We Don’t Need Warrior Cops Policing Campus Protests
“Rather than muzzle students, we should allow them to hear and be heard,” New York Times columnist Pamela Paul wrote recently. “It’s worth remembering how children once responded to schoolyard epithets: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.’ Narrow restrictions on putatively harmful speech leave young people distracted from and ill-prepared for the actual violence they’ll encounter in the real world.”
It's good advice. Unfortunately, I've misled you. That’s actually a Pamela Paul column from Feb. 2023.
Here's what she wrote in response to the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University: “[I]t’s a rare pleasure to get a chance to applaud the president of a university, in this case Minouche Shafik of Columbia, who on Thursday called in the police to remove student protesters who have camped out on campus in violation of university policy… with the authority at her disposal and with the courage that too many academic leaders have lacked, Shafik did what any responsible adult should do in her position: She ordered the police to clear Columbia’s campus of the students seemingly unaware of how lucky they are to attend one of the nation’s top universities.”