DealBook's Andrew Sorkin solemnly wrote yesterday that "many business leaders have told me they are deeply concerned about incidents of harassment against Jewish students that have taken place at and around universities like Columbia and appear to be increasing. Inside corner offices, there has been a lot of hand-wringing."
Hand-wringing denotes indecisiveness, which isn't the best look for CEOs. On the other hand, their anxiety and uncertainty have resulted in "little action from corporations," adds Sorkin. And that, it seems to me, is a good thing. Corporations have as much business interfering in university administration as churches have in poking their pious noses into secular politics.
But DealBook's headmaster wants action and he's stirring his market. He's agin all this leaderless handwringing and buttscratching. Thus Sorkin offers an "out-of-the-box" idea. (Note: Anyone who says he's thinking "outside the box" just cliché-ishly demonstrated he is not.) The stern educator's proposition: "Companies could scrutinize universities ... as they would any other vendor. They could tell universities that they won’t hire their students unless the schools take decisive action to stem antisemitism."
Here's another, more accurate way to word Sorkin's recommendation: Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out; i.e., kill all the students' odds of ever being hired by certain busybody, kibitzing, scrutinizing corporations. (Assuredly, some will see wisdom in his loony advice.)
Sorkin sadly concedes that his overkill would victimize those "who have nothing to do with the worst offenders on campus." But he chooses to look at what he sees as the upside: such mass, stridently unjust discrimination "would put real pressure ... on college administrations to police blatant antisemitism."
By this morning, Sorkin's Friday solemnity had mushroomed into full freakout: "Top American colleges are in turmoil, with dozens of pro-Palestinian student protesters having been arrested at N.Y.U. and Yale." 
I italicized the segment to emphasize the unmitigated absurdity of what Sorkin proposes. At two of the universities undergoing "turmoil," dozens of students have been arrested. Nationwide, then, several dozens of students have been arrested out of student bodies numbering, let's say, 850,000?
That's merely a guess as absurd as Sorkin's dozens, based on CNN's update on the campuses where protests are occurring: Arizona State University, Barnard College, Columbia University, Denver campuses [several], Emory University, George Washington University, Ohio State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, Virginia Tech and Yale University.
My approximation of 850,000 students is intentionally low — way low; allowing only 50,000 students at each of the 17 campuses. ASU alone has about 140,000 students. But even this severely lowballed accounting highlights just how preposterously overreactive Sorkin's kill-'em-all strategy is. He reminds me of the 1919 Red Scare bourgeoisie who freaked out over mere handfuls of socialists and anarchists tossing the occasional bomb.
What's interesting about CNN's campus list is the number of students involved, rather than the number of campuses named, which on its face suggests to the hysterically inclined — our atavistically Red Scared — that America is under attack by thousands of long-haired leftists in consort with murderous members of Hamas. CNN almost pathetically reported protesting students numbering 100 at one campus, 75 at another, and saddest yet, a mere 36 students at one other campus.
Same in Paris, where massive student demonstrations in May 1968 against pretty much everything essentially shut down the entire nation of France. On BBC News Thursday, a reporter in the thick of the protest at today's Paris Institute of Political Studies said students blocking the entrance to the school numbered in "the tens." He could barely contain his laughter at the surrounding panic.
Were it not for unnerved, police-dialing, SWAT-calling university administrators prematurely agonizing about being called before a panel of House Republican imbeciles, nearly all the protests to date would have remained peaceful and therefore unnewsworthy. "Gangs" of 50-or-so sophomore social-work majors are generally unthreatening to the peace and security of the United States.
I'm sympathetic to the students' complaints. What the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is unconscionable, as most Americans would agree. What these students seem to misapprehend, however, is that news coverage of their protests, which on occasion become violent for this reason or that, only harms the Palestinian cause. Their valid message gets lost in the distorted presentation; television news sells the sizzle, not the steak.
Atop that, the right's media machine tells millions of Americans lounging in their La-Z-Boys that it's all Biden's doing, notwithstanding Palestinian-Americans' strong opposition to his Israel-Palestine policy.
Youthful overzealousness often leads to strategic shortsightedness, which would seem to explain the students' honorable yet somewhat misguided protests on behalf of brutalized, defenseless Palestinians in Gaza. The key word there is youthful — as in alibi, apologia, something deserving of our understanding, that sort of thing.
Andrew Sorkin lacks those explanations, or justifications. He and many a corporate CEO to come will have no excuse for the overzealous, post-handwringing overreactions they'll undoubtedly unleash on hundreds of thousands of unoffending, orderly college students.
They're the ones who will soon behave like children — except they possess punishing powers that children lack.