Universities should be bastions of truth, not politics
On both sides of America’s Palestine campus wars, you find people making historical parallels. The protestors present themselves as the heirs to the Vietnam peaceniks, proudly bearing what Noam Chomsky called “the responsibility of intellectuals” and comparing their own run-ins with the police to the Kent State massacre. Their opponents take a different view. “Will Columbia be remembered as Heidelberg?”, the chair of Yad Vashem went as far as to ask: does Columbia risk alienating its Jewish students and scholars for good, and declining in prestige as a result?
