Image by Janne Leimola.

Freedom of speech is kind of like eggs nowadays – too expensive! For Columbia University, the cost imposed on it by the Trump administration was suddenly $400 million in rescinded federal funding, at least if the speech was pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel.

What choice did the school have, except, as Jennifer Scarlott writes, “to appease the Trump administration by expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of a growing number of students accused of peaceful protest and exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly . . .?”

“The shameless capitulation of Columbia to government pressure,” she goes on, “is reflective of the corporate, neoliberal selling-out of academia. Academia, exemplified by Columbia University, has surrendered its proclaimed mission of intellectual independence and endeavor, and the academic pursuit of knowledge and social advancement.”

Can you believe it? An academic clampdown on peace protests! Reading about this, I couldn’t help but feel my own college days come back hard and strong, and I started reading the current news in a larger context.

Education isn’t just a matter of absorbing a bunch of dead facts and certainties. As we gain – as we claim – our education, we bring our expanding awareness into the world we’re entering. An essential part of the world during my own college years, back in the late ’60s, was of course the Vietnam war. This war wasn’t simply an abstraction; it was anxious to claim us as obedient participants.

Many of us chose not to be obedient. We saw the hell and pointless horror of the war and decided that the only way we could participate in it was by standing against it, by ending it . . . and,........

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