Columbia University’s new task force report shows antisemitism is pervasive at the university — and it’s just a symptom of a larger ailment plaguing elite higher education.
The report is yet more evidence top universities are the most overtaken by radical activism and bigotry.
In fact, according to a new analysis, schools that cost $60,000-plus a year and have fewer students on scholarship grants have staged the most disruptive demonstrations.
It appears the country’s most privileged kids are the ones spearheading campus chaos.
On Friday, Columbia released its report on “student experiences of antisemitism and recommendations for promoting shared values and inclusion” as the second installment of publications from its appointed faculty task force on antisemitism.
As the Post reported this weekend, the 91 page packet is the result of testimony of more than 500 Columbia students.
It describes Jewish students as having been “shoved, pushed to the ground, berated for showing support for Zionist causes, and watching Israeli flags burned.”
“The testimonies of hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students have made clear that the University community has not treated them with the standards of civility, respect, and fairness it promises to all its students,” the school said in a statement about the report.
Columbia was hit with demonstrations Tuesday by more anti-Israel protesters, as the new school year starts. Students had to line up and be screeened to be allowed onto campus in the first place, an Alma Mater statue on college grounds was splashed with red paint and two arrests of protesters were made.
Similar experiences have been recounted across the nation’s most premiere universities. Students at other ivies, including Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, have even sued their universities for antisemitism.
Radical anti-Israel sentiment is bubbling over most vigorously at the most elite universities — and it’s no coincidence. These schools have been churning out far-left activists for years, and now they’re showing their true colors.
According to a new analysis from Washington Monthly, protests popped up in the least affordable — and most entitled — universities.
Robert Kelchen and Marc Novicoff’s report found that the higher the tuition is at a school, the more likely they were to have an encampment pop up in the name of the Palestinian cause this past year.
In fact, almost every school with an encampment on their campus costs more than $60,000 annually to attend. That’s about as much as the average annual salary, $63,795, in the United States.
Similarly, schools with less students on Pell Grants (federal needs-based subsidies for tuition costs) were more likely to have protests and encampments.
In short: it’s rich kids in the tents.
While familial wealth and anti-israel sentiment might seem disconnected on the surface, a certain level of privilege is required to have the time and bandwidth to pitch a tent and skip out on finals in the name of a struggle in a foreign country you’ve never been to before.
It’s a prime example of “luxury beliefs,” a term coined by writer Rob Henderson, which he defines as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower classes.”
There’s a certain tone-deaf luxury required to advocate for defunding the police when you live in a doorman guarded building, rather than the inner city.
Similarly, it’s easy to go all-out for Palestine in your gated campus community when you don’t have to endure the trauma of October 7th like the Israeli people did.
Luxury beliefs are responsible for students at Columbia enduring swastikas graffitied in their dorms, classmates endorsing Hamas, and being booted from communal spaces, according to Columbia’s report.
And it’s no wonder that the most expensive schools have proven the most susceptible to such emboldened bigotry.
Kids who aren’t footing their own tuition bills seem more likely to take their education for granted and spend a good chunk of their semester on the quad fighting for a cause they only learned about a couple weeks ago.
Of course kids on Pell Grants, who are scraping together tuition to make ends meet, aren’t going to squander their education for frivolous activism. They came to school to learn, not to participate in an antisemitic staycation in the quad.
There’s a naive privilege required to believe that you — as a kid with a lot of demands and a tent you bought off of Amazon — could alter the course of a decades-long international conflict because you yelled and screamed and camped out long enough.
University presidents are not responsible for foreign policy decisions in the Middle East.
Elite universities have encouraged their students to take up social causes and fight hard for their vision of “progress.” And now they’re suffering the consequences of students who are taking that mission to the extreme.
Entitled kids are taking up the cause of an oppressed people, and are oppressing their fellow Jewish classmates in the process.
It’s time that top universities wake up to the fact that they’re churning out class after class of entitled activists with so few problems that they derail a semester of learning in the name of a cause that is a mere abstraction to them.