truly change until, as I argued previously, our elected representatives use their power of the purse to demand sweeping change. These institutions need to return to open inquiry, free speech, viewpoint diversity, and punishment of pampered rulebreakers who think they are above the law.