“Shut down” is too strong. After a demonstration and shouting interruption while the President of Sarah Lawrence sat there silently, the protesters left to vandalize the building.
The students went for the old standby: the heckler’s veto.
Ezra Klein is a man of the left, but in most ways, he reflects the late Clinton-era liberalism more than the current insanity. Or, perhaps, more of the early Obama era, back when people didn’t understand that underneath those crisp pants creases and urbane arguments lay a radical.
His podcast is done with The New York Times, for God’s sake. He isn’t a supporter of Israel in particular, but he IS a Jew and unwilling to buy into the full degrowth agenda. He talks, instead, about “abundance,” not eating crickets and killing health care executives.
That makes him a Nazi.
They think this is free expression and that Ezra Klein is an “apologist of white supremacist views and an accessory to genocidal state violence.”
Nothing will ever satisfy these anti-civilizational morons. https://t.co/tXUl0663TU pic.twitter.com/744BQmCfde
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) January 30, 2026
Compared to other tantrums thrown by the Maoists on campuses, this one was mild. There wasn’t a kidnapping, or even an “occupation.” Perhaps too many students are captivated by The Next Thing, which is not protecting terrorists in Gaza but rapists and pedophiles here in America; they just couldn’t get into the whole thing in the same way. Rapists and murderers here are a more attractive victim group than terrorist rapists and murderers half a world away.
@ezraklein did everything he can to be “the right kind of Jew”.
He gave Syrian-Algerian enemy of the Jewish people Mahmoud Kahlil a coddling interview.
He refused to condemn the genocide blood libel against the Jewish people.
He said supporting Israel is conflict with…
— Rabbi Poupko (@RabbiPoupko) January 30, 2026
Sarah Lawrence’s tuition, room, and board is only $90,000 a year. For that princely sum, the college may feel obliged to pamper its student body. The college had already bent to demands to have a counter-event for the students to express their grievances and support for killing Jews, but the president took it upon herself to allow this interruption as well, and to explain to Klein that this is how intellectual discussion looks at her college.
At a recent campus event featuring Ezra Klein, that test arrived and Cristle Judd, president of Sarah Lawrence College, failed it.
From the outset, students affiliated with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) did not seek to authentically challenge Klein’s ideas. They shouted him down. They had no intention of persuasion or debate; they wanted to disrupt the speech and intimidate audience members—a textbook heckler’s veto.
What makes this episode so damning, however, is that Klein did everything right.
As interruptions mounted, Klein repeatedly tried to engage. He invited disagreement. He addressed the protesters directly: “Try to convince me of something. Hold on—hold on—let’s talk. You have me right here. You can talk to me and persuade me of your position.” This was intellectual good faith under pressure and a superficial exchange did last perhaps 30 seconds before the protestors disengaged entirely.
Klein is a deeply skilled public interlocutor, known precisely for working through disagreement carefully and publicly. If a college president believes in dialogue, she could not ask for a better demonstration partner.
Klein was there. He was willing. He was asking questions.
And Cristle Judd sat silently onstage.
She did not pause the event. She did not insist that the student disruptors explain themselves and engage as was asked of them. She did not restate expectations or defend basic norms. She did not model how disagreement is argued through rather than performed. Klein stood ready to do the intellectual work. The students refused. And the president allowed refusal to prevail.
The failure became explicit when the protesters finally exited. Judd turned to Klein onstage and said, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence College.” Klein replied simply, “Thank you.”
“Welcome to Sarah Lawrence College.” That says a lot. Sarah Lawrence is in the post-discussion/post-rational stage of academia, as most schools are today. Students are encouraged not to learn and debate, but to emote and throw tantrums. The goal is not to gain knowledge and wisdom, because wisdom has been replaced by…outbursts? I’m not sure what you could call the end product that Sarah Lawrence is selling, except a comfortable four years in an ideological bubble with room to explore your carnal desires and express your ID.
No doubt the college, in its brochures, sent to eager parents whose vision of college is old-fashioned, talks all about students gaining a serious, well-rounded education. No doubt they don’t discuss the fact that Sarah Lawrence allowed the father of one of their students to move into their dorm and start a sex cult that ended with him being convicted and sent to prison for 60 years.
“Larry Ray is a monster. For years, he inflicted brutal and lifelong harm on innocent victims. Students who had their lives ahead of them. He groomed them and abused them into submission for his own gain. Through physical and psychological abuse, he took control over his victims’ minds and bodies and then extracted millions of dollars from them.
Welcome to Sarah Lawrence College.
Oh well, at least he was able to send his daughter to an elite school.
I struggle to find reasons why any parent should send their children to an elite school these days. Sure, if you send them to Harvard, you can hope that they will wind up employed at a white-shoe law firm or on Wall Street. I guess that if all you care about is producing an ignoramus with emotional continence problems but a huge salary, Harvard is the way to go. One-third end up in finance or “consulting” right after graduation.
But as far as I can tell, education is no longer on the agenda anymore.
In light of that, I guess it makes sense that even a liberal who wants to discuss ideas has no place on a college campus, except as a foil for the activists.
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