The question of whether St. Louis Board of Aldermen President Megan Green abused her position as a Washington University adjunct lecturer by letting unauthorized people through a secure campus door during last Saturday’s campus protest shouldn’t be that complicated. This is the age of security cameras and electronic footprints. She either used her WashU swipe card, or she didn’t. She says she didn’t.
Of more importance is the fact that the second highest-ranking elected official in a city already reeling with tension between police, protesters and citizens at large has decided to torque up that conflict instead of defusing it.
Green, placed on leave from her WashU gig because of the business with the door, is using her new free time to slam police handling of the campus protest, in an echo of her discredited old defund-the-police nonsense. In a city that desperately needs stabilizing leadership, her all-too-familiar progressive-radical schtick is an unhelpful distraction.
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As we have said before, there are legitimate concerns about Israel’s relentless, tragic (and, we would argue, self-defeating) assaults on Gaza civilians as it roots out Hamas terrorists.
But there is also valid criticism that pro-Palestinian protests over those tactics, here and around the nation, have embraced campus disruption and violence and harbored a poisonous undercurrent of antisemitism.
College students certainly have the right to express their views through peaceful protest. But WashU maintains (with plenty of evidence) that Saturday’s demonstrations that led to roughly 100 arrests weren’t peaceful at all.
The demonstrators — WashU students, faculty and many who were neither — were attempting to set up encampments and refusing to leave when ordered to by police. Charges may include trespassing, resisting arrest and assault.
In posted remarks, Chancellor Andrew Martin noted that WashU has long supported students’ right to peaceful protest, but that the aggressive turn of the demonstrators forced its hand.
“What happened Saturday was not a peaceful protest by our students,” he wrote. “Some of the protesters were behaving aggressively, swinging flagpoles and sticks. Some were attempting to break into locked buildings or to deface property. There were chants that many in our community find threatening and antisemitic.”
Once the demonstration started infringing on the rights of other students to a safe and peaceful campus, the university had little choice but to act. Given the number of protesters involved, it’s not unreasonable that they had to bring in police from St. Louis and other area cities.
Were police unnecessarily rough in those removals, as Green and her fellow protesters claim? Some video footage indicates aggression on both sides — and there were injuries on both sides.
All that’s certain at this point is that none of it would have happened if Green and the others hadn’t made the decision to ignore lawful instructions to disperse.
Green wasn’t arrested, but was among WashU faculty placed on leave and barred from campus.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Joe Holleman reports, Green was told in a letter from the university that she was being suspended because “you used your campus access card to allow unauthorized persons into campus buildings against the explicit orders” of campus police.
Green told Holleman that WashU “made that up.” She said she entered the building to use the restroom and “the door was open already; it was propped open with a chair.”
So did it occur to her, as an adjunct faculty member, under those circumstances — a demonstration spiraling out of control, with protesters allegedly trying to get into secured campus buildings — that she should perhaps have closed the door?
Green’s subsequent public comments indicate a similarly blasé attitude toward the serious issue of protesters refusing to obey police orders to disperse.
“A lot of students didn’t leave because they were students, they were faculty, they were alumni,” she told an interviewer, “who all said ‘Hey, I have an affiliation with this university so I can be here.’”
So they get to just ignore police dispersal orders intended to keep the peace?
This from a top elected official of a city in which the image of out-of-control crime and chaos is driving the economy into the ground?
As an Editorial Board that tends to skew toward liberal positions, we have long found Green’s brand of confrontational left-wing extremism problematic, for many reasons — not least of which is that it gives mainstream liberalism a bad name.
Instead of working to find realistic solutions to chronic homelessness, Green suggests the homeless should just have a legal right to urinate in public.
Instead of working with businesses that complain of not enough city police protection, she blames merchants for not paying to solve the problem themselves (then suggests dissolving the private police firms that inevitably arise to fill the void).
Now she’s blaming last weekend’s campus melee on a world-class university with a history of tolerance toward activism — and on a police force that her own policies have left severely understaffed — instead of acknowledging that activists abused their right to peaceful protest by endangering others.
Green said this week, with typical self-indulgence, that Saturday’s confrontation was “unlike anything I’ve seen in my 20 years as an activist.”
If that’s true, alderwoman, then it sounds like the Movement desperately needs your undivided attention.
Perhaps more than city government does.
Just something to consider.