Situation at Columbia XIX

Yesterday was the main and final graduation ceremony here at Columbia. Despite the NY Post labeling their coverage “arrests-diploma-burning-mayhem-and-chaos”, graduation went on here very peacefully, much the same as usual. Lots and lots and lots of happy students and proud parents and relatives. Main negative thing was some rain.

I wasn’t at the big ceremony, but as far as I can tell, the only thing even slightly unusual was some booing of acting president Claire Shipman. Until quite recently she had a rigid policy of refusing to even say the names of students like Mahmoud Khalil who had been imprisoned for pro-Palestinian activity. That’s changed, she is now saying his name at least, and some students evidently were shouting it to make sure she knew how they felt about this. There was a small demonstration outside the campus, on the other side of Broadway. I walked through it on the way to lunch, a small group with signs and some chanting.

There’s a breaking story from Harvard this afternoon. Dog-killer Kristi Noem has announced that

Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.

justifying this with the outrageous lie that

Harvard’s leadership has created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students, and otherwise obstruct its once-venerable learning environment. Many of these agitators are foreign students. Harvard’s leadership further facilitated, and engaged in coordinated activity with the CCP, including hosting and training members of a CCP paramilitary group complicit in the Uyghur genocide.

What Noem is doing is obviously completely illegal, and I assume Harvard’s lawyers are already going to court to fight. This is just one example of where this country is: a Fascist dictatorship is illegally trying to destroy one of the best and most world-respected institutions in the country. As in this and hundreds of other similar cases, the legislative branch refuses to do anything, so we’re all hoping the judiciary will hold the line and thwart the dictatorship. That Columbia is refusing to join the fight and still negotiating surrender to the dictatorship is deeply shameful and a big reason Shipman was getting booed yesterday.

Update: It took, minutes, not hours for a federal judge to block this insanity. If institutions are willing to fight and not cave-in, the judicial system may save us. When the Columbia cave-in happened, one of the main excuses I heard for it was that Columbia could not fight because if we did:

• Trump would cancel more grants.
• Trump would remove the university’s ability to have foreign students.
• Trump would remove Columbia student’s Pell grants.

After the cave-in, the grants were canceled anyway. The second threat was so obviously illegal that it’s unclear why you would take it seriously. Haven’t heard more about the third threat.

If my sources were accurately describing legal advice that Columbia was getting about the need to cave-in because of the danger to the ability to enroll foreign students, some highly-paid lawyers need to be fired immediately.

Update: Previous update unfortunately not accurate. It seems that today’s order from the federal judge has to do with a challenge to what the Trump administration had been doing earlier, canceling student visas because of pro-Palestinian activity or for other unknown reasons. I don’t know what effect it has on the latest illegal activity. Perhaps it will also keep current student’s visas from being canceled, but there will still be a problem with enrolling new students (until a different court order).