Arrests related to unlawful anti-Israel activity on campus are soaring. In addition to the two arrests at Dartmouth College and 57 arrests at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst already noted here previously, recent days have seen seven arrests at Brandeis University, 20 arrests at Brown University, and about 20 arrests at the University of Chicago, apparently including a couple of faculty members. College students were also among those arrested "on charges of illegally protesting inside a congressional office building," according to a Washington Post account.
The police are one possibility in the toolbox that college administrators and political leaders have for maintaining order and preventing a pro-terrorist takeover of the college campuses. I've been encouraging the college administrators to set some boundaries and to make clear that the mob doesn't have unchecked power, but the presence of "faculty members" participating in an anti-Israel sit-in at Chicago underscores the challenges.
So does the "yes" vote of more than 400 Harvard graduate students—the ones teaching discussion sections and grading papers—in favor of an extreme union resolution that says in part, "We categorically reject U.S. support of the murderous Israeli regime in its ongoing genocide of Palestinians" and "workers in the U.S. are struggling against many of the same capitalist forces that maintain and bolster the Israeli occupation of Palestine." The Harvard graduate student union resolution endorses a boycott of Israel and divestment from it. "No longer will we stand for investments that aid in the genocide of Palestinians. As members of the labor movement, we call on U.S. labor unions to cut all ties with Israeli unions. We call on the AFL-CIO to terminate its relationship with the Israeli Histadrut. We additionally call on U.S. unions and our employers to divest from Israeli bonds and from the military, extractive, and technological industries connected with the Israeli occupation and U.S. imperialism."
Arrests are certainly one tool that administrations can use, but so long as the faculty and graduate students are indoctrinating undergraduate students in these views, some of which also come from foreign governments and terrorist-sympathizing organizations, arrests alone won't be sufficient, because when the grad students and teachers get out of jail, they'll be back in the classrooms pushing the same falsehoods.