Mika Brzezinski on Columbia Protests: This Does Look Like Janaury 6

BRZEZINSKI: “No, they’re adults and — go ahead.”
HAASS: “I was just gonna say, it’s one half about the students. It’s also, Mika, about these authorities and the lack of them. Why are these school administrators, why are they abdicating their responsibility to this degree? This affects students. It affects outsiders. It affects teachers with tenure. The last I checked, tenure is supposed to give you intellectual protection so you can say things in classrooms. It doesn’t, seems to me, give you the ability to break the law with impunity. I just don’t understand. And you see also the difference on the campuses, between what’s happening on some, Chicago and Florida, as opposed to what’s happening at Columbia and others. There is an enormous gap in the principle and backbone we’re seeing here.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Richard, to your point, I think that’s where we’ve all — that’s the place we’ve all been sitting in, watching this, going, ‘What the hell is going on? What are these universities doing? Why aren’t they doing something?’ And I’ll echo the horror that this does look like January 6th. What a terrible example for our students. At the same time, these are young adults. The question is, why do you choose to learn about the complexities of other situations around the world, but this one, you want to set up an encampment; this one, you want to scare people; this one, you want to come to the edge of violence or even go to violence.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Not the edge. They’re breaking into buildings.”
BRZEZINSKI: “This one you risk your future and your education for. See, I think these college students obviously are missing the part where they need to see what’s going on across the country with these protests, that it’s now in the realm of violence. It is in the realm of hatred, whether some are peaceful or not. They need to watch the news and look at all the different arguments and be adults or start learning to be adults and set up discussions and debates across college campuses, or their colleges and universities are going to have no choice but to expel them and ruin their future, the impact they want to have on the community, society and the world at some point.”