MARSCHALL: There is no more 'back to campus' after universities surrendered to pro-Hamas mobs
There is no 'back to campus.' Not anymore. The cultural barriers and physical demarcations that once separated society and higher education have crumbled under the weight of unimpeded pro-Hamas violence.
It is neither accurate nor timely to say that college students are going back to campus this week, where they will resume far-left protests that held universities hostage last spring.
There is no “back to campus.” Not anymore. The cultural barriers and physical demarcations that once distinguished society and higher education have crumbled under the weight of unimpeded pro-Hamas violence.
Consider a theater’s proscenium, the physical outline of the stage whose threshold keeps the worlds of the audience and actors apart as the play unfolds for both spaces. Historically, campus boundaries were thresholds between the worlds of higher learning and daily life as the politics of both influenced the other. Protests came and went, but the acknowledged barriers endured.
But that threshold is now gone, even if people do not yet recognize it, and there is no use pretending it still remains.
There is now only flux between student and adult activists, between on-campus and off-campus protests. The proscenium has given way to a spectrum of spaces and people united by leftist lust to eradicate Western civilization.
University leaders are responsible for this change. They willfully surrendered territory to the mobs’ tent encampments as they abandoned their responsibilities to ensure secure and well-functioning campus complexes.
The revolution came from within on the heels of institutional weakness and decay, and it accelerated from without as Hamas leaders anointed student activists part of the “Al Aqsa Flood” operation that killed more than 1,000 innocent Israelis on October 7.
Institutions such as Columbia University, Syracuse University, Northwestern University, and the University of California Los Angeles acted too slowly last spring to police the wave of adult and professional protesters that partook in the tent encampments. Last week, multiple Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters partook in protests at the Democratic National Convention under the auspices of National SJP, which Campus Reform has identified as a beneficiary of George Soros’s trickle-down network of activism funding.
To borrow the words of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, these administrations waited for the barbarians to breach from within and without. Their first instincts were neither to welcome nor banish these new barbarians from the universities – places of learning and intellectual pursuits already compromised and mired by years of anti-intellectual leftist indoctrination.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
But unlike Cavafy’s poem, in which the barbarians do not come to relieve the city-state of its terminal decline to usher in a utopian revival, pro-Hamas protesters appeared immediately after October 7 and colonized the quads the following spring.
The protests will continue this fall, particularly in New York, the state with the largest Jewish population. Disruptive actions already commenced at the University of Albany during orientation and agitators at the City University of New York (CUNY) have promised to “TAKE ACTION FOR GAZA.” At Baruch College (CUNY), the SJP chapter’s job posting for marketing, event coordination, and “volunteer protester” positions features two overlayed AK-47s, a pictorial nod to Hamas propaganda and iconography.
No wonder CUNY safety officers are sounding the alarm. “The university is going into this under fire – they have no idea what’s going to happen. There’s no preparation,” one officer told The New York Post anonymously.
Cavafy’s august city leaders are resigned to the anticipated invasion. As at CUNY, there is no defensive preparation or redoubt from which to mount a stand against violence and anarchy. Protesters didn’t need a Trojan Horse to breach university operations; from the occupations of Hamilton Hall at Columbia to Dearing Meadow at Northwestern, they besieged campus property and razed academic life from within after months of honestly professing their revolutionary ambitions to “Globalize the Intifada.”
So, why the inaction, the wait-and-see approach that colored so many university leaders’ impotence in the face of violent and disruptive upheaval? Do not forget the context in which university leaders have overseen the incubation of far-left activism for the last two generations.
On a microcosmic level, the dissolution of higher education’s cloistered position in society resonates with the far-left’s overarching goal to be global citizens in a cosmopolitan constellation of communities unburdened by physical borders.
Leftist lecture hall-trained revolutionaries want to be citizens of nowhere while claiming membership everywhere as cogs in the perennial struggle between class and identitarian groups.
And as university leaders tolerated these student activists – and the radical professors who oversee the brainwashing – they have doled out freebies to illegal immigrants enrolled at their universities. From the theoretical to the practical, university administrations have enabled disregard for borders, for distinctions between places based on space.
That is why LGBTQ activists march for Palestinian “liberation.”
National distinctions – between a gay rooftop party in Tel Aviv and gays being thrown off a roof in the Palestinian territories – do not register in leftists’ worldviews. The wall separating Israel from terrorist-supporting Palestinians does not demarcate any difference in leftists’ global imaginary because far-left politics only seek to transcend and break down borders.
No university president wakes up in the morning supporting violence. But the violence we all witnessed last academic year is not incompatible with the academic environments these leaders have fostered for decades.
University presidents presided over their once-respected institutions with indifference and ambivalence and they watched as campus and community forces colluded to globalize the Intifada. They sat on their hands, viewing the horror as nothing more than the practical application of what students, their faculty, and their adult allies have professed all along.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
