Columbia president defends calling police on protesters: ‘Sorry we reached this point’
Semafor Signals
Insights from The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Voice of America
The News
Embattled Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik defended her decision to call the New York Police Department to clear pro-Palestinian protesters from campus, saying the protests had raised “safety risks to an intolerable level.”
“I am sorry we reached this point,” she wrote.
Riot gear-clad officers arrested nearly 300 people at Columbia University and the City College of New York on Tuesday night, as they took back Hamilton Hall, the Columbia building in which protesters had barricaded themselves. Authorities also cleared the weeks-long encampment from the lawn.
More than 1,000 protesters have been arrested across US campuses in recent weeks, as demonstrations demanding universities divest from companies with ties to Israel have intensified: Police were called to quell violence at the University of California, Los Angeles, leading administrators to cancel classes Wednesday. A small fraction of universities have struck agreements with protest leaders to allow them to continue less disruptively, while many other schools have suspended students.
SIGNALS
Biden risks lasting political ramifications over war and campus protests
Sources: The Guardian, The Atlantic
President Joe Biden’s pro-Israel stance in the face of defiant campus protests could cost him precious youth votes in what’s expected to be a tight race in November. The danger to Biden is not that the protesters will vote for Donald Trump, a University of Pennsylvania professor told The Guardian. “The danger is much simpler: that they simply won’t vote.”
Biden’s Israel policies already cost him in the primaries, as more than 100,000 voted “uncommitted” in Michigan alone. Democratic veterans told The Atlantic that no recent foreign policy decision has “generated as much sustained discord” as Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. And the longer it continues, a senior administration official said, the less time Biden has to resolve the growing rift in the Democratic Party before the election.
Trump seizes on protests as evidence of Biden’s weakness
Sources: The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal
Trump and other prominent Republicans are pointing to the campus unrest as evidence that the US is “out of control under President Biden,” The Washington Post reported. Trump referred to the demonstrations as “Biden protests” on Tuesday, and earlier said “it’s all Biden’s fault and everybody knows it.”
“The tone of the criticism is not new,” The Post wrote, and “the campus protests present conservatives with some of their favorite targets: elite universities, progressive activists, ‘woke’ culture and civil rights leaders.”
Chinese state media’s support of US campus protests criticized as hypocritical
Source: Voice of America News
State media in China has vocally supported the campus protests and criticized the US government for suppressing free speech. “Can blindly using violence to suppress students be able to quell domestic dissatisfaction with the government?” wrote a social media account operated by the News Broadcasting Center of the People’s Liberation Army. Critics pointed out the “double standards” of China’s endorsement of the college protests, given Beijing’s intense surveillance and crackdown on domestic dissent, the Voice of America wrote. A former employee of Chinese state media told the outlet that coverage of protests in other countries is used to show “how scary foreign democracies are,” especially around elections.
