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After going out protesting, Columbia's law students demand a free pass on their finals

By Monica Showalter

They had one job: to study like hell to pass their exams and get their diploma and get the heck out. They didn't do that, and now it's consequence time.

I've been to Columbia. I was at student there at the graduate journalism school in the 1990s.

I know what it is like.

You will have a workload like nothing else you have ever had. You will think of nothing else. Weekends will be time to sit in bed and read a chapter of a history book on some distant era just to air out your mind for an hour, or else finding a classmate to go to church or synagogue with at the university chapel on Saturday or Sunday. You won't be in any position to work at a money-paying job and you will have to get cash to live on someplace else, sometimes selling your work to the press, sometimes from mom, and often not having much of any, using university events for your food supply. Stuff a bagel and some grapes in your pocket and get back to the computers.

Seriously, there will be nothing there resembling 'life' at that school because you will be so busy doing your class work to keep up, writing and reporting this story for this class, reporting and writing this story for that class, often with travel, hoping like crazy you can get someone on the phone in time, and the printer doesn't go out on you, delaying your filing, oh, and there's the Master's Project and law class for First Amendment law to get to on time. You cannot get behind, you will get kicked out. You will look bedraggled from sleeplessness, and work like you've never worked. You will carefully plan ahead to manage your time so as to never fall behind. The idea of wasting one precious minute on a protest, no matter what the cause, is unthinkable.

So now the news, which came out a few days ago, is that Columbia's law students are demanding that their final exams be cancelled based on all the "trauma" they've endured from recent campus protests.

According to the New York Post:

The student editors at the Columbia Law Review want administrators to cancel the law school’s exams and pass all its students after cops cleared out an anti-Israel encampment last week — claiming in a letter that the police action left the student body “irrevocably shaken.”

The letter — penned right after the NYPD dismantled protesters’ tent city Tuesday night and evicted them from nearby Hamilton Hall — also said the school should at least let students receive a simple pass/fail grade because they’re just so upset.

“The violence we witnessed last night has irrevocably shaken many of us on the Review,” the editors whined in the letter, published by Above The Law.

Really? What violence? The cops scooped up protestors who were out taking custodians hostage, junking furniture in campus buildings, invading an undergraduate dorm, and camping out on the university's lawn against the university's orders to go home.

That's not traumatizing, it's rectifying. Are they saying the screaming clown show on the lawn and custodians the held hostage needed to stay that way so they could study for their finals?

The letter itself is hideous, insulting the very professional New York Police Department officers as "a crowd of people that proudly represent their membership in a white supremacist, neo-fascist, hate group were storming our campus." This, despite the fact that at least half of the cops in the videos were black.



NEW: The student editors of the Columbia Law Review have issued a statement urging the law school to cancel exams in the wake of the police operation that cleared the university's encampment, saying the "violence" has left them "irrevocably shaken" and "unable to focus."🧵 pic.twitter.com/BOD87x5mwM
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) May 2, 2024



What were they doing that got themselves so 'traumatized'?

Given the wokesterliness of university law classes seen at elite universities, it sounds like some of them were out protesting and not studying. That's really bad time management and decisionmaking in general, because law school is extremely rigorous. Who came up with the bright idea to skip classes and go protesting in keffiyehs for the television cameras instead of study for finals?

Now it's time to pay the piper. Exams are on, hope you found time from your busy protest schedule to study for your law finals.

As it does a lot these days, there was a partial cave-in from the administration to the protestors:

May 2 (Reuters) - Columbia Law School resumed final exams on Thursday after canceling all tests on Wednesday due to ongoing pro-Palestinian protests and the closure of the university campus.

All the law school’s final exams are proceeding remotely instead of in-person, according to a Wednesday message to students from law dean Gillian Lester. Students may opt to have any or all of their exams graded on a pass or fail basis.

Which is to say, 'C' or 'D' work will now be getting a papered-over 'pass.' But this at least is some kind of standard. These snowflakes were demanding unproven passing grades, good, bad and ugly.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley described the problem with this demand:



Law students need to be able face such moments without shutting down due to the stress. Our profession is filled with stress and trauma. It is the environment in which we operate. In those moments, we do not have the option of being a no-show... https://t.co/qzfog6Prlv
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 3, 2024



And a retort, here.

Lawyers are supposed to be calm under pressure. (President Trump's attorneys demonstrate that with alacrity every day.) These characters want to get a free pass on law exams because of their feelings. And more likely, because they nursed those feelings and didn't study ahead of exams, confident the university would cave on them as they did on everything else.

Not surprisingly, the demand drew jaded responses on Twitter:



Columbia Law Review demands the Law School cancel final exams cause the q“violence” students witnessed on campus left them “irrevocably shaken” and “unable to focus.” The little terrorists are the ones who created the violence so BIG NO. FAFO kids. And they want to be attorneys!
— Patrick Hanrahan (@Hanrahan1949) May 6, 2024



Remember: They are at a law school where they are studying to be shark attorneys at six-figure starting salaries supposedly because of all the value they provide to their clients. The emotional self-nursing is about the stupidest thing any law student can ever do. They had one job: to study like hell to pass their exams and get their diploma and get the heck out. They didn't do that, and now it's consequence time.

Already many corporate CEOs are stating that they will think twice before hiring Columbia's grads, including law grads. Does giving everyone a pass, or even going pass-fail, enhance that school's reputation? Or does it expose them as overcoddled crybabies unable to manage their time or deal with their stress?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/after_going_out_protesting_columbia_s_law_students_demand_a_free_pass_on_their_finals.html