Rafael Mangual, Jesse Arm, Tal Fortgang, and John Ketcham discuss the FBI’s arrest of a Wisconsin judge, the Jewish students who were blocked from areas of Yale University’s campus, and the other topics they’re following right now.
Audio Transcript
Rafael Mangual: Hey, good afternoon everybody. Welcome to the new episode of the City Journal Podcast. My name is Rafael Mangual. I’m the Nick Ohnell Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and of course a contributing editor of City Journal. I am filling in for our regular host, Charles Fain Lehman today, so bear with me. Thankfully, I am joined by three fantastic guests. With me are Jesse Arm, Director of all things External Affairs at the Manhattan Institute, Tal Fortgang, one of our many legal eagles, and John Ketcham who is Director of Cities, which encompasses all of our urban policy stuff. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.
Tal Fortgang: Thanks.
John Ketcham: Thank you, great to be here.
Rafael Mangual: So I want to jump right in with the news of the day here. So of course, I think the big story from the end of last week was this judge in Wisconsin who was arrested by the Trump administration. So the background I have based on the reporting that’s out there is that this judge had an individual before her who was wanted by immigration authorities who were there at the courthouse. And rather than allow him to exit the courthouse and be arrested, she directed this individual toward a back exit so that he could have a better chance of getting away. At least those are the allegations. The Trump administration officials have made an arrest in this case and a lot of people have their hair on fire about it. Some people say that this is authoritarianism in action, that this is the threat to democracy that they were all warning about.
Others say like, you know, just like you all were saying with respect to the cases against Donald Trump, no one is above the law. This judge clearly broke the law and so she is eligible to be arrested. So what are you guys’ takes? John, I’ll start with you.
John Ketcham: Sure, thanks Ralph. Look, the judge’s alleged actions based on the filings so far and the reporting probably violated the law. I don’t condone her actions. But the whole incident to my mind should have been avoided. We don’t need to have federal enforcers going into courthouses to make arrests in brazen ways. Even if it’s legal, I don’t think it’s a matter of good, prudent policy or just good practice. Norms are very important in our country. They bind together the populace in important ways. And when those norms start to erode through government actions like this, I think that you’re starting to see evidence of a wider social breakdown. Courthouses are temples of justice. They are part of our civic religion. When other government actors violate the sanctity of that space, it leads to other problems and I would have preferred to see the FBI and ICE and other federal officers arrest this gentleman in another setting.
Rafael Mangual: All right, I suspect you’re get some disagreement on this panel. Jesse, where are you at on this?
Jesse Arm: You should really go to Tal first, because I’m the only non-lawyer on this call, so my opinion doesn’t particularly matter, but…
Rafael Mangual: I’m bookending you. I’m bookending the lawyers.
Jesse Arm: Fair enough. Well, I think if you kind of set the politics aside, right, you forget Trump, you forget immigration, and you focus on the basic facts in this complaint, it sounds right. Law enforcement showed up with a lawful arrest warrant. A judge allegedly directed the defendant to a hidden exit and helped them flee. If that’s true, it’s not particularly complicated from what I’m reading. It’s textbook obstruction. And any ordinary citizen who did that would be charged.
Judges aren’t above the law. Wearing a robe doesn’t give you a special right to help someone escape arrest. Respect for the judiciary cuts both ways. It means protecting judges from unfair attacks, but it also means judges have to uphold the law themselves. I kind of view that as the real red line.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting to me actually because I’m thinking about what John just said about the propriety of actually making these arrests on courthouse grounds. But just, from a law enforcement perspective, I can think of very few places where, you know, making an arrest is more straightforward. I mean, if you allow this individual to leave the courthouse grounds, right, he gets into a car, drives away, okay, now he’s off grounds and you attempt to pull him over. Say he decides to flee. Well, now you have a car chase, that creates new dangers for the communities, it creates dangers for the officers involved, right? If you wait for the individual to get home, let’s say you follow them home, and, you know, then you knock on the door to make the arrest. Once they’re inside, they can barricade themselves. When they’re in the courthouse, there’s an opportunity for very smooth transition for, you know, the judge to say, OK, this is what’s going on in your case before me. However, there are some agents waiting for you here. I’m going to let them into the courtroom so that they can do their job. And in a controlled setting, they can make a smooth transition from, you know, custody of the state into the custody of the federal government. And I think it would say a lot more, in my opinion, for the state and local authorities to engage in this kind of cooperation. I think that that would be the kind of more responsible approach and in my opinion this judge decided to really open herself up. So let me go to Tal and then John I want to get your response to that.
Tal Fortgang: I want to hear from John too. All I’ll say at this juncture is hearing this story, I couldn’t help but think of the propriety of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Trump immunity case in which the court distinguished between acts in an elected official’s official capacity and those done in some other capacity. And that’s precisely the relevant distinction here as we hear a lot of bellyaching, not from John whose concerns I think are perfectly legitimate, but from people who are a little bit more hysterical about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism that this portends. It’s a judge, a judge, you know, has to be untouchable. Well, was the judge acting in her official capacity when doing this? It seems like though it occurred in a courtroom, which I agree is sort of a, has an altar-like quality of sanctuary, it was not in the judge’s official capacity. In that sense, this is just another person committing a crime. But John, please help stoke the argument here.
John Ketcham: So thank you. Look, there are countervailing policy and pragmatic considerations at play here. I take your point, Ralph, that courthouses may provide a low-risk setting to make arrests. But at the same time, if you make arrests in courthouses, it will deter people from making court appearances. It will create commotion and potentially distract from the orderly administration of justice.
Rafael Mangual: That’s a fair point.
John Ketcham: I can’t necessarily see a world in which some alternate place is so much worse than a courthouse such as to justify the courthouse as being the best available locus for an arrest. It might happen in a very extreme situation, but I don’t think that kind of circumstance was present here and in general, I want to preserve the appearance of order as well, and when, you know, defendants or even judges in this case are arrested in the courthouse and in the courtroom, it creates a perception that the government is trying to overreach. And even if it’s not the case legally, and I agree, there has been a lot of hysterics on this, I just don’t want to create unnecessary appearances of government usurpation or overreach.
Rafael Mangual: Well, that’s fair enough. I think those are really good points. So this is all obviously happening in the context of a broader debate about immigration and the role of state and local authorities with respect to helping enforce immigration. Of course, the Manhattan Institute is situated in New York City, which is one of many sanctuary cities, which means that New York City government will not participate in immigration enforcement. In fact, actually, a judge just ruled last week, which we talked about in the last episode of the podcast, that ICE could not reopen their office on Rikers Island to help facilitate that kind of enforcement.
So one question I have is, do you think that this particular incident is going to inspire other jurisdictions that maybe are on the margins of a sanctuary policy to adopt one? Or do we think that the tide has just completely turned on immigration, that the election of Donald Trump is the best evidence of that, and that sanctuary cities are going to be a thing of the past in say 10, 15 years? Jesse, I’ll start with you.
Jesse Arm: I don’t really know, to be honest. I would imagine that fundamentally people are still going to be with the president’s immigration agenda. I actually think we have four polls that were released yesterday to the public and all of them suggested that Trump’s favorability is on the lowest position it’s been really since the advent of the modern polling era for any president 100 days into his presidency or around that point.
Practically speaking, the president is losing ground on every issue, including immigration. But all of this is coming in the wake of Liberation Day and the tariff policy, turbulence in the market, and a feeling that things are falling off the rails with the economy. The economy has gone from being president’s strongest issue to, and if you believe, mainstream political pollsters, one of his weakest. Immigration remains his strongest even as those numbers drop. So I think some of what we’re seeing about the public’s response about what’s going on with cases like this one, with cases around the, know, Maryland father/El Salvadorian MS-13 member. I think that’s actually noise and we need to separate out the signal here and say that what’s going on is there’s turbulence in the market, people aren’t sure what’s going on with the economy, and that’s leading them to, at least that’s doubt, that’s leading middle of the road voters to, you know, question their faith in what’s going on.
But if the president restores to, you know, goes back to his kind of campaign mode, where he was talking about wealth creation, energy independence, and I honestly think, you know, had this administration tackled their campaign promises in a different set of order of operations, right? If you went and focused primarily on boosting domestic energy production out of the gate, then you went for a big tax cut, you had the market booming, then you win the midterms, and then you get a lot tougher on tariffs in China. It’s hard to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s hard to do everything all at once. So the question about where we end up with sanctuary cities at the end of all this, I think, is downstream from whether this administration can boost its popularity in numbers across the board on a number of issues. I don’t think the Democrats nationally are offering a real compelling alternative right now. I don’t think they deserve much of any credit for this administration sliding approval numbers on various issues. But I also think it’s not necessarily actions like the ones we’re discussing here with the Wisconsin judge that are causing some of this sort of turbulence in the president’s numbers.
Rafael Mangual: So interesting analysis, Tal, what do you think?
Tal Fortgang: One thing I think is for certain, and that is that this will be a microcosm of the way certain individuals and institutions and jurisdictions are going to try to handle the immigration issue, which is obstruct, get caught, cry foul, as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with the federal government trying to enforce immigration law. So you can expect a lot more hysterics in the months and years to come. As to…
Rafael Mangual: What does that mean for sanctuary cities, what you think?
Tal Fortgang: Right, so this will be a great test case. We’ve heard a lot about virtue signaling in past years, and it’s never been clear to what extent the whole sanctuary city self-designation has been an example of signaling virtue as opposed to actually being willing and able to stand up to the federal government enforcing immigration law. This will be a really interesting development to watch to see whether the, you know, primarily upper class jurisdictions, your Martha’s Vineyards and your, your Manhattans, whether they’re actually going to do anything other than fold, what risks the people who are actually going to be trying to obstruct the administration, what they’re going to be willing to take. I’m, I have no idea what, how much these people in their self-conception are Germans hiding Jews during the Holocaust, and to what extent they’re just campus activists parading around saying, “we’re so brave, we’re so tough, ICE is so evil.”
Rafael Mangual: John, what do you think closes out on this?
John Ketcham: Look, facilitating the deportation of criminal aliens is a relatively popular measure. It’s come up in our polls and in other polls. That said, Democrats and big blue cities need to find ways of mounting appropriate opposition, just as a political matter, and sanctuary policies are going to be part of that arsenal. I think there would probably be a more clear distinction between policies that facilitate deportation of criminals versus non criminals with some give in the joints on the criminal side and More of a hardening on the non-criminal side that seems to me a reasonable balance to be struck here especially given that we’ve had unprecedented migration into the country over the last several years with the migrant crisis in places like New York City and People have had enough of that, but they also want to protect their neighbors and their communities.
To your broader point though, Ralph, it speaks of a need to find appropriate ways to have opposition in the country, even opposition by other government actors than the federal government. So the Wisconsin judge, right, is one such actor. And there are other ways of sanctioning her, rather than just arresting her and having the FBI put on her. So I think there will be also a need for appropriate sanction when these government agents in their, you know, maybe in their desire to mount civil disobedience, just overstep the bounds of their authority and go too far. So I think appropriate sanction policies are going to be part of this mix going forward too.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, think ultimately the status quo is going to mostly hold if I had to put my money on one side of the line, I would say that there are going to be fewer sanctuary cities moving forward, say 10, 15 years out. But I don’t think it’s going to be materially different. think a lot of the places where those policies exist now are going to maintain their sort of progressive orientation, particularly on this issue. I don’t think ultimately they’re going to be very responsive to what the Trump administration is doing, no matter how much better their cities are going to be for it.
So yeah, so let’s move on to our next topic, which is, you know, one, I think we’ve been hearing a lot about. We’ve been talking a lot on the podcast about the Trump administration’s war with universities. And it seems like elite universities are just absolutely committed to giving this administration more and more fodder to go after them. The latest iteration of this came from the campus of Yale University, where last week some Jewish students were actually prohibited from walking through one of the areas of the campus that they pay tuition to access. So that student claimed that he was blocked by protesters who set up a new encampment. And Yale, surprisingly, shut the encampment down pretty quickly. And I believe they also, at least temporarily, disbanded the Students for Justice in Palestine, I think is the organization of the student group.
So there are a couple of things here that I want to ask about. One, I do you think that Yale’s response is good or bad? Two, do you think that it has to do with the way that the administration has kind of taken a more aggressive line on universities? Or three, do you think that the public has kind of had enough of these sorts of hijinks on university campuses and that the universities are being responsive to that? Tal, what do you think?
Tal Fortgang: Well, to take those out of order, I will begin with, I think that it’s very clear that this is a response to the administration’s threats to other schools. This was a clear-cut civil rights violation. You can’t prevent anyone from freely traversing campus, much less what was apparently caught on video, which is a Jewish man in traditional Jewish garb being prevented from accessing even a small space. That’s a civil rights violation and it’s a binary. It’s not like, you could have walked around, so therefore you should. Like, unless you have a really good reason to do so, you can’t block people from doing that. And the Trump administration has shown that it’s quite willing and ready to hold universities to account and bring the hammer down very quickly. So I do think that Yale acted in response to that looming pressure.
I will say that it’s good that they cleared the encampment shortly after it sprung up. And I guess it’s good that they suspended the SJP chapter. I don’t really know what suspending a student group means when the individuals who constitute that group are still allowed to do whatever they want under some other banner. So as I’ve maintained throughout all of these campus ordeals, have to expel the people who organize this stuff. You can’t just take a soft line on civil rights violators. So that’s good, a good start, I suppose, but until there are expulsions, you should expect this stuff to continue.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that’s right. I was watching the video as it was circulating online over the weekend and it just, there are few things that make me that furious. It’s like there’s this brazen sense of entitlement to take over an area of campus that other people pay to access. And I suspect that the public can see the injustice at play. And then when you layer that with the antisemitism that undergirds those actions.
I find it hard to believe that these universities have sort of survived as long as they have in terms of the public’s opinion. And it’d be interesting to see what, if anything, these ordeals have done to kind of measurable factors that would give us an indication of the university’s standing in the public’s mind. I would love to see whether this has actually affected admissions data or donations. I know it has in the short term, but it’d be really interesting to see a few years down the line what the reputational damage of this has been. But John, I want to get your thoughts on this whole episode. It just, again, I think everyone who watched the video of this student being obstructed and listened to the jeers that they were being subjected to sort of understands that what the Trump administration’s been talking about is not fake, right?
John Ketcham: No, not fake at all. And as Tal said, the right to travel unimpeded is a fundamental civil right. Public areas belong to everyone, and to impede someone’s access to those areas is a grave injustice. There are reasonable ways of ensuring that students have the opportunity to peaceful protest. Time, place, and matter restrictions, Yale’s policies, those are all appropriate ways of ensuring that students have the ability to do what they think is warranted in justice, as misguided as that might be in this particular case, while also protecting the freedoms of the other students who do not want to partake in those actions. I think it’s very striking how decisive the actions have been now relative to 2023 and 2024. Administrators have gotten the point that, you know, trying to balance the equities here and listening to the students and the far left elements that are supporting those students. That didn’t work. We saw Minouche Shafik at Columbia really undergo tremendous cross pressures, ultimately to be defeated. And she stepped down. Now, and I agree with Tal’s assessment, we have a different presidential administration that’s much more robust, much more aggressive, and I think that’s providing some cover for these administrative to take decisive actions. That’s ultimately leading to positive outcomes here. Enforcement is just very important. Students have to know that if they don’t get a permit, if they impede public walkways and public areas, there are going to be consequences, including potentially suspension and expulsion.
Enforcing that, as is happening, including for some of the actions in 23 and 24, ensuring that that enforcement happens is vital and it’s heartening to see that it’s happening. But again, within the broader structure of reasonable ability to conduct student protests.
Rafael Mangual: Jesse, where you at?
Jesse Arm: Yeah, it’s worth noting also that the path blocking here is not the sole issue. I the other organizers of this protest wednesday night at Yale, included literal Hamas-linked groups, know, real terrorist propagandists on the campus of Yale’s university harassing Jews and everybody who, you know, wanted to use that street that evening. So it extends beyond that problem. And I think Yale acted swiftly to get rid of this campus group because they knew they had real actual financially-linked terrorists on their campus that evening engaged in civil mayhem. The story here, I, actually I mean, I’ll be a little bit candid, you know, let’s zoom out. The story here is that you had at Yale anti-Israel protesters disrupting a speech given by a controversial Israeli minister of security, chanting slogans like “from the river to the sea,” “Intifada revolution,” throwing objects at the Jewish kids and the non-Jewish kids that wanted to go hear this speech, and in some cases, wearing real Hamas headbands. This behavior strips away, I think, any pretense that may have been left. These protesters are not merely pro-Palestinian or anti-genocide. They’re objectively pro-Hamas, explicitly anti-Semitic, glorifying violence against Jews, and they’re doing it, you know, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is when all of this took place. I don’t view this as a free speech issue because the protesting obviously is legal. Yelling “boo” or screaming or shaking a noisemaker of some kind, that’s all fine. Like the lawyers have covered on the podcast, physically blocking students’ paths who pay to be there is not, especially when you’re targeting Jews. That crosses into harassment and intimidation and in some cases even constitutes assault.
Yale’s got to investigate these incidents very seriously, but I also think meanwhile, the wider absurdity on campuses is that institutions have encouraged a dynamic where aggressive protesters are treated like the victims the moment that anyone pushes back. This is the farcical victimhood Olympics on steroids. But on the flip side, you know, I saw the video of the kid, you know, trying to get through the path. The truth is, in a healthy society, people wouldn’t tolerate being blockaded like this. They’d shove right through it and students, you know, would. But the problem and why Jewish students can’t do this and won’t do this is because they know the institutions will punish self-defense, not the aggressors. So, you know, I hate to be sort of indelicate here, but it’s like, the correct human response, in a normal society, would be that if some kid half your size with a keffiyeh wrapping around his face blocking your path is you knock him out of the way. But that’s when we know obviously, just in some sense maybe a microcosm of what’s really going on with Israel and Palestine here, at a more macro level we know the retaliation will be treated probably even more harshly than the original offense from the person crying victim.
So bottom line, the character of these protests, I think, is now, as it has been, undeniable. The anti-Israel campus movement is violent, anti-Semitic, and openly aligned with Hamas’s genocidal agenda. And it wants the public to know it, whether or not the media wants to be honest about it.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, think that’s right. I want to dig deeper though into the free speech issue which you mentioned because I think that’s exactly how these campus protests have been defended in the past, how they will be defended in the future. But you’re exactly right. I mean, the free speech lines are relatively clear, particularly in this case. I mean, you can protest, you can hold up signs, you can say what you want, you can write things in the campus newspaper, but you can’t block people from accessing parts of campus. You can’t throw things. You can’t throw things at them.
But one of the other things here is that, you know, some of the videos I’ve seen, and not just from the Yale encampment, but from Columbia and Harvard, is that some of these chants are happening late at night when people are trying to sleep, near dormitories. They’re happening outside the library and outside classrooms where you can actually hear the chanting disrupting the learning process. I mean, those are, I think, less obvious, but nevertheless, real impediments to accessing the educational process. I would like to see enforcers in the universities crack down on even that kind of behavior that I think disturbs the peace in a less concrete way but is nevertheless deserving of attention. Do we think that there’s an appetite for that? Do you think that the free speech argument gets stronger when it comes to that kind of enforcement and that kind of behavior?
Tal, start with you.
Tal Fortgang: Well, just thinking about what you just laid out here about the cancellation of classes and the disruption to what the university is actually for, I mean, during the Columbia building occupations, there were classes that were canceled even earlier this spring. Forget the encampments last year, where there were classes held in encampments, there were classes canceled so students could attend encampments. This was purely, like, students could not access their classrooms. They couldn’t hear their professors. So classes were canceled. And if that doesn’t say it all about what universities are all about now, that they venerate this kind of demonstration. It’s not really protest. It’s kind of just like emoting about an issue that most of the demonstrators don’t really know very much about at all. At the expense of the actual education that people ostensibly pay for and the credential that future employers seem to think is important.
This comes to mind when I think about people complaining about the Trump administration’s overreach against universities and making demands that don’t have anything obvious to do with the national origin discrimination problem plaguing these universities. And to some extent, I’m sympathetic with those concerns about overreach, but some of the demands that really target institutional corruption, right, the complete abandonment of what the university is supposed to be about really do get to the heart of the anti-Semitism problem and the anti-Israeli national discrimination problem, which is that universities are not what they claim to be. They are not what they say they are. They have subordinated traditional academic considerations to becoming platforms for demonstrators. In that context, the free speech argument falls badly flat, as do the arguments that the Trump administration has no business meddling in universities’ internal affairs. Of course they do, if the internal affairs are all part of the production of discrimination and the abandonment of what makes you eligible for federal funding in the first place.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think…
Jesse Arm: Yeah, they’re getting, they’re getting pinched on multiple fronts is another way of putting it, right? I mean, yes, the president’s war on higher education and particularly elite higher education that is, you know, captured by the woke left is, being waged successfully and it’s yielding things like Yale taking swift action with the group of protesters that we were just discussing from Wednesday night. But they’re also getting pinched because, you know, a lawsuit filed Friday, by the Columbia janitors who were locked in Hamilton Hall are now suing the protesters who trapped them inside the building. I think their names are Mario Torres and Lester Wilson. They’re claiming that mass protesters last spring assaulted them, called them Jew lovers and other racial and ethnic intimidation directed at them. They’re black and Latino guys. And this is all from the lawsuit filing that came out Friday.
Look, and all the while, it’s certainly clear that the climate of chaos on these campuses was a contributing factor in the president’s win last November. It’s not necessarily that it is the case that the majority or strong plurality of Americans are more with Israel than they are with Hamas in the current war that’s being fought out in the Middle East.
But it’s beside the point. It’s that they’re against the protesters. It’s that they don’t like anybody kind of cozying up to these people who are stomping on the American flag and sort of just live to come stir chaos in the streets about whatever the current thing is they’re supposed to be mad about. They felt that way in the summer of 2020 and they feel that way again as these campus intifadas begin to light up once more.
So, you know, the universities are being pinched from the public, pinched from the people who are being impacted by the protesters, whether it’s Jewish students or non-Jewish janitors working in their university buildings. And of course, they’re also being pinched by the administration. So I do think you’re likely to see some degree of change because these universities don’t want to be litigated out of existence.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, those are some excellent points, but I want to touch back on something that Tal hit on, which I think is exactly right with respect to the mission of universities, You know, I think if you go into a modern university today, especially an elite university, there is this sense that you are not considered by the university and its administrators sort of fully realized and actualized if you are not involved in some kind of social justice pursuit. I mean you see this with the prompts for admissions essays, you see this with the curriculums and what gets taught and focused on and how. It’s as if simply going there to learn and come out knowing more than what you knew when you went in is just not, it’s insufficient.
It’s insufficient to be considered a true Harvard alum or Yale alum or Columbia alum. You have to be part of something bigger than yourself. You have to be part of some protest in advancing some social cause. And I think a lot of students have taken that to heart, which is why they’ve become so emboldened with respect to engaging in some of this. But I can’t help but think that Tal’s exactly right, that universities have turned themselves into something other than what they were founded to be.
What do you think?
John Ketcham: I think that’s right, and if you see the university’s mission as allowing students to pursue truth, well it gets to that most basic of all questions. Indeed, it’s a question that Pilate asked Jesus. “What is truth?” Is truth a correspondence to some objective reality that is not dependent upon human beings, or is it some social construct that facilitates the domination of some groups against other groups? The second Marxist take is certainly the pervading theme in many universities. Of course, after the capture of those institutions in the 1960s and onwards, as our colleague Chris Rufo has demonstrated. And so we have, in general, lost sight of that traditional, and I think appropriate and correct view of truth as a correspondence to a greater objective reality. And we see some of the downstream consequences of that in this particular domain. Now, in what I was saying before about norms being important, law is almost the last resort, right? When you have to go through courts, it basically means that custom, norms, policies have broken down and that we need some kind of final adjudication through a formal process that both sides agree is fair. And here, to Tal’s point, you have a situation where faculty are allowed to provide accommodations for students who are protesting in subversion of their mission to teach students, right? And so I say that the university administrators really have to do a better job at creating policies and norms around common standards, holding all students to the same requirements to go to class, to take their tests, and if they want to protest, that’s fine, but it can’t get in the way of their academic objectives. And to the extent that that has not been the case, I think now is the moment of a wake-up call, and it’s in that regard a constructive development here at Yale.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah.
Jesse Arm: It’s worth shouting out one of our City Journal or Manhattan Institute colleagues who had a piece in City Journal that explored this, this very social question. Renu Mukherjee wrote about, you know, this, this Columbia junior, Yunseo Chung, who was, you know, a straight-A Korean immigrant who had lived in the U.S. for years. You know, why does someone like that join pro-Hamas protests alongside the likes of Mahmoud Khalil? And her take is basically that, you know, that’s, that’s the only way for for Asian kids to kind of be deemed cool, that this is a byproduct. Going into pro-Hamas activism reveals kind of a tragic outcome of higher education’s fixation with racial victimhood. Yeah, straight A’s don’t kind of earn you clout in today’s Ivy Leagues. All these kids are brilliant students, but a keffiyeh and a bullhorn might.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, no, I mean, I think that the social signal argument is a strong one and it’s one that’s been made in other contexts too. One of our other Manhattan Institute colleagues, Roland Fryer, has done some work on the sort of acting black phenomenon in lower levels of education where there’s actually a correlation between the level of academic success that you have and how popular you are in school in certain communities. And so, yeah, I was fascinated by Renu’s piece. If everyone hasn’t yet, you should go, you should read it. But I want to close us out on this issue because we’re coming up on time.
So we’ve got the administration coming down on universities. You have got students and employees starting to sue universities for failing to take action. And you’ve got the universities responding, at least in Yale’s case most recently, in a more aggressive and quicker way than they were before. What do we think about the future of campus protests? Will we see more? Will we see less? Will we see none? Really quickly, Jesse, start with you.
Jesse Arm: I think the climate and this administration are going to make it a lot more difficult to do so. It’s not going to be gone anytime soon, but we may see less if the administration follows through on all of its promises and all of its plan to punish these institutions for allowing this stuff to continue. It’s certainly not going away. It’s a tradition that has ebbed and flowed and existed in some serious form in this country for a very long time. But I do think we’re going to see less of it.
Rafael Mangual: John?
John Ketcham: If administrators enforce their policies decisively and clearly, we will see less of it. But I think we could see larger demonstrations in accordance with university policies that still get press attention, but there will be fewer incidents of these chaotic, unsanctioned groups taking over campus grounds.
Tal Fortgang: That’s really interesting that John says that. I actually think that as long as these demonstrators have to stay within the four corners of actual school rules, they won’t bother because the whole point of these demonstrations, excuse me, is showing that they run the campus, they get to decide what the standards are, and if they’re not smashing windows and occupying buildings, they’re not there to try to persuade anyone, right? They’re there to show people who’s in charge and that support for Israel and other mainstream positions are somehow fringe. And this is like, this is the logic of civil terrorism. It’s that, like, if you’re not pushing the boundaries of the law or the relevant rules, then then you’re not advancing the cause. So I think the crackdown is good. And as long as it university administrators actually follow through, this stuff will finally tamp down. But that is a big if.
Rafael Mangual: So we usually close our shows out with some kind of a light topic, but I want to give the listeners just some insight into some of the things that we’ve all been working on. So I’m going to close the episode out with just giving you all a quick chance to point listeners to either something you’ve written recently or something that you’re working on that they should keep an eye out for. John, I’ll start with you.
John Ketcham: Sure, thanks Ralph. New York City is undergoing a charter revision commission currently, which is to amend its foundational document, the New York City Charter, and one of the issues under consideration is electoral reform, the structure of New York City local elections. Some things that are on the table are primary reform. New York City has a closed partisan primary. Only registered Democrats can participate in a Democratic primary that most of the time determines the ultimate winner. And the Charter Vision Commission is looking to reform potentially that structure as well as the even year election issues. Because right now, New York City elections are on odd numbered years like this one but that comes with a lot less turnout and a lot of special interest influence. The CRC is considering moving local elections to even numbered years to boost democratic participation. I am contributing to this through a testimony that I provided orally a few weeks ago, and I will be providing written testimony this week, expanding on that oral testimony.
Rafael Mangual: Awesome, that’s exciting. Tal, what about you? Anything you’d talk about?
Tal Fortgang: Well, it’s not as sexy as local local election revisions and charter. You know, nothing really gets the blood pumping quite like that. But in an attempt to match that, I have a piece out today at Civitas Outlook, the excellent new publication from the University of Texas Civitas Center, one of those university beachheads we’ve been hearing so much about. I have a piece doing a full analysis, I think, of the Trump versus Harvard showdown, explaining why I think neither party comes to this dispute with its hands clean and how both are kind of distracting from a set of real issues and also pointing out ways in which some of Harvard’s policies and practices which the administration is targeting may seem sacrosanct and like it’s overreach for the administration to get in there and try to change them, but it’s actually not so crazy and may well hold up in court. But I try to lay out what I see as the legal issues and broader policy and philosophical issues in that dispute.
Rafael Mangual: Awesome. Well, for my part, I had a piece in the New York Times on Thursday, which is in today’s paper. So go and read that. talks about how the left continues to get it wrong on crime. And in the Sunday New York Post hitting both ends of the editorial spectrum here in New York, along with Naomi Schaefer Riley, I had a piece on Zohran Mamdani’s child welfare legislative record, which is extremely troubling. Jesse, close us out. What have you been working on?
Jesse Arm: Yeah, I thought you were gonna skip me there. Well, I didn’t have anything in the New York Times, but I did have a piece in the real paper of record, City Journal, that I wrote with the usual host of this show, but Ralph, you did a great job subbing in, Charles Lehman. And we were talking about actually the same subject that I spoke about the last time I was on this podcast, which is this question of the Josh Shapiro firebombing. There was an attack on, an antisemitic attack from someone who was mentally disturbed out on bail on governor of Pennsylvania’s life and on the life of his family and now he faces a choice fold his party’s radicals or lead.
Charles and I spelled out specifically what it would make sense for the governor to do in the wake of this attack make it easier to commit the dangerously mentally ill before they strike, back bipartisan cash bail legislation that is sitting in the Pennsylvania state legislature, and we call, you know, and he could call for more aggressive prosecution of anti-Semitic and other civil terrorists, as Tal has eloquently described them. And we haven’t really seen action on any of those fronts so far and that piece came out last week. But yeah, working on other things too.
We’re going to have a lot of interesting Manhattan Institute polling that’s coming out in the next few weeks and relating to the New York City mayoral election in particular and the way New Yorkers are feeling about the issues that are shaping that race. So lots to look forward to.
Rafael Mangual: That’s exciting, exciting stuff. Well, unfortunately, that’s all the time that we have for this show. So I want to thank our panelists. I want to thank our producer, Isabella Redjai. I want you all watching to like, comment, subscribe, either on YouTube or whatever other platform you listen to your podcasts on. You know, help the algorithm, help us out. If you like what you hear, let us know. If you don’t like what you hear, let us know and maybe we’ll make some changes. If you have questions for the panelists that you want to post, post them up. We’ll try to get to them during other episodes. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. Thank you and see you soon.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
