education
Pro-Palestinian protesters take over Columbia building, barricade doors
Dozens of protesters breached an administrative building at Columbia University early Tuesday morning, barricading entrances while flying a Palestinian flag out a window on the Ivy League campus in Manhattan.
Students used furniture to barricade Hamilton Hall, which was occupied during a 1968 civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protest, AP reports. The student radio station, WKCR-FM, broadcast a play-by-play of the takeover.
Reports state protesters locked down the building in fewer than five minutes once they’d entered, according to the Columbia Spectator, which detailed how the demonstrators carried out the takeover starting just past midnight.
Axios reports that a coalition of student groups behind the protest has called for, among other things, divesting university endowment funds from companies that do business with the Israeli government.
Columbia President Minouche Shafik said in a statement Monday: “We are consulting with a broader group in our community to explore alternative internal options to end this crisis as soon as possible.”
A Columbia protester told reporters: “We will not be moved unless by force.”
Axios has also compiled information from anti-Israel protests on college campuses around the country:
At Cal Poly Humboldt, north of San Francisco among ancient coastal redwoods, student protesters have barricaded themselves for a week in a building that includes the president’s office, tagging walls and renaming it “Intifada Hall,” the New York Times reports.
Cornell and NYU — said they’ll suspend or discipline students involved in encampments. At least 40 people involved in a tent encampment were arrested at the University of Texas in Austin on Monday afternoon.
Nine protesters at the University of Florida were taken into custody and police in riot gear arrested multiple people at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va.
An elementary school in the suburbs of New York City has been teaching a “gender curriculum” to kindergarten children in an effort to promote “inclusion” in the school. Hillside Elementary School, part of the Hastings-on-Hudson Union Free District, uses photos of children to introduce “different identities.”
The New York Post reports that the course includes showing kindergarten students photos of other children which are used to “introduce vocabulary to describe characters of different identities,” including teaching them about the terms “cisgender, transgender, and non-binary,” according to a message to parents regarding the curriculum.
“Our gender curriculum focuses on Hillside’s core value of respect and aims to center discussions on gender identity. The students will learn and discuss that there is a lot you can’t tell about a person by simply looking at them,” the kindergarten level course description reads.
“The students will look at pictures of children and talk about what they notice and what they think they know about the children just from the pictures. Using their observations, we will then take the opportunity to introduce vocabulary to describe characters of different identities,” the school writes.
The “identity” being taught to children includes discussing “gender and the pronouns that you use,” and that “as we learn and grow, the words we use to describe our gender identity can grow too,” as described by the school.
Fox News Digital reached out to the school about the curriculum, to which the Hastings-on-Hudson Union Free District communications team said that the lessons have been in place for several years and are rooted in “Hillside’s core values of respect and fostering dignity for all students.”
“One 30-minute gender lesson is taught in each class one time per year. The classes are led by a certified educator, following a specific set of lessons designed to help students value the full diversity of their classmates,” Superintendent William S. McKersie said in a message to faculty and parents.
“The lessons have been created in alignment with the NYS Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework,” he wrote. The school noted that the lessons do not address sex education or sexuality. The school district said that while they usually have the courses posted publicly online, the gender lesson description has been taken off the website since going viral.
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