University administrations, pushed by ruling class politicians, call in police to arrest students carrying out peaceful protests on the grounds of the schools where they are students! This has involved many instances of brutality by the police, directed against these students—and against faculty taking part in, or just observing, the protests. And now, the administration at Columbia University calls on the New York Police not just to arrest protesters but to occupy the campus for weeks to prevent further protests!

All this is being done in the name of “preventing disruptions to campus life.” But it could certainly be argued that the main “disruption” to campus life is the repression that the authorities have brought down against these protests, especially with the frequently massive, and often brutal, invasions of campuses by police.

The truth is that it is the content of what the students are doing—their righteous protests against the genocidal slaughter Israel is carrying out against the Palestinian people, with the full backing of the U.S., and the complicity of universities in this genocide—it is this stand of the students that the authorities find most “disruptive.”

Shouldn’t the continual slaughter of more than 35 thousand Palestinians, including nearly 15 thousand children—and the complicity of American universities in this genocide—be “disrupted,” in fact fully stopped? The demands of the protesting students, to end this genocide and the complicity of universities in it, are completely justified. And to the degree that the raising of these demands—and the protests the students have carried out in support of these demands—causes some “disruptions of college life,” and forces more people to confront why campus life is being disrupted, and where they should stand in relation to this—that is a very good thing, something which should be supported, encouraged and spread further, not viciously suppressed!