April 25, 2024 | The Dispatch
How Universities Can Take Back the Quad
They have student codes of conduct, they just need to enforce them.
April 25, 2024 | The Dispatch
How Universities Can Take Back the Quad
They have student codes of conduct, they just need to enforce them.
Excerpt
More than 100 people staging a pro-Palestinian protest were arrested last week at Columbia University after the university president asked the NYPD to intervene. That didn’t quell the situation: A new tent camp was soon set up on the campus quad, and disorder has continued, with some protesters screaming, “We know where you live now” and throwing liquids at Jewish students. “Other pro-Palestinian protesters circling around the main gates claimed to be with Hamas,” reported a Jewish student. “One said ‘I am Hamas’ on video.” The university has moved to a hybrid class model to allow students to attend online for the rest of the semester, which ends next week. As of Wednesday, the university was working with student protesters to dismantle some of the tents in the encampment and ensure they would adhere to safety and behavioral guidelines.
The protests at Columbia are a product of the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses around the country since October 7 but have also inspired further demonstrations: Students have been arrested at New York University, Yale, and the University of Minnesota among others, and tent encampments are popping up on campuses across the country. Colleges and universities have a tool at hand to deal with this problem, if only they’ll use it: enforcing codes of conduct by clarifying expectations and holding perpetrators accountable.
David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Antonette Bowman is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies