Columbia Is Waging War on Dissent

Perhaps the worst part of the university’s sanctioning of this student was the fact that three days before they sent her the letter informing her of the conviction and punishment, she had notified the school that she had to withdraw from school for mental health reasons and was already living in another state with her parents.

One last example is even more shocking. In early February a group of students decided to protest a talk that Hillary Clinton was giving at Columbia on gender-based violence in armed conflict by staging a silent walkout of the event. They chose to protest the event because of Clinton’s longtime support for the Israeli government and how charges of sexual violence have been used in the framing of guilt and innocence since October 7. Students have engaged in this kind of protest for decades without the university treating it as a disciplinary matter. Ironically, Clinton herself has made statements on social media applauding students who have staged silent walkouts in other contexts. History notwithstanding, many students were charged with multiple disciplinary code violations for walking out of this lecture. One student who received a very strong letter threatening discipline had gotten up and walked out of the room quietly because she was suffering a severe asthma attack. Her friend left with her, concerned about the student’s health. Security video shows the student retrieving her bag after she left the room and pulling out her inhaler. When she wrote to the disciplinary office to ask that the charges be dismissed given that she was not part of the protest and instead had been suffering a medical incident, they wrote back claiming that her version of the events was “an incomplete and misleading description of what happened.” She responded to them, “Having shared my medical condition…as part of a good faith explanation for my conduct on February 9, 2024, and then having that explanation met with such a hostile response from the [university], it is hard to avoid the impression that I am being retaliated against for having a disability, clearly its own violation of Columbia’s EOAA policies, as well as local, state, and federal law.”

This shift in Columbia’s response to student protests started in early November, when the university took the unprecedented step of suspending two student groups, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. (The New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal recently filed a lawsuit challenging the groups’ suspension.) Shortly thereafter, university President Minouche Shafik created an antisemitism task force to investigate instances of antisemitism on our campus and recommend institutional responses to it. (A promised task force to investigate cases of bias against Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians has not materialized.) The task force has been asked many times to make clear what definition of antisemitism they are using in their work, but it refuses to do so. The body is chaired by among the most ardent Zionist faculty members on our campus, former law school dean David Schizer, former journalism school dean Nicholas Lehman, and public affairs and political science professor Esther Fuchs, and none of its members has any academic expertise in the study of antisemitism, or in how antidiscrimination laws apply in an academic setting. This knowledge gap is in full relief in the report they just issued, in which they misstate federal antidiscrimination law that applies to universities (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964). The report strongly recommends disciplining all speech that is experienced by Jewish students as biased or hateful, regardless of what the speaker meant or what the objective meaning of the statement may be (consider “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” for example). This standard is much stricter, and thus much more restrictive of free speech, than that in the law. The Department of Education has clearly, and recently, stated that proving discrimination or harassment requires more than showing merely that the speech was experienced as painful by the student making the complaint; rather, “based on the totality of circumstances, [harassing speech or conduct must be] subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from the recipient’s education program or activity.”

There are enormous pressures being placed on Columbia to be even more aggressive than it has already been in disciplining speech and expressive conduct that meets the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which has long been criticized for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Last December, three university presidents were called before a congressional committee to be grilled on why they weren’t doing more to sanction pro-Palestinian speech on their campuses that committee chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) deemed to be antisemitic. Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Liz McGill both lost their jobs after that hearing. The same committee has summoned Columbia President Shafik to testify in mid-April, accompanied by the cochairs of Columbia’s board of trustees. Meanwhile, two different lawsuits have been filed against Columbia and Barnard claiming that they have not worked hard enough to combat what the lawsuits say are “mob-like protests, sit-ins, and demonstrations continu[ing] with ferocity,” and “mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty [who] have marched by the hundreds through Columbia’s campus.” Lest anyone be misled, there have been no mobs (of any kind) on our campus, and none of the students or faculty who have expressed solidarity with Palestinians generally, or Gazans specifically, have expressed support for Hamas.

Succumbing to this pressure, Columbia is has now started going after its faculty, initiating internal discrimination complaints against faculty who are pro-Palestinian, monitoring syllabi to censure what faculty are teaching, and removing them from teaching when there are student complaints about professors applying terms such as “settler colonialism” or “apartheid” to the context of Israel.

Through all of this, it is clear that Columbia is burdened by an intractable conflict of interest: On the one hand, it is charged in two lawsuits and by Congress with allowing a horrendously antisemitic environment (in their view) to fester on our campus, and claims that it has under-enforced its own rules of conduct and antidiscrimination law. On the other, it is responsible for impartially investigating and adjudicating disciplinary charges brought against students and faculty in connection with their pro-Palestinian speech and protest. As such, the school has very strong incentives, in light of the lawsuits and congressional pressure, to over-enforce the rules against the pro-Palestinian members of our community—to prove that it is doing everything it can to eradicate speech and expressive conduct that is experienced by some students as offensive or painful. Trapped by these two gravitational pulls, Columbia risks violating its most fundamental principles, stated clearly on the university’s website: “But the role of the University is not to shield individuals from positions that they find unwelcome. Rather, the University is a place for received wisdom and firmly held views to be tested, and tested again, so that members of the University community can listen, challenge each other, and be challenged in return.”

Now more than ever, universities should be protecting and defending their unique role in society as places that can generate and hold engagement with the complex histories and politics that lay below the surface of the current violence in Israel and Gaza. But not at Columbia and Barnard. What scares me more than anything is what we might be looking at a year from now, with Trump back in the White House. He has been clear that destroying liberal universities will be among his first priorities. If this happens, Columbia’s administration, faculty, and students will need to face that fight together—and that fight will be so much more challenging than what any of us are facing now. It just pains me to imagine how we can get from the place we are in now—where Columbia and Barnard have waged war on their students—to forming a unified front in defense of the very idea of the university.