Students are massed peacefully on campus, making politically charged demands on university presidents. The police are summoned, leading to mass arrests and even to violence — and to the collapse of confidence in the administration.

You may see the punchline coming: This picture isn’t drawn from USC and Columbia University of the present day, but Berkeley in 1964.

The lessons should be obvious. Bringing police onto a college campus on the pretext of preserving or restoring “order” invariably makes things worse. It’s almost always inspired not by conditions on campus, but by partisan pressure on university administrators to act. Often it results in the ouster of the university presidents who condoned the police incursions, and sometimes even in the departure of the politicians whose fingerprints were on the orders…

Source: Hiltzik: Why were USC and Columbia so wrong about protests? – Los Angeles Times