I'm actually less concerned about the conduct of Dean Morales and the administration. I was thrown out of a good number of events in my day. I did less than the 4 who came to the BDS talk, but was still removed. It's all part of the fun of protest. But in college, people take everything so seriously. I encouraged the students who opposed the event to organize their own. That's how we always did it. Hillel had its Israeli Independence Day carnival, and the ASA (or whatever it was at the time) would have their Naqba Day event. If this BDS event happened at UC-Irvine or Nebraska or another school where the Jewish community isn't as strong, I'd probably take a different position. But like you said, Israel supporters have to pick their battles, and this wasn't one of them.

I'm actually less concerned about the conduct of Dean Morales and the administration. I was thrown out of a good number of events in my day. I did less than the 4 who came to the BDS talk, but was still removed. It's all part of the fun of protest. But in college, people take everything so seriously. I encouraged the students who opposed the event to organize their own. That's how we always did it. Hillel had its Israeli Independence Day carnival, and the ASA (or whatever it was at the time) would have their Naqba Day event. If this BDS event happened at UC-Irvine or Nebraska or another school where the Jewish community isn't as strong, I'd probably take a different position. But like you said, Israel supporters have to pick their battles, and this wasn't one of them.

However, you can't posit a blanket rule that the students on the spot are always right. It's true that they are usually better informed about campus culture and current events, but that advantage is offset by a lack of institutional memory. No one at BC would have been aware of your decade old (but highly relevant) run in with the same Dean of Students unless you had been there to tell them about it.

More significantly, students can't always be relied on to have a firm understanding of the issues at stake. On US campuses Jewish students can usually spot an attack on their rights or the rights of there fellow Jews in Israel; that assumption can't always be depended on in other countries.

If one of the challenges that Jewish students in the US face might be an overly "gung ho" attitude from off campus supporters, elsewhere they can face the problem of themselves having bought into the anti-Israel conceptual frame and needing off campus role models to show them that an other approach exists.

So let's give due weight to the insights of the Jewish students who are at the bleeding edge of Israel advocacy, but let's not make the mistake of thinking they are any more infallible than members of the off campus Jewish establishment.