The day before the start of the Labor Day weekend, emails began flooding the inboxes of Columbia faculty members, linking to a Google document of a new petition bearing scores of signatures. This missive aims to urge Columbia’s leadership to “follow the lead of peer institutions like NYU and the University of California and issue a plain English statement on permissible student conduct.”
Addressed to Columbia’s interim President Katrina Armstrong as well as six other top university administrators, including provost Angela V. Olinto, its title includes the directive, “Fix the Rules” and its central allegation is that key university policies articulated in its Rules for University Conduct were ignored this past academic year as Columbia became a ground-zero of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activism with near constant protests, encampments, antisemitic rhetoric, marginalization and menacing of Jewish and Israeli students, disruptions to classes and university events and the violent takeover of a university building—Hamilton Hall—in the spring.
Twice that semester, the university called in the New York Police Department (NYPD) to disperse students involved in illegal activities.
Drafted by a consortium of faculty members, the petition notably borrowed language from neighboring New York University (NYU), which recently rocked observers of the local campus scene by calling out the use of “code words”—such as Zionist—as an example of speech that might violate the university’s nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policies.
Columbia University faculty and staff were invited to sign. The drafters intend to submit it to Armstrong on September 3.
Antisemitism task force
The very next day, on the eve of the Labor Day holiday weekend, Columbia released the long-anticipated second report of its Antisemitism Task Force, a troubling 90-page document based on hundreds of interviews with Jewish and Israeli students. Perhaps not surprisingly, the recommendations made therein echo many of those contained in the “Fix the Rules” petition.
As the 2024 Fall semester approaches, it is no longer possible to ignore the fact that the venerable 270-year-old Ivy League university is broken.
The executive summary of the Antisemitism Task Force report opens with the statement that the testimonies collected “have made clear that the University community has not treated them with the standards of civility, respect, and fairness it promises to all its students. After October 7, many Jewish and Israeli students began to report multiple instances of harassment, verbal abuse, and ostracism, and in some cases physical violence.”
Reactions to the report came swiftly on social media and in the news. “The task force report is highly upsetting,” Elisha Baker, a rising junior at Columbia told The Media Line. “The stories are disturbing and should make anyone who cares about higher education very concerned.”
Armstrong issued a strongly worded statement alongside the release of the report. “The painful and distressing incidents of antisemitism recounted in this report are completely unacceptable. They are antithetical to our values and go against the principles of open inquiry, tolerance, and inclusivity that define us,” she wrote.
Just three weeks into her new position, Armstrong was appointed in the wake of the 11th-hour resignation of Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who occupied her post for less than a year and whose leadership had been highly criticized.
Stating that the “ramifications of campus chaos extend much further than Jewish students,” Baker characterized the findings of the report as “relevant for all students who want to go to class and learn and who care about liberalism.” Like many others, including the authors of the task force report, Baker faulted Columbia administrators with failing to enforce university policy.
Ran Kivetz, the Philip H. Geier Professor of Business at Columbia, agrees with Baker’s assessment, telling The Media Line that last year, the university tottered “on the borderline of domestic terrorism,” with a sizable number of faculty and administrators being either “misinformed or complicit.”
Describing the rhetoric on campus as “very strong, very violent and extreme,” he also said that “the line toward physical violence had been crossed’” by radicalized students, agitators, and even faculty.
Brian Cohen, executive director of the Kraft Center for Jewish Life at Columbia/Barnard, confirmed these allegations. “The report makes for difficult reading,” he wrote in an email. “Over the past several months, Columbia/Barnard Hillel’s team has routinely met with students as they told us of the intimidation, harassment, exclusion, and threats leveled against them for just being Jews at Columbia.”
The report’s release capped off an extremely eventful week as New York area colleges and universities prepared to open for the fall 2024 semester.
The Columbia petition, the Antisemitism Task Force report, and NYU’s new student conduct guidelines were the most dramatic and concrete developments during a week characterized by closed-door meetings, suspended social media accounts, and reams of press releases announcing new policies, initiatives, partnerships, collaborations, and unity efforts.
The week opened with a ”super-Zoom” with New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul on Monday, August 26, which drew the participation of more than 200 college and university presidents and involved the Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies. Avi Small, the governor’s press secretary, stressed that “Governor Hochul is committed to ensuring every single college student can learn in a safe environment.” The meeting included a review of safety plans at each campus and provided the opportunity for the governor to “reiterate that there is no place for hate, bias or antisemitism in New York,” he said.
The governor’s concerns are well-founded, according to Mitch Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative, an agency designed to safeguard the New York Jewish community.
“We have been preparing for the fall semester since the summer when a set of donors came to us and asked us to augment our efforts,” Silber told The Media Line. CSI has now engaged a full-time former NYPD detective as their campus security director, responsible for 12 campuses in the UJA-Federation of New York catchment area. Working alongside the campus security director is an intelligence desk, he said.
“Our concern is that the protesters are preparing for the fall,” Silber added. “We have told [the schools]: Expect that these students are going to pick right up. They will try to seize more buildings. Do not be surprised if they will try to seize a Hillel and fly a Palestinian flag and say they liberated a Zionist building.”
Other notable aspects of the prelude week to the fall semester include NYU issuing the aforementioned clarifications on its new student policy penalizing the use of “code words.” In the new document, discrimination is defined as “adverse treatment based on an actual or perceived characteristic.” It goes on to explain that “for many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity.” Anti-Zionist speech or the exclusion of pro-Israel students or faculty would therefore be considered discriminatory.
Susan “Sam” Marchiano is an adjunct assistant professor at NYU’s Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport Education. Though not Jewish, the Manhattan native terms herself “culturally Jewish” and an ally of the community. Following the attacks of October 7, she began to notice the language used by university presidents and found herself stunned “by the lack of empathy” toward Jews and Israelis.
An alumna of Columbia University, Marchiano told The Media Line that she was proud of the way that NYU handled the anti-Israel and antisemitic activism on campus and was heartened by the school’s recent clarification of discriminatory language, for instance, its warning against the use of “code words.”
Marchiano hearkens to an incident this past spring at NYU when the NYPD was called to clear out an encampment blocking a public plaza as an example of a school enforcing its own policies. “I had to teach the next day and was dreading going there … but it was amazing. The whole thing was boarded up. They could not have responded faster in terms of shutting it down. That was very encouraging.”
This experience demonstrated that enforcement of school policies—even in a highly agitated campus setting—was possible and that Columbia was failing to uphold its own rules, she explained.
Depending on one’s perspective, the approach of the new school year provided reason for hope or further outrage. Midweek, two campus-related chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) found their Instagram accounts permanently suspended, allegedly “with no reason provided and no opportunity for appeal,” according to Columbia’s SJP chapter. While Meta, which owns Instagram, did not address these two instances, recent and similar suspensions have happened when a particular account is deemed to have violated its community guidelines, and/or “Dangerous Organizations & Individuals policy.”
In response to both the NYU student conduct guidelines and the shuttering of these campus-related social media accounts—used to organize followers for protests and actions—pro-Palestinian groups on campus issued statements promising retaliatory action.
Finally, on the day that the Columbia faculty letter was beginning to circulate, rumors began to fly regarding the late-in-the-game resignation of Laura Sparks, president of Cooper Union. These rumblings were confirmed indirectly when the college removed her name from its website and posts began on social media, but the school failed to issue a formal statement.
So, is there a reason to be hopeful for the upcoming academic year at Columbia University?
Columbia’s Kivetz remains hopeful that what he calls “decency” will prevail. He points to the efforts of the Stand Columbia Society, which is working to wrest the university back from radical ideologies. “I do think the majority of professors and students want to study and learn. They want free speech, discourse, debate, not what we have seen last year. The university has been hijacked by a very extreme group and some of the professors have been there forever, brewing for decades,” he said.
Kivetz adds that the success of the new academic year is contingent on many elements. “We don’t know the next steps and strategies of the agitators. They can continue being overtly disruptive or they can take their action underground. Also, I see a lack of leadership at Columbia. There is a lack of unity and great confusion. [Interim President] Armstrong might be doing a good job, but the deans can undo her efforts. Looking ahead, I wonder, what is going to save the house?”
Baker, the rising junior at Columbia, says the core question heading back to school is, “Will we be able to go to class? Will our administrators stand up for the values Columbia was created to uphold?”
Looking ahead, NYU’s Marchiano admits that she is “very frightened about the possibility of a mass casualty event.” She recounts that when the news broke about plans for terrorism at the recent Taylor Swift concerts in Europe she thought about “how 17- and 18-year-olds get radicalized, and that this radicalization process has been happening here for months. All it takes is one or two students to start thinking like those kids.”
And even with concerns about the violent takeover of a campus Hillel building, CSI’s Silber praises the expertise of his team, resolutely declaring, “We’ll get through this.”
Finally, Columbia Antisemitism Task Force co-chair Nicholas Lemann, the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus at the Graduate School of Journalism, was heartened by Friday’s supportive statements issued by Columbia’s Armstrong and Barnard President Laura Ann Rosenbury. He told The Media Line, “I certainly hope that the report will be a catalyst for positive change. … Much of what we’re suggesting is not super hard to enact. I am reasonably confident.”