NYPD @ TNS

While I've been communing with trees, my university has been, like many others, convulsed by student protests at the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and our complicity in it as Americans. When Columbia students set up a tent encampment to demand their university divest from companies involved in Israel's war on Hamas, some of our students joined them, and others set up an encampment on our campus too, demanding similar divestment from our far smaller endowment. Columbia's was stormed by the NYPD, as were similar protests at other New York schools - leading quickly to the appearance of larger encampments - but our campus seemed to be an exception, the interim president having assured all that she didn't want to call the police. The exception proved the rule yesterday morning, as police arrested students who were sleeping in tents in the lobbies of three schoolm buildings. In short order, faculty bodies across the school put out statements and passed resolutions condemning the president's calling the police, demanding all charges against the protesters be dropped, voting no confidence in the university leadership and endorsing the protesters' call for the university to divest. I followed all this on my phone as we drove back from North Carolina (when I wasn't driving), amazed at how quickly it all unspooled. Who saw this coming? And what happens now, in the last week of the academic year, New School's innocence (again) lost?