Enough Is Enough

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 30, 2025

 

The campus experience at Columbia University over the last week is illustrative of the hell to which America’s students have been consigned since the October 7 massacre.

 

As students embarked on the spring semester last week, a “band of masked keffiyeh-clad students” intruded on a course on modern Israeli history where they threw “flyers featuring a smashed Star of David underneath a boot, a burning Israeli flag, and weapon-carrying militants at students,” Fox News reported. The vandals continued to distribute literature insisting that “the enemy will not see tomorrow” and announcing their intention to “burn Zionism to the ground,” until this week, when they resorted to insurrection. “We cemented the sewage lines of the entire building,” the Columbia branch of Students for Justice in Palestine announced, “forcing them to shut down business-as-usual.”

 

It’s almost as if Columbia’s administrators learned no lessons from their efforts to appease the violent professional demonstrators who took over their campus last year when they threatened and harassed Jews, did violence to their campus, and forced the administration to reluctantly sic the NYPD on them.

 

The same could be said of colleges across the country. Despite the humiliation Republicans duly meted out to a few Ivy League presidents for their conspicuous tolerance of antisemitism, this menace still plagues colleges across the country. The onset of a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has had no effect on this tempo of antisocial activism, revealing once and for all that the unrest is fueled not by the war Hamas started but by the existence of the Jewish state.

 

Something must be done to force American colleges to do their jobs — elementary stuff, such as protecting from physical injury and stultifying intimidation the students who pay exorbitant sums to be there. “This failure is unacceptable,” an executive order promulgated by the president last night read, “and ends today.”

 

The order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” builds on a 2019 executive order targeting “the rise of antisemitism” on American college campuses. But this goes further in direct proportion to the growing scale of the threat it seeks to address.

 

Starting yesterday, the president’s domestic policy staff has 60 days to prepare a report “identifying all civil and criminal” tools available to the president to “curb or combat” antisemitism. That report will be transmitted to the attorney general to potentially prosecute colleges that fail to protect the civil rights of students targeted by Hamas sympathizers. It engages the secretary of education in the effort to determine whether the lax standards on America’s campuses comport with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which proscribes racial, ethnic, and creedal discrimination. And according to the EO’s supplemental fact sheet, it serves as a warning to “pro-jihadist” noncitizens studying in the United States on student visas. As the president said on the 2024 campaign trail, “Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.”

 

It’s that last part that has civil libertarians on edge — more so than they ever seem to have been by the targeted harassment of Jews and their allies on college campuses for over 15 months. Sure, the government currently possesses the statutory authority to deport a noncitizen who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” And, yes, Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization, per the State Department’s formal designation. “But critics immediately denounced the move as an overreach and as unconstitutional,” NPR reported. At least insofar as it could chill speech and limit the willingness of students to engage in protected displays of expression, like protest.

 

That’s not an unreasonable concern, but it’s being selectively applied. The students who are subject to this intimidation campaign have had their rights infringed, albeit by private actors, but the institutions (indeed, partially taxpayer-funded institutions) that are supposed to preserve that right have abdicated their role.

 

“Many campuses do not have a clearly-stated definition of what crosses the line into antisemitism,” NPR continued, “and many student protesters have complained that their anti-Israel demonstrations have been unfairly conflated with antisemitism.” Well, perhaps these campuses should get on with crafting a definition that satisfies all parties. The fact that they have not is evidence of the paralyzing effect these intimidating demonstrations have had on campus administrators. Additionally, as NPR tacitly admitted in the above, it is a paralysis that is enforced by elements within the professorate who provide succor to the demonstrators and their noxious cause.

 

It has to stop, and it isn’t going to stop unless the administration begins throwing its weight around. Indeed, it would be impossible to say with any certainty how much the chaos on America’s campuses to which Democrats turned a blind eye (until it became unignorable) contributed to Donald Trump’s victory. But it wasn’t a nonfactor. Trump has a mandate to restore something resembling sanity on America’s college campuses. If its administrators cannot or will not do it themselves, the Justice Department will do it for them.