The professors at Columbia are fighting mad at the administration because the administration dared to call the cops on the good little cosplay terrorists.
Columbia professor Joseph Slaughter declared:
I can understand that the building occupation is a different matter than a completely peaceful, nonviolent encampment that had existed on the campus for the last ten days or so.
But the fact that the building can be occupied is partly, is due partly to the gross mismanagement of this administration. It has escalated consistently for the last seven months. These students have been attempting to get what they understand to be a human rights message about justice for Palestine out for seven months, and at every turn, they have been met with repressive actions to shut down their ability to speak, to demonstrate, to try to make their voices heard and what they see as the greatest human rights crisis of the moment.
Yes, the administration is at fault, according to the faculty. According to the faculty, the good little cosplay radicals, the good little cosplay pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism radicals, must be protected by the university. That’s the job of the university.
Which does raise the question: What is the purpose of these universities anymore?
The purpose of Columbia was clear when it was originally founded as King’s College in 1754.
The very first president of King’s College, William Samuel Johnson, stated:
The chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children to know God in Jesus Christ, and to love and serve Him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness of life, with a perfect heart, and a willing mind; and to train them up in all virtuous habits and all such useful knowledge as may render them creditable to their families and friends, ornaments to their country, and useful to the public weal in their generations.
In short, Columbia University was founded to teach eternal truths, to pursue the knowledge of nature and nature’s God, and to create good citizens and good men.
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But the social changes of the 1960s hollowed out the mission of Columbia University, mainly by fostering an entire generation of pseudo-revolutionaries devoted to overturning the status quo. By 1968, Columbia University was faced with a choice: to continue to promulgate its original mission of fostering virtue and good citizenship in accordance with eternal knowledge, or to become an activist training center. It opted for the latter with an adjunct school attached.
In 1968, the president of Columbia University was Grayson Kirk. That year, he gave a speech in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he tore into the spate of university unrest plaguing the country. He said:
Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority, from whatever source derived, and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destruction.
That statement proceeded to touch off an extraordinary crisis at Columbia University when Mark Rudd, a leader of the Radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), led a student takeover of multiple campus buildings, including Hamilton Hall. Sound familiar?
Professional activists from around the country, including Tom Hayden and Stokely Carmichael, quickly descended on the campus. Sound familiar?
One week later, the police were called in. Hundreds of people were arrested. Some were wounded. Weeks later, another student takeover broke out. The university promptly canceled finals, dropped charges against the offenders, and finally capitulated to student demands to divest from cooperation with the Pentagon. Kirk was then forced out.
His eventual replacement was William James McGill, a committed man of the Left who’d gotten famous at the University of California San Diego, having hired Herbert Marcuse, one of the heroes of the Left. He quickly pledged to “cement the rapport” between students, faculty, and administration. In 1971, McGill said the university should take the lead in enforcing the federal government’s equal rights mandates because “no other part of society is as responsive to social change as we are.” In 1972, when protesters took over campus buildings again, he refused to involve the police, preferring to “ride this one out.”
Fast forward about half a century, and universities are now full-scale Left-wing activism centers. The current president of Columbia University is an Egyptian-American economist, Minouche Shafik. In an interview with Columbia magazine upon taking this role, Shafik explained what a university is for:
The problems the world is facing today are so complex, and so pressing, that new ideas are needed to address them. Great universities like Columbia excel at generating new ideas. … Supporting faculty and students who want to get their ideas out into the world will help, but there’s more to it.
The chaos we are now seeing at universities from ignorant radicals masquerading as incisive, revolutionary truth-tellers is not a bug of the college system. It is now the point. Our universities increasingly treat activism as the main focus. These universities are, in fact, little indoctrination machines generating activists. That’s what they are for. They recruit activists, and then they promote those activists. Why? Because this is the jet fuel of Left-wing movements. The reason these administrators are selecting these people is because these people are the vanguard.
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This is why they’re negotiating with them. It’s an inside-outside game in which outside agitators make a lot of trouble. And then inside, the administrators say, “Well, we do have to negotiate with them. We have to deal with them.”
That is now the position of the Democratic Party writ large. Joe Biden is in the same exact position as Minouche Shafik. Not only is he scared of young voters, but he also sees them as the future. He sees them as the most passionate, most dedicated members of his coterie. They’re the vanguard of the revolution because these are the makings of the future Democratic Party.
These are the activists being trained at Columbia University.