Is Barnard College's president going the way of Clark Kerr?
She's letting the little rotters suspended for spewing antisemitism and refusing to go home run circles around Columbia University.
According to National Review:
Barnard president Laura Rosenbury addressed the campus tensions in a statement Monday night and said the college offered to lift interim suspensions for anti-Israel protesters without a previous record of misconduct, if those students follow campus rules.
“The vast majority of the students on interim suspension have not previously engaged in misconduct under Barnard’s rules. Last night, the College sent written notices to these students offering to lift the interim suspensions, and immediately restore their access to College buildings, if they agree to follow all Barnard rules during a probationary period,” Rosenbury said.
Barnard placed dozens of students on interim suspension last week after they participated in Columbia University’s unauthorized tent encampment, set up to protest U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas and Columbia’s financial relationship with companies that do business in Israel. The Barnard students were evicted from student housing and prevented from attending classes under the terms of their suspensions.
Her letter to the students was so ... nice, sounding like it was written by a delicate old bluestocking who just wants trouble to go away.
It's an about-face, brought on by criticism from the left, and National Review names Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose daughter was among the suspended as someone who had been criticizing instead of praising the school.
So rather than stand by her ruling, and her correct notation that she gave these radicals ample warning about what was coming in her letter, now she's saying she will take them back again, with no black marks on their records, pretty please, instead of just expelling them to restore order at the school, which is the best way to handle this lunacy.
We all know how that's going to turn out. Capitulation to radicals only breeds more radicals.
It calls to mind a passage from Eric Hoffer's "Before the Sabbath" in which he mused about the wretched Clark Kerr, onetime chancellor of U.C. Berkeley, who though he was considered the finest academic of his generation, and "knew how to build a great university," in the end allowed "a punk like Mario Savio," crawl all over him, running circles around him as Kerr kept trying to please the unsatiable "new left" student protest leaders of the early 1960s. Hoffer had scorn for these '60s radicals, and understood the power dynamics they were employing, which left him a pity of sorts for the likes of Kerr. And yes, he admired the great Ronald Reagan's resolute response as California governor to shut down the radicals with an appetite for power from disrupting education. In 1967, he fired Kerr.
And that matters, because Hoffer, a longshoreman in San Francisco who died in 1983, remains a leading expert on the nature of mass movements. His 1951 book, "The True Believer" has never been out of print, and at times like these, sees big spikes in sales on Amazon.
While I don't have that vivid passage he wrote about Kerr letting punks crawl all over him from the book, I did find this online passage from some leftist, which gives the flavor:
Avenues of negotiation and peaceful change were closed to them [student radicals]. It should be noted that they had no opponent more vociferous than Eric Hoffer, whose main attack during that period was to denounce Mario Savio as a "punk" and "juvenile totalitarian."
Four years after the Free Speech rebellion at Berkeley, at the subcommittee hearings, star witness Hoffer was still making attacks on Savio. To this he added an onslaught against Mark Rudd for the "violent" language used by the Columbia University student leader.
Senator Ribicoff countered by again confronting Hoffer with his failure to view student actions in comparative historical context. In so doing, he pushed Hoffer to the most
revealing self-imposed indignity that occurred during his appearance:
SENATOR RIBICOFF: You remember the labor movement, you remember when the labor movement was pretty violent, too?
MR. HOFFER: Yes.
SENATOR RIBICOFF: When they were fighting for their rights but the labor movement is no longer violent.
MR. HOFFER: But we didn't want to destroy the establishment. We wanted a piece of our pie. We were compromising. We didn't have non-negotiable demands.
SENATOR RIBICOFF: I remember the labor union sit-ins in the 205 and 305.
MR. HOFFER: But we got rid of our extremists . .
Hoffer acquitted himself very well on the punks, contrary to what the writer claimed, and sure enough, Columbia's institutional weakness also drew his contempt, too.
The problem with Rosenbury is that she seems to be capitulating when she should be getting tough. What's more not once in her nice-y nice letter did she bring up what was going on as students "felt unsafe." Antisemitism is rampant among the radicals now disrupting the university and not once did she mention it.
As for her attempt to bring the suspended back into the fold, where's her requirement that they apologize to the Jewish students for their group's menacing and hateful speech, and to disclose who's funding them. If she's going to take them back, that ought to be a minimum.
Since none of that is going to happen, a resolute response is all they're going to understand. Expel them for antisemitism and tell them that's that's an ivy league legacy they need to let go of, not embrace. One can only hope that Rosenburg manages to shut this clown show down but thus far, all we see is bending and capitulating.
Image: WalkingGeek (wengs), via Flickr // CC BY 2.0 DEED