Isn’t it almost summer break? Feel like the admin needs to just ignore the protestors completely for a couple weeks then most will pack up and if some remain on a ghost campus who cares?
Or… They could go talk to the students and then explore ways to divest from genocide?
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Certainly would be helpful to clarify their specific demands. Everything I see in media is very general, like does a complete divestment from anything related to Israel mean any company that sells stuff there?
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They are asking for a “complete divestment” from anything related to Israel, financial transparency into the university’s investments and amnesty from any disciplinary measures for students participating in the protests.
“This is what we are here for – calling for an end to genocide and for Columbia to financially divest from the violent Zionist settler entity,” a student who identified themself as W told CNN.
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Isnt this how a number of Israelis (maybe the majority) view Palestinian or Arab people?
Protest movements always seem incoherent and poorly planned at the time, don’t worry. Let the kids do their thing, it’ll make sense when you’re older.
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McWhorter is not exactly known for his subversive sense of humor.
He had some funny bits in his language lecture series, back before the Boomer mind virus got to him.
This isn’t getting out in the press, but one of the fundamental factors in this conflict is commencement. Columbia has one small patch of lawn on campus - just one. That patch of grass is one of the most litigated and obsessed over spots of real estate in NYC. They spend literally millions maintaining it and access is limited by a labyrinthian set of rules that I will never understand. One thing for sure though - from late April till late May that patch is the centerpiece of CU’s multiweek commencement extravaganza. The set up for those events started this week. I just now walked across central campus and there is far more disruption and restriction from the dozens of workers are setting up bleachers and wine tents (seriously) as there are from student protesters.
The fact that the administration feels the need to arrest protesting students is 99% because they need to clear that area for graduating students, and especially, their very wealthy parents. Otherwise, they would have to move the events to the football field or something - at that point we may as well be Cornell.
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Thanks for the response. I was just kinda taken aback at the type of comments about college aged kids sitting around protesting. And yeah, I’m sure I don’t properly understand the impact of Oct 7
That adds a lot of context!
OK, I went ahead and read the article and I have no idea what he is getting at in that anecdote.
I swear, the audio lecture series on languages he did with The Learning Company a million years ago was quite interesting. I guess being Reactionary Black Guy gets more attention that being good at linguistics.
Read the Noah Smith article. As he mentions, many protest movements are incoherent in hindsight. I think this is a “free” share of the article: Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left. If not, it should be available form the tweet linked above.
Yes, considerably more after Oct 7th.
There’s also “channel 14”. Israel’s relatively new version of Fox News, which is rotting the brains of anyone watching it to probably irreversible state.
There is no silver lining to anything here, but something to remember is that there were very few incidents between Arab and Jewish citizens since Oct 7th (probably closer to none if you dont include East Jerusalem), something i was terrified of.
Of course there are lots of Jewish students at the protests. Hard to imagine that’s even a question. They had a seder at the Yale protest. I would bet that more than half the white kids at these protests at Yale, Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley are Jewish. I guarantee Jews are overrepresented at the pro-cease-fire protests.
I think very few Americans take “anti-Zionist” to mean Jews can’t live in Israel and I’ve seen first hand that it can take a little work to get an Israeli to understand that and I’ve seen Americans unwilling to accept that to many people “Zionist” doesn’t mean only Jews can live in Israel.
Zionism meant to build a homeland for Jewish people in Israel. When anti-zionist Jews held a Seder in Columbia and had to repeatedly read the prayers for God to rebuild Jerusalem, it just sounds odd.
I can definitely relate to the notion that Zionism should have evolved into a much more inclusive and progressed idea once Israel was formed and secured. But telling people that their beliefs aren’t actually their beliefs and we will use it in a different and derogatory way is very unproductive. I’m also certain it is fueled by the small fraction that truly is anti-zionist in its original meaning.
I think that’s all correct including the small fraction part, but there’s a lot of misunderstanding. My sample size of really discussing this isn’t huge, but the two ardent non-Jewish end the war protestors I’ve talked to about this did not think Zionist could mean accepting Palestinians in Israel/Palestine at all.
Older American Jews like myself I think will usually not take Zionism to necessarily mean that because I don’t think people in the US took it that way as much when I was a kid. I’m sure some younger American Jews at these protests are aware and perhaps uncomfortable and some are probably not aware.
