Now that the tents have been cleared from Columbia University’s campus, now that the NYPD has liberated Hamilton Hall, now that arrests have been made and outside agitators named, it’s time to begin making sense of the Tentifada. Mysteries abound: Who paid for all that matching, high-end camping gear? How did the same violent playbook spread from one campus to the next overnight? And what must we do now that the young collegians have made it clear that there’s more mayhem coming?
Let’s hope that our more astute observers get answers to these questions. But we have a more pressing duty: that of observing how various men and women in positions of power and authority acted when the barbarians stormed the gates.
First up: Columbia president Minouche Shafik. If you knew nothing about Shafik, or Columbia, or modern universities, and wanted to ascertain how the president might meet the troubling moment, you wouldn’t have needed to look past one number: $13.64 billion. That’s the value of Columbia’s endowment as of last June; it’s also, more or less, the Gross Domestic Product of Moldova, Rwanda, and a host of other smallish nations. With so much money at stake, it’s likely that anyone in Shafik’s position would have reacted as she did, with a symphony of bluster, obfuscations, and half-truths designed to make sure that business proceeds as usual.
Testifying before Congress in April, for example, Shafik delivered sweeping, emotive statements, such as saying that “for me, personally, any discrimination against people for their Jewish faith is anti-Semitism.” But when asked whether she intended to discipline Professor Joseph Massad, who celebrated the massacre of more than a thousand Israelis on October 7 as “awesome,” Shafik merely said that the errant teacher was “spoken to.” When pressed further about Massad’s employment status, the president replied that she just wasn’t sure.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Ruth King
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.ruthfullyyours.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.