IT’S NOT 1965 ANYMORE: Charles Cooke: Columbia Is in the Grips of a Perverse Selma Envy.
Cooke said Tuesday that the escalating anti-Israel protests at Columbia University appear to reflect a desire on the part of the contemporary Left to “contrive” a kind of “great clarifying Manichaean moment,” even if they’re not living through one.
“I think that we are once again witnessing what is generally termed ‘Selma envy,’” Cooke said on The Editors podcast, “but I think that there is an attendant wrinkle to it.
“They have managed to deploy the logic and rhetoric of Selma in all circumstances in a manner that always, invariably, helps them,” Cooke said. He brought up something National Review Online editor Phil Klein pointed out, that “it’s not just that there is a double standard when it comes to Jews. It’s that there is a double standard when it comes to who is protesting Jews.”
Cooke recalled the Charlottesville riots, where “right-wingers were protesting Jews. They are therefore the bad guy who are making the world less safe. . . . but if the Left is protesting Jews, then they are the downtrodden.
“You can’t win. You cannot win in this framework. It’s extremely clever.”
Meanwhile, Bari Weiss’ Free Press is advising its readers, Go South, Young Man! Kids Are Giving Up on Elite Colleges—and Heading South.
The recent wave of violent protests and arrests at elite universities like Yale and Columbia have only confirmed for Scott Katz that he made the right decision to attend Elon University. The North Carolina college, where he is currently wrapping up his sophomore year, is a long way from his hometown of Lafayette Hill, the predominantly liberal Philadelphia suburb where the average home costs $610,000.
Katz, who is Jewish, says the antisemitism that’s increasingly visible at colleges nationwide—especially in the Ivy League, and other elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley—hasn’t even touched his campus.
“I haven’t been affected by it at all,” Katz told me. “I definitely feel very safe on campus regarding my religion.”
He notes that Elon was one of only two universities in the country to get an A grade from the Anti-Defamation League for its policies protecting Jewish students against hate. (The other is Brandeis.) According to the ADL ranking, Elon has seen zero “severe antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents” and zero “hostile anti-Zionist student groups.”
“It was a big deal,” Katz says of the level of comfort he feels on campus.
Just a few years ago, in the fall of 2022, Katz was nervous about his college decision. His mom had grown up in South Carolina but fled the South at 18, disturbed by the racism and antisemitism in her local community, vowing never to return.
Despite his mother’s reluctance, something in Katz’s gut told him to look south. “Even if I could’ve gotten into Harvard, I wouldn’t have gone,” says the 20-year-old. “I wanted a school that felt right for me, not someplace that we’re told we’re supposed to want to go.” Many of his fellow Elon students, he added, come from northern states, too. When he first arrived on campus, “it seemed like every other person was from Maryland, New Jersey, Maine, or New York,” he says. “It was like being back in the Northeast, but warmer.”
And:
Archie Glazer, 16, from Boston, is one prospective student looking to head south for college in a couple years (Elon is his top choice, but he’s still looking).
“Kids up north were pretty unhappy during those Covid lockdown years,” says his dad, Larry Glazer. “And colleges down south were offering something different. My son and his friends would look at TikTok and see all these college kids going to football games, throwing parties, living their lives. It has an impact.”
To boldly go where Iowahawk has gone before:
