Playing ‘War’ at Sarah Lawrence

Samuel J. Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, just north of New York City, has written a fascinating and disturbing essay about the growing radicalism of his students.

“I recently walked into my politics class at Sarah Lawrence College prepared to discuss civic protest. The prompt was Minneapolis, where a recent immigration enforcement surge has sparked mass demonstrations, a general strike, and the fatal shooting of two civilians by federal agents.

I planned to cover basic principles: the right to protest, the obligation to remain nonviolent, the distinction between civil disobedience and coercion. My students rejected the premise almost immediately.

‘What are we supposed to do?’ one asked. ‘Hold signs while people are being shot?‘

‘You’re asking us to play by rules that only we follow,’ another said.

They cited the Black Panthers. They invoked Stonewall. They argued, confidently, that throughout American history, violence or the credible threat of it was what forced change. Several endorsed armed confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as both effective and ethically justified.“

These views are not, of course, confined to students at Sarah Lawrence but are certainly widely shared at virtually all of America’s prestigious universities.

There are many reasons for this growing polarization, which has been documented extensively in these pages and elsewhere. Abrams correctly points to the outrageous rhetoric that has now become routine among leading Democrat politicians.

“Last month, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner issued a statement that would have been unthinkable from a major American law-enforcement official a generation ago. Speaking about federal immigration agents, Krasner declared: ‘In a country of 350 million, we outnumber them. If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities. We will find you. We will achieve justice.‘”

The students, Abrams notes, are listening.