Johns Hopkins English professor Drew Daniel started a petition for his university to cut ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which collaborates with the school to offer a couple of programs for students, according to Campus Reform.
The professor’s petition says “ICE is now currently responsible for the fabrication and maintenance of facilities across the country which have been described by scholars of the Holocaust as meeting the conditions considered definitive of concentration camps: indefinite detention without trial on the basis of identity.”
Whoa whoa whoa, so let me get this straight. Is Drew using “identity” here to refer to the fact that these people are in the country illegally? Drew, buddy, that’s an ACTION, not an identity. I mean, imagine being able to go around committing crimes and then say “oh, what? You can’t lock me up. That’s discriminating against my identity!”
More than 2,000 people, over half of whom were students, alumni, or faculty from Johns Hopkins, signed the petition. But fortunately, it doesn’t seem like the school is falling for this hogwash. Johns Hopkins’ president and provost wrote a letter suggesting that distancing the school from ICE would violate academic freedom and saying:
“We believe that it would be antithetical to the mission of the university if we were to insist that faculty members withhold instruction or medical care in order to have the university express its disapproval with certain aspects of current federal policy.”
Based, as they say on the interwebs. And to add insult to injury, a Johns Hopkins student who wanted to stay anonymous told one of my correspondents over at Campus Reform that illegal alien students “may benefit from [ICE contracts] because these contracts provide funding to” the school and suggested that this funding also keeps the school open to lower-income students. The compassionate left all of a sudden doesn’t seem so compassionate. Who would’ve thought?
Protesters at Johns Hopkins University were upset with the university’s decision to both have a private police force, as well as maintain a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Campus Reform.
Police finally intervened a full month after protesters occupied a campus building. Johns Hopkins had to move academic advising, financial aid, and disability services to a different building for that period and when the police finally stepped in, protesters put up quite the fight.
What do you think is going to be the outcome of lying down on the road, blocking police? Honestly, do you think they’re just gonna say ‘oh well I guess we can’t do our jobs, better just let the people we arrested go free”? We’ve got some feisty leftists like Berkeley teacher Yvette Felarca who love the concept of “By any means necessary,” except probably not when it’s used against them.
So those two protesters lying down were also arrested, making a grand total of seven arrested on charges like trespassing and impeding vehicle traffic, but get this: none of the seven are getting charged. The Baltimore state attorney said the charges were “abated by arrest.”
To Johns Hopkins’ credit, though, it’s been pretty solid about the contracts it offers, training officers through its medical school. If only more schools would stand up to the mob.
Johns Hopkins University currently relies on off-duty Baltimore, Maryland officers, but a bill introduced recently would establish a separate police department of 100 officers for the school, reported Campus Reform. But not if the more than 60 Johns Hopkins faculty who signed a recent letter have anything to do with it.
They said “We believe that armed personnel introduce dangerous firearms and can decrease public safety, endanger our own students, and increase risk. We are concerned that once in place, police administrations will inevitably amplify the climate of fear and justify their roles by citing stops, arrests, and detainments.”
OK, so 1) those “dangerous firearms” aren’t just tossed out into the community. They’re in the possession of people employed to protect you, so how does that add risk for you? And 2) yes, police are going to detain and arrest people; that’s kind of the point. If there’s a culture of fear around doing crime, I’m all for it.
The professors also said “We believe that an armed force of university employees operating beyond our campus is undemocratic.”
They go back to the racial element, quoting a student group that said “Black and brown students and Baltimoreans are already disproportionately targeted. Private police on campus are likely to exacerbate racial profiling, with even more dangerous and potentially fatal consequences.”
How do you know this? And it’s not exactly like there’s a shortage of murders that can be stopped. Remember that this is Baltimore, folks, the city with the fourth highest violent crime rate in 2016. What’s especially ironic about all this hullabaloo is that the bill to give Johns Hopkins its own police force was introduced by two Democrats. They’re eating each other, folks.
All this comes shortly after Johns Hopkins shut down another petition demanding it sever ties with ICE.
