Mayor Johnson, given the demographics (spoiled moron children and professional activists) he naturally identifies with, didn’t offer the services of the Chicago PD.
Most everyone who’s mounted the whole higher-education carousel feels at least some sort of attachment to their horse of choice, their alma mater — maybe sometimes just as a credential to get by with in awkward introductions, which is a telling-enough thought. But I’m particularly attached to the good ol’ University of Chicago, where I attended law school (class of ’08), far more so than to my equally unsexy non-“party school” undergrad days at Johns Hopkins University. Both places have been famously branded as “where fun goes to die” — please understand, this was their core appeal for me — but something always felt different about the Chicago way. It wasn’t just the fact that I met my wife there (though that certainly helps), it was the approach to academics and the fierce seriousness and openness of the inquiry I found there, something best embodied by the Chicago Principles.
So it matters to me — as not just a Chicagoan but a Chicago alum — to see them still holding the fort when it comes to social authoritarianism on campus and the attempted shuttering of discourse. Like many other schools, UChicago was invaded by a combination of school and professional-outsider activists a week ago, who occupied the Main Quadrangle. They refused to move and mounted the same nonsensical list of impossibly fascist demands seen replicated across campuses (and not exactly organically) nationwide. There is much I could criticize about Chicago’s response — in particular I am reliably informed that the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine has been allowed to flout university rules for years now with no serious enforcement — but they have ultimately held up their end of the bargain.
This morning, at 4:25 a.m., campus police showed up and announced they were lowering the boom:
You are hereby notified that you are committing criminal trespass by remaining on this private property without permission. You are ordered to disperse immediately. Anyone who fails to comply will be criminally charged. Students who fail to comply with this order are subject to University discipline and immediately placed on leave of absence.
And then the UCPD and the Cook County Sheriff’s Department rolled in and rolled them off. Noted ex–mad bomber Bernardine Dorhn (Law ’67) showed up to the encampment around 5:30 a.m. only to slink away before the rest got paddy-wagoned by the cops. (Some habits are lifelong.) And then this morning around 9:00, an absolutely massive, protracted squall of thundershowers ripped through the city for about an hour. Anyone who hoped to remain at the protest at that point would have been washed away, along with all their ad hoc camping gear, in a torrential fury. (I like to imagine God leafing through a reissue of his Greatest Hits to Genesis 7:4 and deciding, “Hey, let’s try this one again on a smaller scale.”)
And now the UChicago quad is clear. What can you say? Sometimes a rain really does come to wash all the scum off the streets. I look forward to the plaza outside the campus bookstore returning to its previous use: as a space where mottled, scraggly bearded activists can shriek at you about the cruelties of circumcision. (Things truly were better back in the day, kids.)
But they’ll be back again, and likely soon — the administration acknowledges this openly, to signal that it is prepared. The most ominous aspect of this entire affair is that by all accounts the University of Chicago had to clear its own school without the assistance of the Chicago Police Department, and that this was done at the explicit direction of Mayor Brandon Johnson. I have written about Johnson extensively in the past, and in particular about his deeply rooted — as only the convictions of a wholesale creation of the Chicago Teachers Union can be — disdain for police response and use of force even in the face of outright violent criminality. This is especially so when it comes to the demographics (spoiled moron children and professional activists) he most naturally identifies with, and explains why the UChicago administration had to reportedly rely on its own campus police with significant assistance from the Cook County Sheriff’s Department (think about that for a second) to get the job done.
It certainly all bodes well for the upcoming hot town, summer in the city that will be Chicago 2024. If we’re lucky we’ll get the inevitable heatwave-related gun-crime spike out of the way by mid to late July, so we can buckle down and focus on the Main Event in August: the Democratic National Convention, where I anticipate that — unless, as is the fevered wish of the former encampers, Israel has ceased to exist by then — things may happen that become the stuff of unfortunate local legend. Brandon Johnson seems to have made clear what his strategy will be. It really all depends on what the activists want to do. Do you trust them?