One Rule for Frat Boys. Another for Violent Activists. | The Free Press

The Maryland case, sources told me, reveals a double standard on American campuses today: students who openly break the law including trespassing, breaking and entering, and harassing their fellow students are given a pass when they re committing crimes in the name of activism, while students suspected of behaving badly in their social lives are treated like villains. 

As Maryland was cracking down on its fraternities last spring, pro-Palestine protests were sweeping through campuses across the country. Students built sprawling encampments that openly violated university rules, and some assaulted and verbally attacked Jewish students. A student at Yale was stabbed in the eye with a flagpole, and another at Columbia was told to go back to Poland. At UCLA, violence and hate erupted on both sides, as Jewish students were blocked from walking to class, and a group of pro-Israel protesters attacked the pro-Palestine encampment with fireworks. 

In many cases, students got off scot-free despite committing criminal acts. At Princeton, the faculty voted to grant students legal and disciplinary amnesty after they were arrested for breaking into and occupying a campus building. At Columbia, protesters who held three janitors hostage after breaking into a campus building saw charges against them dismissed by the Manhattan district attorney, who cited a lack of sufficient evidence even though multiple photos and videos documented their crimes. (The pro-Palestinian protests at Maryland were mostly confined to sit-ins that dispersed peacefully.) 

Now, as students nationwide are preparing to return to campus this fall, all signs point toward another chaotic, and potentially violent, semester. One coalition at NYU has already said it s ready to embrace armed struggle in its fight for the pro-Palestinian cause. And it s not clear whether or not colleges will stop them.

via www.thefp.com

This characteristically thorough and alarming piece by Francesca Block tells us that things are as bad as we thought and some of us have experienced first hand. Francesca wrote a story a while back chronicling the cockswaddle incident here at USD and its aftermath. If you have thousands of administrators whose job it is to ferret out various thought crimes, they’re going to find them. Bringing US universities back into the light of reason will be a generational task for the future, if it can be done at all.