What happens at Columbia doesn’t stay at Columbia, but in many ways it starts there.

Here are points of interest related mostly to Palestine and Trump and Jews at Columbia:

–Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) is the primary group organizing and leading and setting the tone at the protests at Columbia since October 7. At their substack, they are calling, not for free speech, but for and manifesting massive disruption of campus life, memorializing Hamas leader Sinwar, celebrating the one year anniversary of the October 7 massacres in the south of Israel, cheering on Iran regime missile strikes in Israel. I wrote a long piece about the new norms on campus represented by the and pro-Hamas tilt on campus left going back to Octtober 2023. Columbia figures prominently.

— Anti-Semitism taskforces: a blogpost with links to Columbia, Harvard, Stanford (including links to Isalmophobia task forces at Harvard and Stanford).

–Unreasonable or not, here is the (first) list of Trump Administrations demands and the response from Columbia.

–Fair or not, here is the Columbia AAUP criticism of Columbia for “caving” to the Trump Administration

–An open letter with many co-signers re: Jews on campus against the weaponizing of anti-Semitism by the Trump Administration. Arguably, this letter represents mainline liberal American Jewish opinion.

–An interview with Lee Bollinger at the Chronicle of Higher Education on free speech and maybe limits on free speech. In his view, “I think our systems of discipline for violations of that kind and many others are inadequate to the moment. We lack a rule of law at universities, and that rule of law is needed for there to be a robust free-speech commitment.” On one hand, public universities are committed to the First Amendment, which  protects hate speech, including, in theory, even speech of the Klan and neo-Nazis. On the other hand, Bollinger somewhat surprisingly concedes that at a private university, there might be limits to “what people are allowed to say on a campus.” With the experience  at Columbia clearly in mind, he says, for example, that “advocating invidious discrimination against groups, or advocating physical violence, is so inconsistent with the humanistic values of the university that we should not respect it on a campus. That’s a reasonable debate and it should be had if people are so inclined.”

–Here is a big-picture view by Adam Tooze about the Trump assault on universities and the “poly-crisis” on campus. Some of this stands up, some of it doesn’t. He points to [1] the unravelling of globalization and in particular the hope of the two state solution that explodes a critical fault line on our campus and throws the weight of power massively on to the side of the Israeli government’s efforts to uphold the project of the Jewish state by violent means; [2] the MAGA assault exposes the compromise that liberal administrators thought they could create on campus, creating enclaves of left-wing thought and incipient mobilization, which are now being sacrificed pellmell to the new conservative mood; [3] the multi-faceted crisis of “big science” as a source of consensual authority in the US. [4] the bad future for U.S. and China relations.

Jews on campus are human shields for Trump’s gutting of civil society.