A mob now rules Columbia University. University administrators are keeping the police off campus and refusing to enforce school policies. Students and outside agitators have occupied the school’s southwest lawn to “free Palestine.” Rather than restore order, administrators forced classes to go at least partly virtual for the rest of the semester while they negotiate with “representatives of the student encampment.” The mob action goes beyond the issue of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza or this one campus. It is an attack on basic American ideas of order and rule of law as well as a bigoted smack at the Jews.
The mob surged initially on April 17, as Columbia president Minouche Shafik faced questions from Congress about how the school is handling its antisemitic faculty and students. Students pitched tents and declared a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Protesters on and around campus shouted, “We are Hamas,” “Long live the intifada,” and “We don’t want no two state, we want ’48” (that is, the undoing of Israel’s founding in 1948).
The next day, Shafik, declaring that free-speech principles are not a license to violate the school’s policies against harassment and intimidation, called in the police, who arrested 108 of the protesters for trespassing. Within hours, however, other students set up a new encampment — and Columbia’s administration folded.
The new “Liberated Zone” is a vortex of Jew-hatred, drawing not just Columbia students but outside actors. They scream for Israel’s destruction, banging drums and chanting loudly to celebrate jihadist terrorism. One student threatened that pro-Israel students were going to be Hamas’s “next targets.” Another activist, face wrapped in a keffiyeh, waved a photo of Hamas’s flag. Crowds on campus have been chanting “Oh Hamas, oh loved one, strike strike Tel Aviv!” and “The martyr is Allah’s beloved. . . . From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab.”
Students praising terrorists threatened their peers. One speaker said, “On October 7, the Palestinian resistance broke through the walls of their open-air prison, shattering the illusion of the invincibility of their occupiers.” To cheers, she added, “By setting up this encampment in the heart of the Zionist stronghold of Columbia University, we intend to do the same.”
On Saturday, a visibly Jewish student was assaulted on campus. No police could help him, because Columbia’s administration has refused to allow the NYPD to reenter campus since the arrests last Thursday. When the police were on campus that day, radical students called the officers “baby killers” and told them to kill themselves. Later, in a class-wide group chat, a law student irrationally blamed the antisemitic attacks on the police’s presence.
The mob’s hostility is directed not only at Jews. A counter-protester who brought out an American flag was sworn at. (At Yale, similarly, protesters took down an American flag from a war memorial, while a flyer distributed at the University of Michigan said, “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.”) These anti-Jewish radicals hate the Stars and Stripes as much as the Star of David.
When a university cancels classes for more than 36,000 students because of a small group’s threats and violence, the mob has taken over. And mobs spawn other mobs. If Columbia — or law enforcement — does not reopen campus to all its students, this problem will keep spreading across college campuses and elsewhere in the country. Radicals shouting violent slogans have already shut down bridges and roads in major cities — what’s next?
Who can stop this? New York mayor Eric Adams says that he cannot send police to restore order until Columbia allows them to enter the campus. Manhattan’s progressive district attorney, Alvin Bragg, almost certainly will refuse to press charges against the 108 people arrested last week.
President Shafik, who now has Republicans and Democrats in Congress calling on her to resign, has failed to make Columbia secure for Jews over the Passover holiday this week. Suspended students have returned to campus. If expulsions are on the table, Columbia has not said so. The mob is steamrolling Shafik. She gave them a deadline of April 24 to clear their encampment. When they refused, she extended it by 48 hours. Her email updating the school on these negotiations conceded that Columbia has lost control: The students, not the university, “will ensure that those not affiliated with Columbia will leave.” Rule of law is over when the authorities cannot enforce the rules.
Columbia has told its Jewish students that it cannot guarantee their security, but they are free to Zoom in to classes and final exams while their peers sit in the classroom. The Zoom-in policy does not mention Jews explicitly, but it is obvious who is being invited to stay remote. Shafik has surrendered to the radicals’ anti-Jewish chant that “we don’t want no Zionists here.”
However she justifies her cowardice, Shafik is violating Jewish students’ civil rights to equal access to education. New York governor Kathy Hochul, Mayor Adams, and Democratic and Republican members of Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have all visited the campus this week — rightly suggesting that city, state, and federal officials will not stand by as a university improperly refuses to provide equal learning opportunities to all its students.
But the problem runs far deeper than Shafik’s failures over the last week. In America’s institutions of higher education, there are two types of plague, each aggravating the other. One is hatred of America and the West. The other is an antisemitic double standard.
At last week’s congressional hearing, Utah representative Burgess Owens, who grew up in the segregated South, asked how Columbia would respond if black students were being targeted by the KKK rather than Jewish students targeted by pro-Hamas mobs in keffiyehs: “Would those same bigots be allowed to protest on Columbia’s campus, spewing anti-black hate speech? . . . Would this treatment of black Americans be tolerated for one second on Columbia’s campus?” Of course not, Shafik responded. And yet here we are.
Jews gathered at Passover tables this week to tell the story of the Exodus from slavery to freedom. So central to the American idea is this story that Benjamin Franklin wanted to depict it on the Seal of the United States. Countless immigrants have made similar journeys from tyranny to freedom because of America’s promise of equality under the law. Those who run Columbia now need to fulfill that promise at a once-great university.