@interfluidity Today is also the deadline for new admits to deposit — or, in plainspeak, it’s when people who applied to a school and were accepted have to sign on the dotted line.
These last weeks leading up to that are crucial: schools do everything they can — most of all, by being really nice — to persuade people to come.
Columbia, in contrast, has spent these weeks exaggerating and escalating the anxieties, fears, tensions, chaos, conflict, confrontations, risks, threats, violence. Their admissions numbers are going to collapse.
And, Groucho Marx–style, I’m not even sure I’d want to go to school with people who want to go there next year. That’s a big deal for be to say: I’m a proud alumnus and a neighbor for thirty years, and CU has been a positive presence in my life, often in a daily basis. But now I’m really, really, REALLY angry.
@tb i mean, i guess higher-ed was already a tinderbox, but columbia really has made a unique contribution this year setting the world on fire. had the school simply been indulgent, it’s not impossible this academic year could have come to a mostly uneventful close nationwide, just some very understandable protests in the ordinary course of things. a bit of groveling before ideologues that you try to back up with ill-considered action and blammo.
i mean… who cares what undergraduates have to say about anything? they coulda ridden it out for a month and summer would naturally have dispersed them.
@phillmv@tb it was the best possible response for fascist accelerationists in the US and the most genocidal elements of the Israeli polity.
they say never let a crisis go to waste, but for a burgeoning fascist movement, the catchphrase is never waste an opportunity to create a crisis.
the socialist left imagines it owns crisis, because contradictions of capitalism theory predicts it. but there’s an underpants gnome btw predicting correctly and benefiting from.
@interfluidity 🎯 — every word. Columbia’s toxic tantrum turned a bunch of tents into a national (arguably international) wildcat strike. Another way to say that: huge numbers are drawn to these protests more by solidarity with fellow students than by support for a “free Palestine.” I seriously doubt the hostilities will end by September, so protests will likely resume in the fall in one form or another. That’d make the election much riskier, and if Trump wins he’d escalate wildly. Listening to what undergrads have to say vs seeing fascists launch a nationwide war on academia is not a hard choice. @phillmv
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