For weeks, police have been arriving on college campuses from New York to California at the behest of university officials, sweeping pro-Palestinian protests and arresting more than 2,100 people. They’ve come in riot gear, zip-tied students and hauled them off, and in some high-profile instances, acted violently.
The aggressive crackdown started when Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, summoned New York Police Department officers to campus in mid-April to bring an end to the student encampment there, one day after she promised Congress she would quash unauthorized protests and discipline students for antisemitism.
That police intervention temporarily dismantled the encampment, and resulted in the arrest of more than 100 protesters on trespassing charges.
But it was also a strategic failure on the part of the university administration. If the university was trying to avoid disruption, it has ended up inviting it…