Columbia Law students want their final exams called off … in the name of Palestine.
In a recent letter, the student editors of the Columbia Law Review made a public call for the school to cancel the semester’s remaining exams and “give all students passing grades for their work throughout the semester.”
“We believe that canceling exams would be a proportionate response to the level of distress our peers have been feeling,” the unnamed students wrote in an open letter.
The plea comes after Columbia University, on April 30, authorized the NYPD to clear out trespassers who violently and forcibly took over the school’s Hamilton Hall (and smashed windows and trashed furniture while at it).
And yet these law students describe the police’s action as “violence” that “has irrevocably shaken many” of them and “the majority of our classmates.”
You’re telling me that the majority of Columbia Law students — who were admitted to a program with a 12% acceptance rate — are unable to do their work amidst political upheaval?
According to the Law Review board, law students have been rendered “unable to focus and highly emotional” due to recent events on campus. And, if the school says they can’t all just pass automatically, the Law Review’s letter asks that exams at least be graded on a pass or fail basis.
These needy kids might sound like the squeaky wheels — but a shocking 74.2% of Columbia Law School Students support pass-or-fail grading this semester. (Since 1994, the school has used an A, B, C, F grading system with “very few” credit/fail courses, according to its academic procedures.)
It’s not a good look when most students at your elite institution are asking for educators to go easy on them.
“Videos have circulated of police clad in riot gear mocking and brutalizing our students,” the letter reads. “Many [of us] are unwell at this time and cannot study or concentrate while [our] peers are being hauled to jail.”
Clearly Columbia Law School isn’t teaching their students property rights. They should know well that a private institution has every right to establish its own rules and see that they are enforced. There’s no inalienable right to trespassing.
The students also clearly neglected to read the campus rulebook, which clearly states that “all tenting must be ordered through Columbia Facilities Events Administration.”
I’m a part-time Columbia student, but I don’t need a law degree to parse out what that means: No liberated zone on the quad.
The letter — which was co-signed by the executive boards of five other Columbia Law-affiliated publications — asks the school to “give all students passing grades for their work throughout the semester.”
The subtext: Even those with Fs should get degrees and start representing legal clients without qualifications or requisite knowledge.
The entire demand is absurd.
Nothing about exams is supposed to be equitable. The whole point of finals is to figure out who retained knowledge and understood concepts and who didn’t. Egalitarian grades are no grades at all.
You know what else can be distressing, disturbing and emotionally confronting? Courtroom proceedings. These kids might end up working as legal counsel in a murder trial.
Such a level of entitlement would have been unthinkable just a couple years ago, but this is a coddled generation accustomed to being given extensions on deadlines, extra time for exams and easy As on their transcripts.
The law students’ requests have precedent.
When they demanded leniency on grades in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, administrators capitulated. At UCLA, a professor was even suspended for refusing to go easier on black students’ grades.
At NYU, the Senior Vice President for Global Inclusion at the university’s DEI office said that professors should consider not making students turn on cameras during Zoom classes in the days following the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two protesters during a fiery Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
NYU’s statement cited students’ “exhaustion, fatigue, frustration, and anger” as a reason to go easy on them.
Time and again, kids have been coddled by their schools — and they’re growing entitled. Now that they’re being unleashed into the courtroom, the rest of the world risks bearing the consequences.
If not for the sake of sanity, for the sake of reputation Columbia Law School shouldn’t give in and start doling out degrees to feeble, flunking Hamas supporters.
