Americans of all stripes across the political spectrum have been understandably transfixed by the wave of student protests against the Gaza war that has spread from elite Ivy League campuses to numerous other schools, some more surprising than others. Police have been called in to break up student encampments not just at Columbia University’s iconic Manhattan campus, which was both ground zero and a natural media target, but at USC in Los Angeles (once upon a time a famously white-bread conservative school), Emory University in Atlanta, the University of Texas at Austin, Ohio State, Indiana University and Cal Poly Humboldt in rural Northern California, among other places.
I intend to work my way back around to the instructive case of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who apparently believed she could galaxy-brain her way around the protest crisis — and avoid the fate of ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay, among others — by capitulating in advance to the House Republicans’ witch-trial caucus, taking a hard line against alleged or actual antisemitism, and finally calling the cops on her own students. Spoiler alert: None of that was a good idea, and she probably didn’t save her job anyway.
