Columbia’s president is committed to one principle: Herself
Last week, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik offered congressional testimony fiercely committed to one principle: keeping her job.
The spectacle of the leader of one of the world’s great universities snitching on some of the school’s professors was both frightening and pathetic. Combating antisemitism at American universities is an urgent objective, but some conservatives are using it as a means to a different end: broader control of U.S. higher education.
This is not particularly surprising to anyone following the anti-woke backlash. Right-wing ideologues are gonna right-wing ideologize. What’s alarming is Shafik’s willingness to throw “faculty and academic freedom under the bus,” as Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors put it.
Hopefully, the underside of the bus has room for the more than 100 Columbia students who were arrested the day after the hearing, when, in another anti-free-speech move, Shafik asked New York police to clear a tent encampment erected by students calling for divestment from Israel. It was the first time the NYPD has been called to campus in decades.
Shafik, along with other Columbia administrators, was summoned before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to “answer for the rampant antisemitism engulfing their campuses and threatening their Jewish students.” She seemed determined not to repeat the performance of the then-presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania who, testifying before the same committee last December, resolutely avowed their schools’ commitment to free expression. That meant nuanced, one might even say intellectual, answers to questions from committee members such as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) who did not appear interested in nuance.
In one exchange, Stefanik asked Harvard’s Claudine Gay whether a student’s call for the mass murder of African Americans would be “protected free speech.” When Gay attempted to answer, Stefanik loudly interrupted, saying “It’s a yes or no question,” and then moved on to her next harangue, asking how Harvard would respond to students chanting “intifada revolution.” Gay answered that while she found that kind of speech “personally abhorrent” and “at odds with the values of Harvard,” the university embraced a “commitment to free expression [that includes] views that are objectionable, offensive, [and] hateful.”
As a description of the free speech policies of many universities, Gay’s answer was exactly right. The reward for her commitment to civil liberties was being forced out of office, just a few weeks after Liz Magill resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania, after offering a similar defense of academic freedom.
At last week’s hearing, Shafik’s opening statement proclaimed Columbia’s commitment to “supporting rigorous academic exploration and freedom,” but her answers to committee members revealed those words to be lip service.
She acknowledged that the meaning of phrases such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is contested but stated, “We have some disciplinary cases ongoing around that language. We have specified that those kinds of chants should be restricted in terms of where they happen.”
At the December hearing, Stefanik alleged that a Harvard dean had been removed from his post because of his legal representation of an unpopular client. Gay demurred that this was incorrect but said she “was not going to get into details about a personnel matter.” Shafik was much more forthcoming about the faculty she leads. The day before the hearing, Columbia sent the committee a letter detailing its investigations of eight faculty members and a teaching assistant for alleged bias. At the hearing, Shafik said, “On my watch, faculty who make remarks that cross the line in terms of antisemitism, there will be consequences for them. I have five cases at the moment who have either been taken out of the classroom or dismissed.”
And she named names. Middle Eastern studies professor Joseph Massad, who had published an article about the Oct. 7 attack titled “Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?” had “been spoken to,” she said. Had it been up to her, she said, Massad would never have gotten tenure. Regarding visiting professor Mohamed Abdou, who posted “I’m with Hamas & Hezbollah & Islamic Jihad” on social media, Shafik said he “is grading his students’ papers and will never teach at Columbia again.”
The academy’s traditional response to speech that demeans racial, religious or other groups has been to protect it. Consider the case of Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Wax has said “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites,” that African Americans and other “non-Western people” feel “resentment and shame and envy” of “Western peoples for Western peoples’ outsized achievements and contributions,” and that the United States would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.
Penn has prohibited Wax from teaching first-year law students, and its faculty senate recently recommended sanctions, not for her speech but for “conduct” that involved “flagrant disregard” of the university’s rules. Still, the law school’s dean emphasized that “as a scholar [Wax] is free to advocate her views, no matter how dramatically those views diverge from our institutional ethos and considered practices.”
Among the House committee’s next targets are faculty members at Rutgers University, including law professor Sahar Aziz, who committee chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) claims has “made numerous antisemitic and pro-terrorism statements, including saying that ‘American Jews are more privileged than Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian Americans.’” – – Paul Butler writes on issues at the intersection of criminal justice and race. Butler is the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University Law Center, an MSNBC legal analyst and author of “Chokehold: Policing Black Men.”