Columbia’s interim President Katrina Armstrong announced she will ban masks on campus, with exemptions for health or religious reasons, train three-dozen campus police officers with authority to arrest people, and appoint a new senior vice provost who will conduct a “thorough review” of the Middle East studies department.
The moves came amid unprecedented pressure on the Ivy League university from the White House. Earlier this month, the federal education department moved to terminate $400 million in federal funding for Columbia, citing what it called “relentless violence, intimidation and antisemitic harassment” on campus.
Federal education officials then sent Columbia a detailed list of demands for the funding to be restored.
idiots. youre attempting to bargain with terrorists.
they are fucking dismantling your funding source, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
Columbia effectively committed to a punitive line that threw its student protesters under the bus last year; this is, unfortunately, not a very surprising development with that in mind
Yeah, it’s not like this was some agonizing choice but the Columbia administration. They already weren’t on their students’ side.
Complacency. Laziness. A comfortable life having been always the “right sort of people” who are privileged and protected within the system, drawing their six-figure salaries and having a position of power and respect, without having had to go out on a limb for it.
For them to be cut off from their funding, officially having to exist outside the umbrella, is an existential threat. It’s unthinkable. It is the nuclear option in the face of which they would break any bond, betray any ally. Their bonds of allegiance weren’t really all that deep, in the first place, since they grew up with no strong culture of brotherhood with their allies in a noble struggle. They simply don’t want to be cast out in the cold. The prospect causes them to wail, it causes them to beg wretchedly on the floor.
And, of course, they will be cast out. All they’ll get for their sniveling and the betrayal of their people they’re eagerly offering up to the Gestapo right now is a few months’ delay before it happens. They have probably been so soft and protected that they don’t realize that. They think they’re saving themselves, naivety being surely a big part of it, too.
Waiter! I’ll have the Gestapo.
Somewhat obscure joke, but I didn’t understand the distinction between that and gazpacho as a kid. (See also: IRS vs. IRA [the Irish one])
Right? They’re bargaining themselves into extinction.
Appeasing Hitler sure worked - why not just pet him take Austria/Poland/France…
What use does Columbia have for the Sudetenland? Hitler didn’t start with any of the three countries you mention. By the time he rolled into those countries, it was called WWII.
Sorry, been awhile since Western Civ.
Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland
Perhaps if we just give up Colombia, Princeton, and University of California he’ll be satisfied.