"This Is What a University Looks Like" (In Response to the Latest Presidential Email)

Classics prof Joseph Howley read the following text at the Speakout last month. We didn’t have a chance to run it, but it seems like a good moment to do so in the wake of yet another statement from the President’s office seeming to claim that Columbia is a nest of anti-Semites.

Howley and Prof. Alisa Solomon first read from an open letter published last year by Jewish Columbia faculty in advance of President Minouche Shafik’s testimony before the now-famous Congressional committee on “antisemitism.” The faculty urged Shafik not to give in to a transparently manipulative process. “We urge you, as the University president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism,” the signatories wrote, and then continued:

Rather than being concerned with the safety and well-being of Jewish students on campuses, the committee is leveraging antisemitism in a wider effort to caricature and demonize universities as hotbeds of “woke indoctrination.” Its opportunistic use of antisemitism in a moment of crisis is expanding and strengthening longstanding efforts to undermine educational institutions. After launching attacks on public universities from Florida to South Dakota, this campaign has opened a new front against private institutions.

After reading from this text, Prof. Howley said the following:

We wrote that a year ago, and unfortunately I think it holds up. I’d like to say a couple words about what happened after we sent this letter. Several weeks later, Columbia’s then-president Shafik went before Congress, joined by the two co-chairs of our Board of Trustees, one of whom is now acting president and the other of whom is selecting our next president, and by a chair of our Antisemitism Task Force. They did not take our advice. Instead, they offered a full-court press in affirmation of the right-wing attack on our students and university, repeatedly agreeing with the white nationalists and MAGA extremists on that committee that yes, Columbia had “a specific problem… with rampant antisemitism”—a direct quote from now-acting-president Shipman. They did not take our advice and the outcome was exactly what we predicted: the very false narrative about our university that our leaders affirmed that is now being used as a pretext for these attacks on learning, knowledge, academic freedom and democracy.

I do not like to say “I told you so,” but—we told you so. We were right then, and we are right now. Our analysis of the situation was correct a year ago in both explaining what was happening and predicting what would happen next, and it continues to be correct. And I would like to ask our colleagues who are still hunting for nests of secret Iran-funded antisemitic professors whose fault it somehow is that Donald Trump is cutting funding for research on biodiversity—can you still say the same for your analysis?

But what was our reward for being correct? For offering good advice that was ignored? Well, when Columbia’s Antisemitism Task Force, whose chair was part of this performance of collusion before Congress, finally issued a report this past August, they devoted an entire footnote to the 23 of us who wrote this letter, in which they accused us of “calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.” You just heard the letter—I’m pretty sure we didn’t say that.

The point I want to make is that our Board of Trustees made a choice year ago that they did not have to make, a choice to facilitate this attack on our university. Our Antisemitism Task Force, whose primary goal seems to be continuing to manufacture further evidence to support this attack on the university, also took the opportunity to participate in the right-wing project of legislating who does and does not count as a Jew. Reporting reporting in the press has suggested that members of the Board of Trustees have actually advised Republicans and Congress and the White House on how to make these attacks on Columbia. Our university is being disassembled around us, with the help of members of our own community, and it is being done in the name of Jews and Jewish safety, and I can think of nothing that runs a greater risk of engendering real antisemitism and hatred toward Jews than tearing down a great university and blaming it on the Jews.

The good news is that it is not too late to correct this course. There is still time for our Jewish community to speak together, as our students have done this week, and say that even when we disagree about protest or about Palestine or about anything else—as we Jews are so used to doing—we can unite in demanding that nobody speak for us, that nobody use our history, our pain, or our fear to justify new cruelties and repression. That we can tolerate protests that make us uncomfortable, and reject harassment and speech that is clearly prejudicial, without letting the line between the two be blurred by people who care nothing for our safety and everything for their own agenda. And we can say to our leadership that the misguided anti-protest, pro-Trump politics that drove the university’s handling of last year’s crisis and this year’s crisis should not dictate the selection of our next president or the path we chart forward as a university. Our Jewish community—our entire community—deserves so much better.