News Roundup: More Trustee Drama, the Columbia hack, plus a Kafkaesque Missive from U-Penn

One of the mysteries of the last year and a half, but particularly of the last six months, is why the Board of Trustees of Columbia University—helmed by titans of business and law—has been so quiescent in the face of the government’s unprincipled and illegal attack.

One theory has been that the trustees—or some trustees—agree with the federal government that Columbia is a nest of antisemitic activity. Well, it was one thing to speculate, it’s another thing to see a trustee go out in public and start a campaign against the university. That’s what trustee Shoshana Shendelman has been doing over the last two weeks.

She wrote an op-ed for Fox News; she gave an exclusive interview to Breitbart; and now CBS reports that she’s written a letter to the rest of the Board demanding that it submit to the Trump administration. The letter states that:

The conduct which has been exhibited by Columbia leadership in recent months — particularly the failure to decisively address antisemitism on campus — demonstrates a disturbing lack of moral clarity and poses a significant threat to the safety and well-being of Jewish students, faculty, and the broader community of Columbia University.

And:

Columbia must fully accept the Trump administration's demands regarding antisemitism and Title VI compliance. It is the right thing to do for our students, and it is undeniable that the current situation at Columbia is untenable. Thus, our Board must work promptly and unconditionally with the United States Federal government.

There you have it. Columbia, of course, must do no such thing. It is not in violation of Title VI.

It’s worth noting (as the NYT recently failed for some reason to do) that Shendelman is currently the subject of a shareholder lawsuit for securities fraud.

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Speaking of the NYT, Columbia prof. Margaret Sullivan has a nice column in the Guardian that talks about the paper’s use of the illegal hack of Columbia to pursue their weird get off my lawn vendetta against Columbia community member Zohran Mamdani:

The Times’s decision to pursue and publish the story was, at the very least, unwise.

For one thing, it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist.

Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication. Much of Big Journalism, for example, turned their noses up at insider documents offered to them about JD Vance during last year’s presidential campaign, in part because the source was Iranian hackers; in some cases, they wrote about the hack but not the documents.

The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.

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Finally, in news from fellow besieged Ivy League university U-Penn, a remarkable account from Dr. Carter J. Carter on what being accused of antisemitism looks like, for a Jewish professor whose next book is literally about antisemitism.

The whole thing is worth reading in full, but the best part is a transcribed conversation with his department chair (J) and another prof (P), in which they tell him (C) that, because he has a Palestinian author on his syllabus, he should also have some Jewish authors, for balance.

C: Here—there’s a lot that could be said about this. One is that the idea of “both” is problematic in various ways, but another is that, if you’re to look at my syllabus, it’s primarily a course about Jewish intellectual history.

P: Well yeah, psychoanalysis! Freud!

C: Yeah.

J: But that doesn’t mean that antisemitism doesn’t exist now.

C: But I also teach very extensively about fascism and the Holocaust in this course, in the version of the syllabus that students had this term. They read Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, from “The Mass Psychology of—”, they read substantially, orders of magnitude more from both Jewish intellectuals and about Jewish diasporic intellectual history, and about antisemitism, and Nazism, and the Holocaust, they read substantially more about that in this course than they ever read about Palestine. So the idea that there’s an—again, I’m not actually conceding the concept of “imbalance” as legitimate, but even according to what I would infer is this office’s vision of “balance,” if anything the balance very substantially favors Jewish intellectual history, and antisemitism and anti-Jewish fascism. So I guess what I’m suggesting is that the premise is not legitimate. The premise of the complaint is not legitimate.

J: Well, I mean, we’re just telling you what our advice is. It might help students understand it more if it was more current, like if you were talking about antisemitism as it plays out today and, y’know, I don’t know all your readings, I haven’t read them, and I’m not going to.

Dr. C (who, again, it’s worth noting, is Jewish) concludes:

A complaint was made about me, but I could not know by whom. The complaint was found to be baseless, but nobody knew what evidence the office reviewing it (which was brand new) had or had not reviewed in order to determine its baselessness. Still, despite the complaint being baseless, the office felt entitled to counsel me to be “balanced”—without actually having determined that I wasn’t, and more to the point without having any meaningful definition of “balance” in which to ground that judgment. All of this was conveyed to me, thirdhand, by administrators who also reported that they had never read any of the readings on my syllabus, and wouldn’t, but who nonetheless felt inclined to advise that I must be “balanced,” which they defined as talking about antisemitism (which I do, a lot) if I’m going to talk about Palestinian suffering (which I do, a little)….

This is what fascism does. It creates a climate of fear that leads people with a little power to abuse it, for fear of being punished themselves. It leads institutions that purport to promote “social good” to perpetrate social ills. Indeed, it leads an Ivy League social work school that, in 2024, advertised itself as unerringly committed to “social justice” to cower before fascist language mandates and, in 2025, revise its website to insist on its now-unerring commitment to “social good.”

Fascism makes people irrational, spineless, and small. That’s what I was trying to teach students in my class at Penn, until they wouldn’t let me teach it anymore.

Dr. Carter is now suing U-Penn, because, as he puts it, legal threats are the only thing universities respond to anymore. Read the whole thing here.