Douglas Belkin
WSJ, Apr. 17, 2024
“The last six months on campus have served as an extreme pressure test. Our systems clearly have not been equipped to manage the unfolding situation.”
Columbia University president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik told a congressional committee Wednesday that the school wasn’t prepared for the firestorm stemming from Hamas’s attack on Israel last fall, which has led to numerous protests, instances of antisemitism, and claims by Jewish students that they feel unsafe on campus.
“When I first started at Columbia, our policies, our systems, and our enforcement mechanisms were not up to the scale of this challenge,” Shafik said. “They were designed for a very different world.”
Shafik, who became Columbia’s president last July, faced scores of pointed questions from committee members critical of the school’s response to instances of antisemitism on campus since the outbreak of war in the Middle East last October.
The questions were part of a 3 ½-hour hearing held by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The same committee in December elicited responses from two Ivy league presidents that led to their eventual resignations.
The fallout from the war in Gaza has been particularly intense on many college campuses, with many students torn over the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s response. Universities have faced the challenge of balancing speech rights on the one hand with the rights of students to attend school without feeling harassed.
Jewish students at Columbia have alleged incidents of assault, antisemitic graffiti such as swastikas, calls for the destruction of Israel at rallies, and speaking invitations from student groups to members of foreign terrorist groups.
At the outset of the hearing, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the committee’s chairwoman, called Columbia one of the nation’s hotbeds of antisemitism. “Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence, at best, and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people,” Foxx said.
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