Columbia University Mob Makes the Case for Trump to Drain Higher Ed Swamp

Columbia University’s pro-Hamas radicals couldn’t have handed the Trump administration an easier opening in their war on college campus radicalism.

On Wednesday afternoon, pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the Columbia campus and took over Butler Library during the school’s finals week. Calling them protesters is imprecise. They were a mob.

The videos are all over social media.

Here’s a Keffiyeh-clad fanatic vandalizing school property.

The New York Police Department was eventually called in and trapped the mob in the library. According to a report by The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen, NYPD confirmed that they arrested 80 people. No charges have been made yet, but I’ll be interested to find out how many have been arrested for similar incidents in the past.

Columbia University Acting President Claire Shipman put out a statement that many are praising.

This was well done. Having a media background, as Shipman does, sure helps when dealing with these situations.

But I’d argue that talk is cheap. School policy allowed students and protesters to wear masks if they produced IDs when asked. But they didn’t have to wear IDs on the outside of their clothes. Of course, the masked people simply ignored the ID request when it became relevant.

Whether that mask policy was designed to work or fail, the result was the same.

Not long after the mob was cleared out, Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in, saying that they are going to look at the visa status of the vandals.

Uh oh.

This latest Columbia takeover comes at an awful time for the school administration and for Ivy League schools in general. President Donald Trump has not only threatened to pull billions of dollars from schools that can’t control antisemitism and fail to protect students, but he’s also even going after their tax-exempt status.

The truth is Columbia and higher education in general now operates with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.

Trump and his administration have shown they are not only willing to criticize higher education institutions and the Ivy Leagues specifically, but they’re also prepared to go after them in the way that hurts most. The administration already pulled $400 million in grants from Columbia in March over their inaction on antisemitism, forcing the school to lay off 180 staff members.

This prompted Columbia to take at least some steps to show they are getting their act together. According to the New York Post, the school agreed to “ban masks for the purpose of concealing identity, empower 36 campus police officers with new powers to arrest students and appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies, as well as the Center for Palestine Studies.”

But it’s hard to break old habits.

The campus activists are used to getting their way. In the case of Columbia, the Manhattan district attorney gave those previously arrested for vandalism and disrupting campus only the lightest of slaps on the wrist. He outright dropped charges against most of the students and protesters using the bogus excuse that he couldn’t get evidence against students caught on camera trespassing, vandalizing, and assaulting on Columbia campus property.

The activists know that they can play games with administrations, which is why they make a ruckus and win concessions.

But why was there ever a negotiation? Why is it that the people who disrupt campus life and scream the loudest get anything? That’s not what attending a university should be about. The students who attend to study and engage in reasonable debate or discussion get shafted.

The truth is, the school administration and the activists are part of the same closed circuit political ecosystem that considers support of a terrorist group that wants to exterminate Jews in the range of acceptable opinion, but support of the current president to be beyond the pale.

For a very long time, higher education got away with this dynamic while our federal government gave them a blank check.

But times have changed, and the universities are in the unprecedented situation of being trapped between the government and their leftist base. For decades they’ve essentially let the campus activist wing operate with impunity while doing their best to keep right-leaning voices quiet and in their place.

But the angry mobs in their halls aren’t the only people they should be worried about. There is an angry storm of democracy outside their gate too, the once-silent majority that’s had enough.

Decades of unaccountability have made university administrations weak in the face of determined opposition. Unlike a handful of schools, like Hillsdale College, they became used to funding their bloated bureaucracies with taxpayer money. They have no idea how to operate without unquestioned federal government financial and ideological support.

The campus activists are going to continue doing what they do. Don’t think that children who are used to throwing tantrums and getting what they want are going to suddenly stop their behavior. They know campus administrations are in a bind.

Despite a few token concessions, school administrations like Columbia’s have done little to demonstrate that they can get control of the mayhem, haven’t explained why extremely wealthy schools with billion-dollar endowments deserve generous taxpayer support, and haven’t demonstrated that their sudden, laughable commitment to “free speech” doesn’t just mean free speech for leftists.

They are constitutionally unable to drain their swamp, Now it seems they’ve made it easy for Trump to drain it for them.

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