Columbia Succumbs to the Mob, Cancels Graduation Ceremony

Columbia University caved to the mob and let the unruly anti-Israel radicals on campus win.

Last week, Columbia President Minouche Shafik lastly allowed the NYPD to clear the campus grounds of protesters after a gaggle of them violently took over and occupied a constructing known as Hamilton Hall. 

But that wasn’t the finish of this mess. On Monday, the college’s administration introduced that it will cancel a public, campuswide commencement ceremony for graduating college students.

“We have decided to make the centerpiece of our commencement activities our class days and school-level ceremonies, where students are honored individually alongside their peers, rather than the university-wide ceremony that is scheduled for May 15,” the college web site defined.

Columbia University, already in a state of lockdown, cited “safety concerns” as the motive for the resolution.

“Holding a large commencement ceremony on our campus presented security concerns that unfortunately proved insurmountable,” a Columbia spokesman said in a written statement. “Like our students, we are deeply disappointed with this outcome.”

Instead of a campuswide graduation, the college will maintain small, non-public ceremonies.

Some Columbia college students are rightfully sad.

One Jewish undergraduate interviewed by the New York Post known as it one other instance of “cowardice from an administration that’s been spineless” all through the ordeal.

This is a slightly pathetic finish to a monthlong fiasco at the college. Large parts of Columbia’s 2024 graduating class are also doubtless to have missed their highschool graduations due to COVID-19 lockdowns. 

Another scholar interviewed by the New York Post, Ari Rosen, who’s graduating from Columbia’s dental college, spoke about his disappointment.

“I lost my [undergraduate] graduation four years ago because of COVID, but then I told myself at least I’ll be able to graduate from dental school at Columbia,” he stated.

Rosen famous how it will have been good to be rewarded in public for eight years of laborious work.

“Now to wake up to this news is really unexpected,” Rosen stated of the canceled public ceremony. “This wasn’t just four years of hard work. This was eight years, undergraduate and dental school. I worked really hard for this.”

It’s actually potential that Columbia had critical safety challenges, however it appears slightly feeble {that a} college sitting on over $13 billion in endowments couldn’t have discovered how to make this work.

Actual management would have appeared one thing like this:

Instead, the message despatched by canceling graduation is that the mob will get its means in the finish—no less than when it acts on behalf of an ideology favored by the regime.

That’s what our establishments signaled after the Black Lives Matter riots, when cities determined to defund police departments. 

And that’s what schools and universities are signaling now after they permit out-of-control protesters to take over their campuses and make calls for. Some colleges are locking down, some are canceling commencement ceremonies, and a few are making particular coverage changes to appease protesters.

The activists squawk and stamp their ft and establishments give them what they need.  

As I’ve written before and will surely write again, these incidents ought to present the American folks that we’d like to have a critical rethink about the perform and efficacy of upper training in our nation.

The nation pours billions of {dollars} into the increased training trade, and that will develop to trillions if President Joe Biden’s mass student-loan bailout comes to move.

What we’re getting in return is universities of declining benefit which have develop into hotbeds of antisemitism and anti-Americanism. Universities corresponding to Columbia and plenty of others have totally revealed what they’re in current months. At the very least, it’s time that we put down our foot as a society and finish the gravy train that’s funding this nonsense.