The College Fix

A little over a week ago, NYC police commissioner Ray Kelly visited Brown University to speak about his efforts to reduce crime in the Big Apple. Efforts that have been remarkably successful by most any measure, with drastic reductions in violent crime across the city.

How did Kelly do it? That’s what, presumably, most students in the audience at Brown wanted to know. However, thanks to a group of rowdy leftists protestors who made a point of shouting Kelly down repeatedly until the event had to be cancelled, no one in the audience heard a word from Kelly.

Just take a look at the video clip below, and look at the sheep-like actions of these misguided students, reading their “protests” off of note cards because–obviously–they didn’t know enough about what it was they were protesting to be able to do it without the aid of a written note. Such a knockout combination of ignorance and arrogance can be found perhaps nowhere else other than the halls of our nation’s elite universities–chock full of wealthy liberal kids who have never dealt with the threat of urban crime for a second of their lives, yet are convinced that they are champions of justice.

Over at Minding the Campus, Heather MacDonald analyzes the awful spectacle above with laser-like precision:

Kelly had come to Brown to talk about the New York Police Department’s unmatched success in lowering New York’s crime rate.  The students, however, heckled him off the stage, shouting that Kelly had “institute[ed] systemic racism” in the city through the NYPD’s contested stop, question, and frisk tactics.

The protesters of course take for granted that they can go about blithely squandering their parents’ tuition money at Brown without fear of getting shot, robbed, or raped.  Nor do they have to navigate through a gauntlet of drug dealers on their way to the store or while picking up their mail.  Residents of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods by contrast endured just such constant fear and disorder until the NYPD embraced proactive policing and other revolutionary reforms in the early 1990s, reforms which Kelly perfected.  When every criminologist predicted that the NYPD’s 1990s crime drop had bottomed out, Kelly drove crime down another 31%, in the process saving another 5000 minority lives.

The Brown students have zero understanding of the massive disproportionality in crime commission in New York and other American cities… The police focus on minority neighborhoods in order to protect the many law-abiding residents there; if the police ignored those areas, only then could they rightly be accused of racism…

The Brown protesters disgraced themselves and their school in silencing a selfless public servant who has done more in twelve years for New York’s poorest neighborhoods than decades of the big government redistribution programs that the Brown hecklers most certainly support…

Read MacDonald’s full commentary here.

A critical point here is that the display of close-mindedness and self-righteousness put forward by the students at Brown is about more than this one issue of policing New York. Rather, that close-mindedness points us to the underlying problem of liberal bias on campus. Because students go through four years of education without having their far left political views challenged even once, it’s no wonder that they end up unable to think clearly, critically, or for themselves. If there’s an opposing viewpoint out there, they don’t want to hear it. They are interested only in the cliches of class warfare and racial grievance.

After years of elite education, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, they end up shouting words off of a note card with a black power fist held weakly in the air.

These days, that’s what they call an Ivy League education.

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