From snapshots like this it was unclear whether there was more encouragement of protest and radicalization among the tents on the university’s South Lawn or in the teaching activities inside Columbia’s classrooms. As people who had been on faculty told me during the period in which the encampment was going on, for many years the faculty had expressed a number of views to students as points of truth. These included (as K had said) the idea that the highest expression of higher education in America is to be found in creating “activists”—people who will know that when their time comes they can
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