Shared Responsibility

A wide range of colleges and universities are suffering millions of dollars in damages done their facilities by pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist gangs masquerading themselves as pro-Palestinians in their destructive and antisemitic disruptions [link in the original].

California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, closed down its campus on Saturday “due to ongoing occupation of Siemens Hall and Nelson Hall, as well as continued challenges with individuals breaking laws in the area surrounding the buildings and the quad,” the northern California public university said. Classes were moved online and students who live on campus are allowed to remain in their residence halls and in dining facilities, but they are not allowed on any other parts of campus.
Students at Cal Poly Humboldt appear to have renamed one of the occupied buildings “Intifada Hall.” That building is littered with trash and debris, while the walls are covered with graffiti in support of Palestinians in Gaza, video shows.

And

“Free Palestine” and “Palestine” were graffitied on two buildings at the University of Portland, a private Catholic school in Oregon that is not facing a student occupation. Campus Safety and Emergency Management Director Michael McNerney told The Beacon, a student newspaper, that the clean-up cost is estimated to be in the thousands.

And

Protest encampments have sprung up at more than three dozen private and public schools across the United States since Columbia University students in New York City began a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” earlier this month.

It’s true enough that the schools’ pupils and no small number of interlopers are the ones proximately doing the vandalism.

However, the schools’ management teams bear at least equal responsibility for these costs—which will, most assuredly, be passed along to students, future students, and their families in increased tuition and fees charged. Those management teams, through their tacit condoning of these disruptions and attendant vandalism, through their outright cowardice in not confronting these disrupters and vandals, or both, allow and encourage the damages being done.

Those same teams could have prevented the vast bulk of these damages and costs had they confronted the disrupters at the start, permanently expelling the pupils involved and having arrested the pupils and interlopers doing the vandalism and bringing them to trial. Those teams—or better, their replacements—could prevent further damage by immediately permanently expelling the pupils involved and having arrested the pupils and interlopers doing the vandalism and bringing them to trial.

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