Monday administrators announced that due to the pro-Palestine encampment that lasted for days at Columbia University, the school would hold virtual classes the remainder of the year. Prior to this announcement, the protests seemed so concerning to a local rabbi who warned Jewish students just before Passover not to go to school.
Antisemitic protests have cropped up at Yale. The University of South Carolina canceled its main commencement ceremony after protests broke out and arrests followed. Faculty and staff at Columbia seemed more interested in perpetuating the encampment, even at one point encircling the students to “protect” them, rather than helping to maintain order or even quashing it.
However, student-protestors who tried to mimic Columbia’s experiment at the University of Texas at Austin were met with an entirely different experience. As protesters grew in size and volume, law enforcement stepped in to quell the chaos. Some 60 arrests were made, although charges were dismissed against 46 people arrested at a protest Wednesday on UT Austin's campus, per Travis County Attorney Delia Garza.
Gov. Greg Abbott posted on X that in Texas, “Antisemitism will not be tolerated…Period.
Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.” Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-FL, said something similar at a press conference Thursday.
In a text exchange with a state senator, UT President Jay Hartzell acknowledges that he called upon the help of the Texas Department of Public Safety because “our police force couldn’t do it alone.”
Whether or not students should be arrested at college campuses is entirely up to the purview of local law enforcement and likely depends on whether or not university policies or local laws were broken. After what had been occurring at Columbia University, it’s easy to see why the University of Texas decided to be much more assertive and direct in quashing protests that administrators deemed to be growing violent, large, disruptive, or in violation of school policies.
Throughout the last couple weeks, an issue that continues to be analyzed in light of these protests is the students’ First Amendment rights to speech, peacefully assemble, and more. A glance at any of these protests, whether they’re encampments or loud crowds, can see that for starters, nobody’s free speech rights are being violated. But what’s more, it’s really disingenuous to observe what’s happening and whine about the First Amendment. Commentators do it because it sounds noble and it’s much easier to discuss than the dark underbelly of these protests that is the rank antisemitic and anti-American sentiments that continues to just cascade from these students.
Case in point: One of the alleged leaders of the recently visited Columbia encampment posted a video on social media stating “Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live.” At the University of Michigan Thursday, pamphlets were handed out that said, “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.”
Of course, no one disagrees with the statement that speech must be protected but universities have policies and cities have laws. If these protests — any protests — break those laws or policies, it should be handled with the appropriate consequences. Not even zealous students have a right to harass other students for being Jewish. To suggest that the focus of these protests should be the possible violations of the First Amendment rather than the poison that is thousands of students spewing blatant antisemitic and anti-American views is duplicitous.
It continues to be disappointing to see the level of anti-Americanism students have harbored while enjoying the fruits that American freedoms afforded them. Universities have long been hotbeds of progressive views and now those have come to the surface — and they aren’t going away anytime soon. We must deal head-on with the root of issues, quashing protests that violate school policies, rather than succumb to distractions about whether or not breaking up protests violates the First Amendment rights of students to harass and intimidate Jews.
