PRO-PALESTINIAN protests at American universities are escalating. Within the early hours of April thirtieth greater than 200 demonstrators at Columbia College barricaded Hamilton Corridor, a constructing famously occupied by anti-war protesters in 1968. On the College of California, Los Angeles, scuffles erupted this week between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian college students. Police have arrested college students in latest days at Virginia Tech, the College of Florida, Tulane College and elsewhere. The overall variety of campus arrests is now close to 1,000, but tented encampments—the signature motif of pro-Palestinian campus demonstrators—proceed to bloom like spring flowers from coast to coast.
The blame recreation can also be intensifying. College leaders are once more within the firing line, accused by a few of having introduced the chaos on themselves by coddling pupil trespassers and permitting antisemitic speech to go unpunished. On April twenty ninth 21 Democrats within the Home of Representatives signed a letter to Columbia’s board demanding that it “act decisively” to disband the protest encampment there, arguing that its presence violated federal civil-rights regulation by creating an “impermissibly hostile and unsafe setting for Jewish college students”. But lecturers at Columbia and elsewhere are castigating their directors for turning to the police. Pupil protests, they argue, needs to be dealt with as a teachable second by way of negotiations and campus discourse.
