Emerson College budlights itself after coddling pro-Hamas protesters, watches enrollments tumble
Lots of college campuses saw pro-Hamas protests this spring, but few were quite as accommodating of these Jew-hating disruptors as Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.
According to Campus Reform
Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt appeared to apologize for the arrests of anti-Israel campus occupiers in late April and said that staff members were sent to bail students out of jail.According to Boston.com, 118 students were arrested during an anti-Israel encampment on the Emerson College campus during the early morning hours of April 25. They were charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace.
And as a result, they got a lot of disruption.
Today, they pay the piper:
Now, in a related development, enrollment at the school is down, and they’re laying off staff members.
That's from Legal Insurrection, whose writer, an Emerson grad, said it didn't give him any joy to report this.
But it's about par for what happens when university administrators decide to coddle rather than expel screaming creeps who harass Jewish passers-by on the street in the name of supporting Hamas as well as bellow with noise, trash and roadblocks, set up smelly campsites, spray graffiti, and refuse to leave when it's time to go home. That kind of crap interferes with paying students who are trying to study, so it's not surprising that prospective students decided they'd rather not deal with that and enrolled someplace else.
And Emerson's wokesterlies in its administration should have thought about this before they did it because the phenomenon is quite well known.
Remember this from Inside HigherEd?
Early undergraduate applications to Harvard fell by 17 percent this fall, according to data shared by the university. Harvard’s early-action program drew 7,921 applicants this cycle, compared to 9,553 last year.
It’s a marked decline amid a sea of rising troubles for the institution. Harvard came under fire earlier this month for President Claudine Gay’s responses during a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. And this summer the university lost a landmark Supreme Court case on affirmative action, resulting in a nationwide ban on the practice.
That was from before the campus protests, so goodness knows what the admissions figures look like now, and this is Harvard. Any lower-ranking school is bound to lose even more.
And let's not forget the Black Lives Matters protests and riots on campuses from a few years ago, the one where crazy Prof. Melissa Click tried to shut down student journalists from covering her protest.
Here is what I wrote at Investor's Business Daily in 2016:
Education Bubble: The University of Missouri reported a near-25% drop in student enrollment following its unrest. This is the result of political correctness run amok, weak university leadership and inflated college costs.
"I am writing to you today to confirm that we project a very significant budget shortfall due to an unexpected sharp decline in first-year enrollments and student retention this coming fall," wrote Interim Chancellor Hank Foley in a university memo Wednesday. Instead of a 900-student drop, as Mizzou expected, the university was looking at a 1,500 student drop, and that meant a continuing revenue shortfall as a smaller freshman class moves toward graduation, he explained. With U.S. News and World Report reporting a 46% four-year graduation rate for the school, it's a steep loss indeed.
As a result, Mizzou has been hit with a $32 million revenue shortfall, and will have to cut expenses 5% and impose a hiring freeze.
That's toxic.
Now Emerson has decided to take its turn in the dunking barrel, a completely preventable disaster for them premised on their inability to understand that universities have missions to educate, and that mission comes first, and any extracurricular activity needs to be fenced off and kept from getting out of control. In going woke, and coddling these creeps, they Budlightified themselves and are now experiencing exactly Budlight brought onto itself.
That's job one, and they had one job. They flunked it, so now they are out on their ear. One hopes that other universities will take note of this idiocy, and act with a firm hand when disruptors invade campus life, interfere with education, and try to shove their disgusting agenda down everyone's throats.
Image: Twitter screen shot