The chaos, insanity, and mob rule at Columbia University isn’t just limited to its undergraduate campus, it turns out — students at its law school, which costs just under $100,000 a year to attend, are demanding that all of their grades be pass/fail because “it is wrong to recognize academic achievement (no matter how deserved) at the expense of other students’ physical, emotional, and mental well being.”
This week, Columbia Law School’s student government sent campus administrators a list of demands that includes the “adoption of a mandatory pass/fail grading system” in the name of “equity” and “well-being,” which they repeatedly misspell in an open letter with enough grammar errors to embarrass even fake lawyers in shows like "Suits."
In the petition itself, which was signed by a number of students, they demand that Columbia “take immediate action to make all law school exams pass/fail, in light of the extraordinary circumstances our student body is facing.” Never mind that the circumstances confronting Columbia are being caused by the radical jihadists that would ostensibly align with these demands. Students who are in law school to learn, and not be arrested, presumably do not want their grades to be pass/fail.
While one Columbia student anonymously wrote that they “cannot study for more than 20 mins straight with everything going on…,” a push for exclusively pass/fail grades would likely do more harm than good for the long-term prospects of Columbia grads. As merely the eighth-best law school in America, according to U.S. News and World Report’s highly problematic, yet prestigious rankings, Columbia needs every way for its students to compete against more prestigious diploma mills, like Yale – which is tied for number one.
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Unbeknownst to most outside of higher education, Yale Law School does not award letter grades, like Columbia normally does; instead, its grades are scaled from honors to no credit given. If Columbia switches to universal pass/fail, how will its alums be able to stand apart from their counterparts at other pass/fail schools, like Yale? Grades, it turns out, actually matter–yet, for the sake of supporting another intifada, Columbia activists are trying to sacrifice their futures and those of their classmates.
Just how chaotic is Columbia’s campus right now? Dore Feith, a current law student, described the scene thusly: “The new ‘Liberated Zone’ is a vortex of Jew-hatred, drawing not just Columbia students but outside actors. They scream for Israel’s destruction, banging drums and chanting loudly to celebrate jihadist terrorism. One student threatened that pro-Israel students were going to be Hamas’s ‘next targets.’”
The problems, it turns out, go well beyond Khymani James, the undergraduate activist who infamously said that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Feith continues in his saga about how “another activist, face wrapped in a keffiyeh, waved a photo of Hamas’s flag. Crowds on campus have been chanting ‘Oh Hamas, oh loved one, strike, strike Tel Aviv!’...A visibly Jewish student was assaulted on campus. No police could help him, because Columbia’s administration has refused to allow the NYPD to reenter campus since the arrests last Thursday. When the police were on campus that day, radical students called the officers 'baby killers' and told them to kill themselves.”
In its “call to action,” the student government wrote that “mandatory pass/fail exams is the only equitable solution” in light of the anguish that pro-Hamas protesters are causing them. They cite the “profound grief and stress” of Muslim, Jewish, and Middle Eastern students that “compromises their ability to prepare for and excel in exams.” Any alternative is unacceptable — never mind that students who are able to actually do work are inevitably penalized by mandatory pass/fail.
“Pushing exams to a later date and/or implementing on-campus ‘remote’ exams are not acceptable solutions,” they warn, despite acknowledging that there is not uniform support for their radical recommendations.
This open letter comes after Columbia already caved to leftist demands to “allow up to one Cr/F election for 1Ls and LLMs and up to two Cr/F elections for upper level JD students,” which is amending their original rules. “Cr/F” is Columbia-speak for pass/fail. But, activists claim, such demands are “a direct affront to equity and student wellbeing,” they claimed, in a sentence filled with enough grammar and spelling errors to be a direct affront to the English language.
“We want to make clear that the updated exam guidelines sent to [sic] tonight are unacceptable, and a direct affront to equity and student wellbeing,” they wrote — in bold, no less.
Students can sign anonymously, which will of course inflate the numbers beyond verification — the digital equivalent of the cloth masks the occupiers don to prevent anyone from naming and shaming them.
In recent weeks, Columbia has caved to these protesters time after time, letting the inmates run the commuter college campus. With some commencements being canceled due to campus occupations, it wouldn’t come as a shock if Columbia does let these future lawyers of America pass/fail their whole year — let’s just hope that most of them still fail anyway.
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