Escalating protests expose three fault lines on American campuses

The blame game is also intensifying. University leaders are again in the firing line, accused by some of having brought the chaos on themselves by coddling student trespassers and allowing antisemitic speech to go unpunished. On April 29th 21 Democrats in the House of Representatives signed a letter to Columbia’s board demanding that it “act decisively” to disband the protest encampment there, arguing that its presence violated federal civil-rights law by creating an “impermissibly hostile and unsafe environment for Jewish students”. Yet teachers at Columbia and elsewhere are castigating their administrators for turning to the police. Student protests, they argue, should be handled as a teachable moment via negotiations and campus discourse.