Police and private security throng every entrance but one. Steel barriers line the streets. Students pack up belongings in their cars and leave for home - classes are cancelled, and exam plans are up in the air.
Everywhere there is gloom, and uncertainty about what happens next at Columbia University.
Students told the BBC that the university’s decision to call in police to clear a Gaza protest late on Tuesday, leading to a raid on the occupied Hamilton Hall and hundreds of arrests, has left the college community shattered.
The university president, Nemat Shafik, said that it was with great regret that she ordered the police raid against students and others she said had infiltrated the protest. It would “take time to heal”, she added in a message in the operation’s aftermath.
For students of this prestigious school in Manhattan, New York, how long is unclear.
How to radicalize a lot of smart people in a very short period of time
are those people registered to vote?
If not, it doesn’t take very long to do so. When people feel they have a personal and vested interest in voting, they do so reliably and vocally.
It’s apathy that makes people not bother. That’s not the case when someone is willing to put out even minimal effort protesting.
If only they had someone worth voting FOR.
I’d say preventing a dictatorship is worth voting for, but YMMV.
If someone is politically engaged enough to get arrested at a political protest, it seems like a reasonable assumption that they would be registered to vote
You actually have to register to be eligible to vote in the US? Aren’t you automatically getting your voting cards when there is an election and you are over the age of 18?
What’s it matter? You think they are going to be lining up to vote for Biden who condemned the protests on campus and called the students (many of whom are jewish) antisemitic…
Yeah actually.
Do those people own a registered firearm they can bring next time?
If you see people being radicalized and can’t think of anything other than voting, you’re part of the problem.