Ever surprise why there was a sleeper cell of pro-Hamas Columbia college students able to bang drums, pitch tents and smash home windows after the assaults of October 7? As a result of the college consciously stacked its lessons stuffed with activists.
Elite schools have lengthy combed their huge pool of candidates for social justice warriors captivated with neighborhood activism.
That admissions technique backfired spectacularly when youngsters determined to show their ire on the college itself within the identify of Palestine. The outcome has been reputational injury and crippling federal price range cuts.
“Columbia essentially did this to themselves,” school admissions skilled Christopher Rim advised The Put up. “Students involved in a lot of social justice-type activism were really sought after in the past at Columbia.”
A desire for lefty activists is obvious even within the Ivy League college’s utility essay questions.
One essay immediate asks college students to debate a “perspective, viewpoint or lived experience” that has “shaped the way [they] would learn from and contribute to Columbia’s diverse and collaborative community.”
One other query probes potential college students’ “ability to navigate through adversity” and asks them to “describe a barrier or obstacle [they] have faced.”
That’s somewhat wealthy, contemplating that 36% of Columbia college students come from households within the high 10% of revenue earners, 62% come from the highest 20% — and simply 5% hail from the underside 20%.
“That being one of five questions for students to pick from is pretty telling,” Rim, founder and CEO of Command Schooling, stated. “I don’t think a lot of students can really answer this if they’re wealthy and went to a private school. A lot of them don’t have real adversity.”
Columbia’s most on-the-nose case research is encampment firebrand Khymani James, who led melodramatic press conferences on behalf of the college’s pro-Palestine tent metropolis final spring.
James, who makes use of he/she/they pronouns, was suspended after a video emerged of him saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” throughout a disciplinary listening to with college officers. However his hateful rhetoric hardly got here out of the blue.
Already an outspoken activist on the Boston Faculty Committee as a excessive schooler, James advised the committee “I, too, hate white people.” As a teen, James was profiled by a number of native information shops for his activism, perpetually donning a Black Lives Matter shirt for photoshoots.
“From my experience, Columbia cherry-picked students who were really, really, really into social justice activism,” Rim stated. “They thought they would add value to the community, but actually it totally backfired.”
This isn’t restricted to Columbia. Who can overlook when Stanford admitted a scholar whose essay consisted of the phrase #BlackLivesMatter written 100 occasions over?
Having gone to The Lawrenceville Faculty, a prep college and Ivy League manufacturing facility in New Jersey, I noticed how high-schoolers had been remodeled into “community activists.”
In celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day throughout my freshman 12 months, the college hauled us in for obligatory workshops. We might select from matters like “Bruce Lee and Asian Masculinities,” “Everyday Sexism,” “Unpacking White Privilege” and a session on Black Liberation Theology known as “The Black Jesus.”
College students — who had been paying $80,000 in tuition — might additionally participate in a “Poverty Simulation.”
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the college ensured all of us had entry to buses to attend protests in Washington, DC. No such transport was supplied for Trump rallies.
Many Columbia college students come from comparable non-public faculties that inculcate the identical message: develop into a social justice activist ASAP to make your self stand out.The trigger du-jour simply occurs to be Palestine.
As Avi Friedman, a Columbia professor who stepped down over antisemitism advised The Put up of final spring’s protests: “If you looked at the signs around the encampment, there were more things there that were anti-America — anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, the West is bad, everybody’s racist — than there were about Israel and Gaza.”
He recalled asking a scholar on the encampment why she was there.
“She said, ‘We’re holding space for Gaza,’” Friedman recalled. “Like what the hell is that?”
He’s proper. These is perhaps Ivy League college students — supposedly our county’s finest and brightest — however they’re additionally disoriented agitators grappling for a way of which means. Now that they’ve derailed two consecutive college years, it’s excessive time Columbia realized its lesson.
Admitting entitled youngsters who suppose they’ve all of the options to society’s ills by the point they’re 17 is asking for hassle.
