RUTHFULLY YOURS

Columbia senior Alexander McNab, who is black, entered Barnard late Thursday night, according to a report in the Columbia Daily Spectator. Barnard is a women’s college affiliated with Columbia, whose students are required to show ID to enter the closed campus after 11 p.m. Mr. McNab refused. He strode past security and ignored them on the winding path to the university’s crowded Milstein Center, where five officers cornered him as other students recorded soon-to-be-viral videos. At first, the videos showed, officers held Mr. McNab by the arms. After he protested loudly, two of them lightly pinned him to a cafe counter. He screamed: “Take your hands off me!” The officers released Mr. McNab after 20 seconds, at which point he finally showed his student ID. An officer verified it, and the confrontation ended.

The officers were white and the student was black—and that was enough to cue the Ferguson script. On Friday the Barnard student-government executive board issued a statement: “This incident reflects systemic racism and police brutality against Black people throughout our nation.” Protesters took to campus to chant: “No justice, no peace / F— these racist police!”

This isn’t radical chic; it’s radical kitsch—“vicarious experience and faked sensations,” as the critic Clement Greenberg put it. In reality, no police were involved, only campus security; there was no injustice; and there will be no breach of the peace—already students are back studying for finals. This isn’t “Hands up, don’t shoot” or “I can’t breathe,” but “I can’t enter a women’s college at midnight while refusing to show ID,” an odd complaint in the #MeToo era.

After the confrontation, Mr. McNab told a security officer: “I didn’t know I’m supposed to show my ID.” But he later admitted to the Columbia Daily Spectator that he knew the rule, in place since 2013, and chose not to follow it because it isn’t often enforced for white students—a claim other Columbia students dispute. When I tested it Saturday night, I was refused entry. Barnard’s communications chief, Rochelle Ritchie, tells me that after 11 p.m. “our public-safety officers are required to ask students to show their ID as they enter through the gates.”

Yet the administration has thrown its security staff under the bus. After “listening sessions” with students on Friday, Barnard announced: “The public safety officers involved, as well as the public safety supervisor, have been placed on administrative leave” pending an investigation.

The deans of Columbia’s undergraduate colleges, excluding Barnard, sent out a letter implying the incident was racial: “The more recent climate of racism and inflammatory rhetoric in both the country and the world at large continues to demonstrate a rising trend that targets marginalized populations. We are disturbed that such incidents continue to occur so close to home, and share in the hurt and pain many of you may be feeling.”

Barnard President Sian Leah Beilock announced Sunday “a thorough review of how all public safety officers and supervisors are trained,” adding that “The confrontation puts into stark relief what some members of the Barnard College community, particularly people of color, have been saying about their relationship with the Office of Public Safety and the lack of trust they have in it to keep them safe.”

This may be shrewd. The Barnard student executive board argued that “blame is necessary for community healing,” and a show of appeasement could quiet the story, even if nobody can explain what campus security should have done differently when Mr. McNab barged onto campus. Besides, memories are short. An investigation that drags on before quietly reinstating the security officers during the summer, after Mr. McNab graduates, could do the trick.

Barnard and Columbia are playing it safe, not challenging campus leftists’ reading of events. Their story has no characters, reducing people to their plot function: The security officers can’t be doing an unglamorous job the best they can in a difficult situation, they’re a racist menace; Mr. McNab can’t be privileged to study at an Ivy League university (but perhaps having a bad day); he’s an oppressed victim, “assaulted” for walking while black.

That way, for a day or two, the students could imagine they fought the power.

Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow.