Except this is a bonding exercise based on persecuting Jews. How is it different from German students in the 1940’s persecuting the Jewish students at their universities? For the Nazis, persecuting Jews was a means of bonding the non-Jewish Germans.
No, these students are as nasty and deserving of our condemnation as those who marched with Tiki torches. We cant excuse them because they are juvenile fools.

I’m just wondering how this will all play out over the next few decades. You might write things like this off as the naivety of youth, and I can see the argument that the cause doesn’t really matter – but it’s hard to escape that they are also setting new norms.
There might be some youthful group dynamics we can all recognize, but when I was their age, it wasn’t mainstream-acceptable to target Jewish people, nor was it okay in general for members of one minority to outright discriminate against another, as seems to be becoming more acceptable now. We were committed to more equal opportunity anti-racism back then.
I am Canadian, and while there is now some backlash against poorly thought-out immigration policies, it’s just that – not so much anti-immigrant, even among our conservatives, but specifically against the current immigration policies. I’ve been impressed by how resilient the norms set during our younger years have held.
These “kids” (actually young adults) are establishing different norms. No matter how you frame it, more of them think this behavior is acceptable than did in my generation, and this is likely setting a new baseline in their minds. This is why I don’t dismiss it as merely clueless youth – it matters.
These young adults will soon be just adults, and they will have a very different idea of what is acceptable compared to what people my age (40) believe. No matter how trivial the cause may seem, I don’t think the results will be trivial at all, and it’s much more worrying.

Where were the protests when Ukraine was invaded? Where are the protests for the Chinese Uyghurs? What about the Sudan Darfur genocide?

The First Amendment is an oft abused and commonly misunderstood concept. What these “kids” (they are only so to me because I’m 2x their ages) are doing is not necessarily protected, since it threatens the well being and safety of others. Worse, when Jewish students are actually assaulted, the concept of “free speech” goes out the window, no matter the cause. This makes these protests as legit as any other form of language that threatens violence.
What makes this so insipid is that these kids have become a gang of bullies, clearly capable of intimidation of university faculty and leadership, even national politicians, as well as other students. In that sense, they are different from actual criminal gangs only in their lack of weapons and perhaps lack of willingness to do grave harm ( though clearly the latter is an option).
When gangs run their world through intimidation and threats, nothing good happens.

Beats studying for finals. How many of these kids are getting incompletes on their courses?

And, more importantly, how many profs will have the guts to say no? And of those, how many will be overridden by their chair and dean?

This article is saccharine. Too long on explaining why we just need to understand these poor, young and misjudged souls. It’s the fault of society don’t you know, because they weren’t allowed to have a party during Covid. What utter rubbish!

It’s written with the same mindset that creates the attitude of these ungrateful, vengeful privileged few at Columbia in the first place. Stop finding excuses for this degeneracy, they are acting as two year olds, and that’s an insult to two year olds.

However, even two year olds learn by being held accountable when they have a tantrum, they learn through consequences. Not milksop excuses for why Johnny is throwing a fit.

These people threatening and bullying Jews for being Jews are, unfortunately for all of us, the future. If Kat Rosenfield thinks finding excuses for these peevish and puerile babies, with no consequences for their actions is the way to address this, then the future is certainly a bleak and dismal one.

What are they protesting about. 14500 children killed, 35000 injured for life, impending famine, aided and abetted by US-supplied ‘precision’ 2000lb bombs. It’s collective punishment and it’s an obscenity. Does that not even warrant a mention? I despair.

The demonstrators who are arrested are facing real consequences: eviction, expulsion, financial ruin, and so on. To depict them as partying, joking about pink Crocs is journalistic flippant. Student protests helped stop South African apartheid and the Vietnam war, don’t underestimate their power.

The parallels between what’s going on now and what happened during the 1960s are eerie: a long shadow war against an ideological enemy that many Westerners are uncertain as to the necessity of fighting (Communism, Islamism); an increasingly out-of-touch and decrepit former vice-president (Johnson, Biden) who’s succeeded a young and popular president with a reputation as a peacenik despite ruthlessly widening said shadow war (Kennedy, Obama); an opposition candidate widely derided by and derisive towards the “establishment” who’s preparing another run for the Big Chair after defeat in a perceived stolen election (Nixon, Trump); a controversial and polarizing “civil war” (South Vietnam vs. North Vietnam, Israel vs. Hamas) between a US ally and a guerrilla force sponsored by America’s primary adversary in the shadow war (Russia, Iran) that’s tactically and strategically favoring our ally but is portrayed by the media as a defeat for said ally; massive campus “protests” bordering on riots by student radicals who favor the side in the proxy war that, if they won, would be the first to line the radicals up against a wall to be shot; domestic politics increasingly poisoned by foreign policy; a “free speech” movement that demands increased license for the radicals and silencing of the radicals opponents…obviously, the two situations are not identical, but the parallels, at least to me, are striking.
They say that history repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce, except that last time was the farce, so I have no idea what this is. I will say, however, that I think it’s probably impossible to understand what’s happening on our campuses today without recognizing the extent to which Sixties radicalism has been hagiographied, especially on the campuses themselves. Anyone who considers themselves an “activist” has been reared in the shadow of the SDS, the Weathermen, and the Black Panthers (hey, Black Lives Matter, another parallel!); they undoubtedly feel they have a lot to live up to. In his very perceptive book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork, who as a professor at Yale Law School lived through a number of 1960s student protests, noted the similarities between the sloganeering and actions of the student radicals and the brownshirts in 1930s Germany. Today, perhaps, the mask has slipped even further. Antisemitism is, as someone once put it, the socialism of fools, after all.

Groupthink rarely yields good results.

Anyone who has taken a journalism course in high school or college knows that students DO NOT HAVE FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS. They have limited speech rights subject to school policies.

From the Free Speech Center:

“Constitutional provisions safeguarding individual rights place limits on the government and its agents, but not on private institutions or individuals. Thus, to speak of the First Amendment rights of students is to speak of students in public elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions. Private schools are not government actors and thus there is no state action trigger…
Students in private universities — which are not subject to the requirements of the First Amendment — may rely on state laws to ensure certain basic freedoms. For example, many state cases have established that school policies, student handbooks and other relevant documents represent a contract between the college or university and the student. Schools that promise to respect and foster academic freedom, open expression and freedom of conscience on their campus must deliver the rights they promise.”

All Ivy League schools are private institutions (they are paid for with private funds, not governmental funds). This is true of all private spaces, you do not have free speech rights in my house, you do not have free speech rights at the office, etc. The First Amendment protects us from government regulation of speech (within reason. yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater is not protected).

But if these students are violating school policy, then the schools have no duty to protect them, in fact they bear the duty to their non-disruptive students to end campus disruption and rules violations.

Do they actually do any academic work and get degrees?

The more things change…
Monday, May 4, 1970, Syracuse University. I walked over to the Quad to see what all the fuss was about. Flyers for the anti-war demonstration had been passed out the previous week at the beginning of the student strike, part of a nation-wide Viet Nam war protest taking place on college campuses across the country. 
Microphones had been set up on the steps of Hendricks Chapel, and a scruffy looking fellow was reading press reports of what was happening on other campuses. A chanting rhythm had been established. “XX Hall had been occupied at YY University.” Yeah! Yeah! “Sit-in at ZZ university’s administration building.” Whoop-tee-doo! “Students shot at Kent State University.” Hooray! Right-on! “Student Union at…”
Wait, what? Students shot? Did I hear that right? The established rhythm continued unbroken. I looked around at the faces in the crowd. Did what I had just heard register with anyone else? Apparently not. The party atmosphere from the previous weekend had carried over into the demonstration. Final exams had been called off. It was party time!
Feeling a bit shocked and disgusted, I exited the Quad to the north. As I passed Crouse Hall, I noticed the Sacco-Vanzetti mural on the east wall of the building. Part of the mosaic shows a handful of demonstrators in dark suits carrying signs. I couldn’t help but think how times have changed. Things seemed so much more serious then.
As I got back to the geology building, I noticed students at the fraternity houses that lined the street on the east side of campus doing what most students were doing, packing up their cars and leaving for the summer.
We were busy in geology doing the same thing. Student Strike? Our department head was having none of it. He couldn’t go against the administration, so he just moved up the dates for our summer field courses. We were all looking forward to a summer in Wyoming and Montana studying the grand geology of the Rocky Mountains Foreland and leaving the craziness behind. 

There is the inconvenient truth that anyone who bothers to educate themselves on the Israeli-Palestinian issue quickly realises that the Palestinians have been treated badly.

Way too blaise. Nihilisic revolutions are always built by professional revolutionaries on the backs of useful idiots who should have known better.

I’ve got to the end of this rather good essay with the conclusion that this was not a protest as such – just a restless, directionless, mindless mob.
The logical conclusion to that is that the event does need shutting down. The peoples’ presence does not attach to any specific cause which is what would make it a protected protest and it is resulting in the articulation of anti-semitic hatred.
The problem is – they got a good cover. Add a couple of keffiyehs to your rowdy student party and BOOM! You’re intouchable. It’s impossible for the police to break it up, even if the status as a protest is only superficial.
Just as the younger generation have become fluent in the language of victimhood to escape responsibility for their own bad behaviour, so Palestine is a cover – an Iron Dome one might say – for the same.
And this is the flower of America’s intellectual future. Good grief.