Campus unrest over the war in Gaza has "reached a fever pitch," said The New York Times, with confrontations between authorities and pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University, Yale University, New York University and others. Administrators are "struggling to balance students' free speech rights and the need to protect Jewish students" from threats to their safety.
The crisis is particularly acute at Columbia, where the final weeks of the semester are shifting to remote classes amid the protests. "School administrators and local law enforcement have cracked down," Reuters said. More than 100 protesters have been arrested at Columbia, while other students have been suspended. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called on President Joe Biden to send in the National Guard.
What did the commentators say?
"Anti-Israel, antisemitic protests … are getting uglier," The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. Columbia's move to remote classes doesn't help. "Protesters are winning if they're allowed to shut down classroom instruction." Administrators seem afraid to put an end to all this.
The crackdowns reveal that universities like Columbia "don't value critical thought as much as they value business as usual," Sarah Jones said at New York magazine. It's unreasonable to suggest all the anti-war activity is antisemitic when "many of the demonstrators are Jewish themselves." The protests have been largely peaceful, which means the students are guilty only of "embarrassing their universities by applying their education to the real world."
The "kinds of mass violence and unrest" that justify a National Guard intervention are absent, Adam Serwer said at The Atlantic, with troops more "likely to escalate tensions rather than quell them." Such calls reveal that "powerful figures find the protesters and their demands offensive."
What next?
It's an election year, so the protests will have political ramifications. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will visit Columbia this week, The Hill said, to highlight the "troubling rise of virulent antisemitism on America's college campuses." He called on Columbia University President Minouche Shafik to resign. Biden, meanwhile, is trying to "strike a careful balance between condemning antisemitism on college campuses and supporting students' right to protest," The Washington Post said.
Columbia officials are trying to pull back from the brink of further confrontation. Administrators warned protesters to clear their encampment. The university senate is expected to vote Friday on a resolution censuring Shafik for calling police to break up the protests. | 
