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FinancialTimes Minouche Shafik: universities must engage in serious soul searching on protests

If academia can’t better define the boundaries between free speech and discrimination, government will fill that gap

Minouche Shafik YESTERDAY

The writer is the president of Columbia University.

<< … The wave of protests, encampments, and building takeovers has since spread across the US and around the world. Whatever one thinks of the response of university leaders — denouncing hurtful rhetoric, enforcing rules and discipline, and summoning police to restore order — these are actions, not solutions. All of us who believe in higher education must now engage in serious soul searching about why this is happening. Only then can universities recover and begin to realise their potential to heal and unify ... >>

FinancialTimes ‘This is like a crucible’: spectre of 1968 looms over US campus protests

Student activism evokes sense of disorder that doomed Lyndon B Johnson

Joshua Chaffin in New York and James Politi in Washington YESTERDAY

<< … “That kind of disorder that was taking place in the streets — the violence between police and protesters — without that, Richard Nixon would have never won,” said Norman Siegel, former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who recalled tuning into the chaotic 1968 Democratic national convention each night from Mississippi, where he was then serving as a young civil rights lawyer ... >>

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