The Kids are not Alright

The Disturbing Truth behind the Recent Campus Unrest

On April 17, 2024, hundreds of students at Columbia University in New York, an institution known for decades as a hub of radical activism, constructed an encampment on the campus demanding the school divest its portfolio from any entity tied to Israel.  After failed intervention by the NYPD, the radical students refused to budge.  Since then, the protests have mushroomed across the country and even the world.  This major unrest has forced schools to make drastic decisions we hoped would be behind us after the COVID pandemic.  The University of California in Los Angeles moved its classes online.  Emory University in Atlanta relocated its commencement ceremony to more than 20 miles (32km) away from the campus.  Columbia University, the epicenter of the tempest, cancelled its main commencement altogether.  In the Western World of 2024, the kids are not all right. 

What is happening on college campuses points to so many troubling trends in today’s world that I find it challenging to know where to start.  The first one of these trends is overt and aggressive antisemitism.  While neither this most ancient hatred nor the straw man of false antisemitism accusations are new, the harassment against Jewish students on American campuses is perhaps unprecedented in modern America.  These incidents have included threatening chants such as “go back to Poland”, “We are all Hamas”, “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the Sea Palestine will be free”.  For anyone with a knowledge of history, every single one of these is effectively a call for genocide.   Other Jewish students have been the victims of outright physical violence.  The conditions for Jewish students at Columbia have become so dire that Jewish students were “strongly” urged by a rabbi to “return home as soon as possible and remain home” indefinitely.   In a supposedly modern and progressive society such as ours, such incidents are unacceptable and reprehensible.

Beyond the specter of genocide, the overall disruption is another factor which greatly concerns me.  Four years ago, high school seniors were denied the right to a normal commencement.  Instead, these students were forced to sit through ceremonies in masks, sometimes seated far apart, or even delayed an entire year.  And now, with schools like Columbia and the University of Southern California cancelling their graduations citing “safety concerns”, these students are forced to endure alternative arrangements yet again. There is no evidence to me that a majority of students anywhere, even at Columbia, are actively taking part in these highly disruptive protests and unrest.  In fact, there is a mountain of evidence that a sizeable proportion of the most violent individuals are not students at all, but outside agitators.  In any free and constitutional state, citizens have the right to peaceful dissent and protest.  However in my opinion, even if they don’t cross the threshold of violence, overtly disrupting another citizen’s daily business should not be allowed in any public venue.  If we allow this, we are also allowing the most radical minority to dictate every detail of our lives.

Finally, while we see all sorts of condemnation of Israel, whose obliteration of the Gaza strip I forcefully condemn, we see nothing even close regarding Russia’s continuing aggression against Ukraine.  If the anti-Israel protests are the Super Bowl, the protests against Russian imperialism are third grade flag football.  Meanwhile, for the future of global security, the conflict in Ukraine is far more critical.  The latter conflict has been occurring for decades, or even centuries, and so long as Israel’s existence does not come under an imminent threat, the United States and its allies have little interest in direct involvement in the world’s oldest conflict.   Meanwhile, the consequences of Russia controlling most or all of Ukraine would be dire, and not just for Ukraine and its neighbors in Eastern Europe.  If one country can take over another by brute force, the world would automatically become much more dangerous; and yet these campus radicals cannot be bothered with the truth.  Few can comprehend how frustrating this reality is for me. 

A few weeks back, I took some heat for a previous op-ed bemoaning what I felt is a lack of awareness about foreign affairs among young Americans.  Instead of being an indictment of our supposedly “hopeless” youth, I take solace that most American college students want no part in this chaos and instability.  They just hope to attend class in person, achieve the best grades possible, graduate, find a satisfying career, and eventually repay their student loans.  Instead, a minority of radicals are shutting down campuses, thus dramatically spoiling the university experience for the majority.   In summary, I believe I have made clear my opinion of the unrest we have seen across college campuses in Western countries, regardless of my thoughts on the excessive nature of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.  Interestingly, these sorts of protests have been only marginal in Arab countries due to heavy-handed government intervention.  If even Arab governments take a more rational perspective of pro-Hamas unrest than American students and outside agitators, then our universities have no choice but to engage in deep introspection about their purpose in the 21st century.