Tag Archives: responsibilities

A Statement of Responsibility…and of Consequences

Posted on by
Reply

‘Way back in 1969, the University of Notre Dame’s then-President Father Ted Hesburgh had this to say about the consequences of student disruptions [emphasis in the original]:

Now comes my duty of stating, clearly and unequivocally, what happens if…. Anyone or any group that substitutes force for rational persuasion, be it violent or non-violent, will be given fifteen minutes of meditation to cease and desist…. If they do not within that time period cease and desist, they will be asked for their identity cards. Those who produce these will be suspended from this community as not understanding what this community is. Those who do not have or will not produce identity cards will be assumed not to be members of the community and will be charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace on private property and treated accordingly by the law.
After notification of suspension, or trespass in the case of non-community members, if there is not within five minutes a movement to cease and desist, students will be notified of expulsion from this community and the law will deal with them as non-students.
There seems to be a current myth that university members are not responsible to the law, and that somehow the law is the enemy, particularly those whom society has constituted to uphold and enforce the law. I would like to insist here that all of us are responsible to the duly constituted laws of this University community and to all of the laws of the land. There is no other guarantee of civilization versus the jungle or mob rule, here or elsewhere.

It must be noted that Hesburgh’s consequences are just as applicable to today’s crop of school professors who participate in such disruptions.

It’s too bad that today’s school administrators lack Father Hesburgh’s clarity and moral courage in executing the duties attached to school administration.

Shared Responsibility

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Responsibilities

Posted on by
Reply

The subheadline illustrates the misunderstanding of where responsibility lies.

School officials reap what their politically monoculture faculties have sown.

The WSJ‘s editors then went on about how those thinking antisemitic bigotry are exaggerating are mistaken, pointing out in their examples the rampant antisemitic bigotry on college campuses.

Antisemitism has too often been tolerated within Near Eastern Studies departments. On October 8, 2023, Columbia professor Joseph Massad praised the “awesome” scenes of the October 7 massacre “witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs.” In 2018 Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi posted on Twitter (now X) that “Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world” could soon be traced to “the ugly name of Israel.”

Then they wrote,

The liberal elites who run these institutions seem to lack the moral self-confidence to stand up to these student bullies. College presidents have to take charge, restore order and protect Jewish students, or the trustees should fire them and find someone who will.

But that’s closing the chicken coop after the weasels have moved in and taken over. Monocultural faculties have not created the schools’ problems, including the schools’ systemic (to coin a word) antisemitic bigotry. Schools’ management teams have created their environment of bigotry by allowing—perhaps even encouraging—from the start the creation of their faculties as monocultural, and bigoted.

It’s long past time those management teams were fired for cause, and the bigots on those faculties also fired for cause. Bigotry should not be allowed to survive contracts or tenure.

Misunderstood Difficulty

Posted on by
Reply

Hamas terrorists are resuming their presence in northern Gaza Strip, months after the IDF had initially cleared the Strip except for the far south of the Strip: Rafah and a couple small villages near Rafah.

[R]enewed violence, in areas Israeli forces had previously largely cleared of Hamas, serves as a sobering example for Israel’s forces of the difficulty of consolidating gains as they prepare an offensive in Rafah, the militant group’s last major bastion.

It’s certainly true that clearing an area of the remnants of a terrorist entity that operates as a dispersed network and that is skilled at (literal) underground operations and keeping that area clear is deucedly difficult.

The problem illustrated by the renewed fighting in the cleared areas, though, is not one of that difficulty. On the contrary, the problem so illustrated originates in the IDF’s failure to finally destroy the terrorists in their last enclave, Rafah and those one or two remaining villages. So long as those terrorist entities exist, they’ll continue to infiltrate from wherever they are concentrated to other areas of Gaza.

Israel needs to stop dithering about Rafah and go in, in force, and finish exterminating the terrorists there. The Biden administration needs to stop supporting Hamas with its words and Biden’s kowtowing to the terrorist supporters in his administration and get fully behind Israel in words and especially in overt action as the IDF (finally) moves in.

Cowardice

Posted on by
Reply

Columbia University’s managers have abjectly surrendered to terrorist supporters masquerading as pro-Palestinian demonstrators who are doing their best to prevent Jewish students from attending classes and to prevent Columbia from operating at all.

Columbia University was holding classes virtually Monday as protests over the Israel-Hamas war continue to engulf the campus.
Columbia president Minouche Shafik said she wanted to “deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps.”

Even the Wall Street Journal‘s characterization of these “protests” as being over the Israel-Hamas war is cynical and misleading. These “protestors” aren’t protesting the war, they’re objecting to Israel’s defending itself against Hamas’ war of extermination. Nor will these terrorist supporters stop. As Shafik bows down here, the “rancor” will only escalate, and the disruptors will then push for ending all support for Israel and for the “from the river to the sea” destruction of Israel.

Here’s more from Shafik:

I understand that many are experiencing deep moral distress and want Columbia to help alleviate this by taking action. But we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view.

And yet, that’s exactly what Shafik is doing when she allows these “protestors” to disrupt to the extent that in-person classes, which are what those students and their parents have paid for and which are far more effective teaching devices than individuals participating remotely via video, are no longer being held. In-person classes that are blocked, not by these terrorist supporters, but by the cowardice of Shafik and her management team. Beyond that, Shafik is refusing to do anything to alleviate the deep moral distress that the school’s Jewish students and their supporters are experiencing, and she is empirically refusing to take any action to supply her defect.

Rather than bowing and scraping at the feet of the disrupters, Shafik should authorize and require campus police to arrest them, push for New York City’s Progressive-Democratic Mayor Eric Adams to have the arrestees jailed, expel with prejudice those disruptors who are enrolled in any capacity at Columbia, and fire for cause any COlumbia employee participating in the disruption. The only way to deescalate these disruptions is to eliminate the disruptors.

Addendum: Shafik’s perfidy goes even further than merely aiding and abetting the terrorists-supporting disrupters on campus.

A [Jewish] Columbia University professor who has been a vocal critic of the administration’s response to the ongoing anti-Israel student protests was barred from campus after he tried to lead a pro-Jewish rally at the Ivy League college.
Israel-born Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School and an outspoken supporter of the Jewish state, said that when he swiped his key card at the school’s Morningside Heights campus, it read “deactivated.”

Now Shafik is actively opposing those who disagree with her terrorist-supporting disrupters.

In Thy light shall we see light. Dishonoring the school’s motto, Shafik has turned out the lights.