Protests at New York University got heated when protestors chased NYPD Assistant Chief James McCarthy away after making an arrest. McCarthy tried to escape protestors in a building, but the door was locked. No one was hurt, but this video shows how emotionally charged and upsetting these campus protests have become.
Students have their right to speak out about Israel, and Jewish people have the right to feel threatened by that. It is a boiling situation.
But are universities more worried about their wealthy Jewish donors than their students’ voices? One Jewish alumni of Colombia said this to the Financial Times: ““To have our students protesting in favour of Hamas and the Houthis and Iran — it’s not a great look for the university.”
Many of them are not protesting in favor of Hamas. They are protesting against Israel’s military campaign against civilians in retaliation for October 7. Then again, some of them don’t know exactly what they’re protesting, and that is their right too.
College campuses did this to themselves by not standing for free speech in the last two decades, allowing students to antagonize speakers, creating small free-speech zones, and shouting down causes they didn’t like. Now they don’t even know how to do it when some of them clearly want to.
