The Columbia University anti-Israel encampment has been cleared out, but the New York school continues to beclown itself.
According to a report by the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium, the student editors of the Columbia Law Review issued a statement on Wednesday, calling on Columbia Law School to cancel final exams. They wrote that it had to be done because the “violence” students had witnessed on campus left them “irrevocably shaken” and “unable to focus.”
The statement “represents the majority opinion of the editorial board and was endorsed by five other law journals,” Sibarium wrote.
Columbia Law Review isn’t some generic school paper or marginal publication, it’s the most prestigious law journal on campus and one of the most prestigious law publications in the country.
The editors said that canceling exams would be a “proportionate response” to the “distress our peers have been feeling.”
The law school already postponed exams on May 1 and has offered students pass/fail grading, though it didn’t make pass/fail mandatory.
“The current exam policy raises concerns around equity and academic integrity,” the statement said. “Many are unwell at this time and cannot study or concentrate while their peers are being hauled to jail.”
Given the kinds of “punishments” we’ve seen for other disorderly protesters who have been arrested, and given the judicial powers that be in New York City, it’s unlikely those arrested will face serious consequences.
“The events of last night left us, and many of our peers, unable to focus and highly emotional during this tumultuous time,” the statement read. “This only follows the growing distress that many of us have felt for months as the humanitarian crisis abroad continues to unfold, and as the blatant antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism on campus have escalated.”
The statement also said that the school “refused to consider our calls for making all classes this semester mandatory pass/fail.” Of course, by making classes pass/fail, they would just erode the school’s commitment to any kind of measurable standards of success and failure.
Your first reaction might be to think that the “cancel tests, we’re trembling in fear” demand is a sign of weakness. It’s just your typical college student snowflakes mewling about their bogus “trauma,” right?
Not quite.
In the upside-down world of America’s elite institutions, this is actually a power play.
Victimhood, especially when it’s accrued on behalf of left-wing causes, holds the greatest social cachet in higher education. It can give one the power to command and silence others. It also can be used to escape consequences for one’s actions and bludgeon political opponents.
By demanding that classes be canceled, Columbia Law Review editors are putting the school administration on notice, demanding recognition for their aggrieved status and justifying the supposed morality of the anti-Israel protesters.
This is how the collective “safe space” of our intellectual leadership class operates, and the Columbia Law Review is eager to milk that system. This is the arrangement our future attorneys general, district attorneys, Justice Department officials, and top law firm associates think is right and reasonable.
According to Reuters, “Columbia Law School snagged the top spot among U.S. law schools for having the highest percentage of 2023 graduates who landed jobs at big law firms.”
How do you think these people will operate once they end up in a top law firm or in serious positions of power? They will enforce this code of victimhood status just as they try to do at their schools.
That’s why what’s taking place on college campuses right now is so important, why in a certain sense it transcends our societal disagreements about Israel and Gaza or anything else on the international stage.
This is about the transformation of our most powerful and once-exalted institutions into a malignant force for “social justice” at the expense of traditional forms of justice. It’s about how they have accrued power and impose their ideology, not just internally, but on the rest of our society from the top down.
So, while whining about having to take tests after what happened at Columbia certainly sounds pathetic on its surface, it’s really a sign of how the whole rancid system operates.
That’s part of the reason why this story continues to dominate the news and why Americans need to seriously rethink the role higher education plays in our country.
