Rhys Dyer, 26
If you have looked at the news recently, then you have seen the protests raging on at Columbia University, the prestigious ivy league school. These protests started not too long ago after Israel launched a counterattack on the Gaza strip against Hamas, the terrorist organization that attacked Israel months earlier. The students have been protesting with the hope that large organizations, such as the university they attend, will cease all funding for Israel or for groups that support Israel. These Universities have huge endowments, total investable assets of a non-profit i.e. university, that they have built up over time and use in support of Israel. The protesters at Columbia have now started a nationwide movement. Nationally, we have seen protests at Yale, UConn, California State, Florida State, among others, although not on the same scale as Columbia’s. The students make the decision seem simple: cut funds to Israel. Although this will likely have little effect on Israel and their military’s decisions, the students want to make a statement that they will not support an organization which supports Israel.
In the last couple of weeks, there have been hundreds of arrests made at colleges across the nation. In response to a sit-in protest inside the cafeteria at Columbia, NYPD converged onto the scene, disbanding the assembly while simultaneously making 109 student arrests as “public safety was a real concern…”. However, this served to only add oil to the flames as protests continued to rage on.
Due to the ongoing protests, Columbia made the shift from in-person to online schooling for both students and professors, as the security concerns became impossible to manage. Students who leave school grounds are not allowed to come back onto the premises until further notice, since some people who do not attend Columbia University have come onto campus to protest. It has become increasingly difficult to discern between students and random people. In addition, Columbia canceled the graduation ceremony for similar reasons, making the class of 2024 the first class in history to not hold an in-person graduation from both high school (2020-Covid) and college.