If you were a CEO, and it turned out a significant portion of your workforce not only openly supported a terrorist group but hounded members of an ethnic minority and were so disruptive as to force you to suspend operations at your company — you might be inclined to take a look at the hiring process.
Questions would come to mind. Thoughts such as: “How were these people vetted?” “Why did they want to join this organization?” “What were their qualifications?” “Were there any red flags that were inadvertently overlooked or deliberately ignored?”
University administrations should be asking themselves — and their admissions offices — these questions today, in the face of the widespread, often hateful demonstrations on campus. They should be asking these questions, after it took police force to extract protesters (some students, some presumably not) from a building that, fittingly, serves as home to Columbia admissions offices when it’s not doubling as the last redoubt of pro-Hamas occupiers. They should be asking these questions, after watching yesterday’s incoherent demands for “humanitarian aid” — delivered with all the intellectual force of a tenth-grade after-school forensics club — by protesters who possess the means to procure whatever they want to sustain their own bodies.
The issue can’t just be the (in many cases, temporary) pullback from standardized-testing requirements. The SAT is important, but it doesn’t measure character. Isn’t that where the qualitative-evaluation skills of an admissions office are supposed to come into play? Or are they screening for this type of behavior, and mindset? If so, they have only themselves to blame.