Barnard College’s Jihadist Problem Is a Trump Opportunity

As Israel buried a mother and her two babies—Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas—who had been kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian jihadists, students at the Barnard College in New York City rallied on Wednesday in support of the jihadists.

Keffiyeh-clad campus radicals violently stormed into university buildings while chanting Nazi-inspired Hamas slogans calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Jewish homeland. The radicals blocked students from reaching their classrooms, and even assaulted a Barnard College staff member, who was sent to the hospital.

Predictably, university officials failed this test of leadership. Their failure is inviting the Trump administration to step in.

Officials at Columbia University, with which Barnard is affiliated, washed their hands of the matter, issuing a statement that the “disruption of academic activities is not acceptable conduct,” but noting that “Barnard College is a separate institution from Columbia University” and that the latter is “not responsible for security” on the former’s campus. Last month, an anti-Israel student group at Columbia dumped cement into campus toilets and spray-painted university buildings.

Barnard officials, for their part, fecklessly attempted to appease the student radicals, with Dean Leslie Grinage agreeing to meet with three student representatives so long as they were not wearing masks. Instead, a horde of masked marauders broke into the administrative building and surrounded the dean’s office.

In a humiliating display, the dean asked permission of the protesters to use the bathroom. The mob, drunk on its own power, at first gleefully denied the request. But soon after, it permitted the dean to use the restroom, albeit while subject to jeers and chants of “Shame! Shame!”

Many of the faculty sided with the student radicals. One Columbia professor canceled his class to allow students to join the protest—an act university officials called “a serious breach of University policy” and an “unacceptable infringement on our core academic mission.” Another, an adjunct professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Barnard, shrieked at students who just wanted to attend class and defended the radicals who had assaulted a Barnard staff member.

This should not be surprising as universities are crawling with far-left activists posing as academics—many of them former student radicals themselves—who are all-too eager to push terrorist propaganda.

In the end, the Barnard administration reportedly gave the radical students amnesty—yet again allowing them to violate university rules, disrupt campus life, and intimidate other students with impunity. In a just world, the brands of Barnard and Columbia would never recover.

Although they are private institutions, Barnard and Columbia are highly dependent on taxpayer largesse. As Jay P. Greene of The Heritage Foundation observed:

Columbia University receives a taxpayer subsidy of almost $500 million every year for the overhead on federal research grants. That’s not the money it receives to conduct research. That’s the amount Columbia gets to pay for the buildings in which it conducts that research.

Never mind that Columbia already has more than $14 billion in endowment to pay for all the buildings it needs. And all of this is on top of the money the school gets by over-charging for tuition, which is made possible by students being able to take out subsidized loans that taxpayers might have to ‘forgive.’ 

The truth is that higher education—with all of its irresponsible behavior—is a house of cards built on taxpayer money. If the government were to cut the flow of that money by even a modest amount, higher education as it currently operates would collapse.

The Trump administration is appropriately targeting outsized overhead costs at the federal Institute of Education Sciences and elsewhere. President Donald Trump has also issued an executive order making it “the policy of the United States to combat antisemitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”

Those are great first steps, but there’s more to be done. There are at least two more actions the Trump administration can take to restore order and sanity to our nation’s universities.

First, the Trump administration can significantly step up its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Universities like Columbia should be investigated and, where appropriate, sanctioned—including the withholding of federal funding.

Second, the Trump administration can deport foreign students who are openly supporting terrorism. At Columbia, nearly half the student body is comprised of foreign students. How many of the campus radicals hiding behind keffiyehs as they damage property and intimidate and assault other students are here on student visas? The Immigration and Nationality Act states: “Any alien – who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization … is inadmissible.”

If it were clear that a visa applicant supported terrorism at the time they applied for a visa, it would be denied. It if becomes apparent latter, such as if the student openly supported Hamas or Hezbollah, he or she should be deported. Indeed, Trump issued an executive order stating that his administration would do exactly that.

Trump has already promised that his administration would hold universities accountable for failing to protect students from violent and disruptive radicals, and deport foreign supporters of terrorism. Columbia and Barnard have now given the president an opportunity to fulfill these promises.

The post Barnard College’s Jihadist Problem Is a Trump Opportunity appeared first on The Daily Signal.