What silliness. I want to say: look, y'all, if you don't like the Core Curriculum, then go to Brown or any of a number of other excellent schools up there that give plenty of curricular freedom! No one is making you go to Columbia, where their version of the core has been its pride for a long time.

What I want to know is why don't they just throw the students out? Surely if a bunch of bums set up camp in the middle of Columbia they would be thrown out. Unless, of course, the bums were protesting for some fashionable cause.

In fact, I'm surprised some enterprising bums haven't done just that. Perhaps there's better eating on the streets of New York?

Objecting to studying the achievements of dead people is the least reasonable of their complaints. Most of the living that has taken place in the world was done by people who are now dead, so most of the accomplishments that are worth reading about probably belong to the dead, other than when people who are living now have built and improved upon older accomplishments.

A very similar thing happened at Indiana University about six years ago. After the US invasion of Afghanistan, a bunch of students set up a "Peace Camp" in Dunn Meadow--an area of campus that is designated as a "free speech zone." The camp was supposed to be a vigil protesting the invasion, but there were problems with non-students taking up residence in the camp. The University never took action against the campers, but eventually it was a one-man show and the last camper agreed to pack it up:

http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=10356&comview=1