The pro-Palestinian mob is back in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. So are the Hamas-friendly chants of “intifada revolution” and posts about “resistance until return.” So is the bullying and violence.
On Wednesday afternoon, dozens of masked demonstrators — it isn’t yet clear how many were students — forced their way into Barnard College’s Milbank Hall, pushing past an employee so forcefully that he wound up in the hospital. What followed was a six-hour sit-in to demand the reversal of punishments for students who had been disciplined for violating campus rules.
That included two students who were expelled from Barnard after they had forced their way last month into a class on modern Israel and “handed out antisemitic flyers, including one of a Jewish star being stomped by a jackboot,” as The New York Times’ Sharon Otterman reported. In that incident, the professor, Avi Shilon, told the Times that he invited the demonstrators to join the class instead of disrupting it — a remarkably humane gesture in the face of such bigotry. They refused.
At Barnard, the demonstrators demanded to see Leslie Grinage, a dean, who agreed to a meeting on the condition that students unmask themselves and show their IDs. They, too, refused. The college then gave protesters a 9:30 p.m. deadline to clear out. They ignored it for over an hour. Some then marched out the front door banging a drum. Police, who were present on the campus, did not arrest them. Others slipped out through a first-floor window.
Laura Rosenbury, Barnard’s president, called the sit-in “completely unacceptable” in a statement; after the expulsions for the classroom disruption, she had vowed “decisive action to protect our community as a place where learning thrives.”
But the pablum rings hollow given the many hours wasted offering the demonstrators mediation with faculty members. After more than a year of incessant disruption, intimidation and rule-breaking by pro-Palestinian protesters — not to mention lasting reputational damage these protests have done their schools — the only question Rosenbury, Grinage and other administrators need to answer is why police weren’t called in to clear out the sit-in within minutes and why the protesters didn’t spend the night in jail.
Where’s the board of trustees? Where’s the adult supervision?
Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any non-students at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.
Kicking out the students involved in Wednesday’s sit-in would make the point refreshingly plain.