The Guardian (USA)

Anti-woke Republican­s attacked Columbia University. It capitulate­d

- Alisa Solomon, Marianne Hirsch, Sarah Haley and Helen Benedict

As Jewish faculty at Columbia University, we watched with alarm as our president, Minouche Shafik, appeared before the House education and workforce committee on Wednesday to answer questions about antisemiti­sm on our campus. While we are deeply concerned about antisemiti­sm, we are also disturbed by the ways the hearing – like those in December, and surely those to follow – used specious charges of rampant antisemiti­sm to advance an illiberal agenda.

We were shocked that President Shafik capitulate­d to its mendacious premises and failed to stand up for fundamenta­l academic principles of honest intellectu­al inquiry and free expression. Most galling was the absence of any acknowledg­ment of the relentless devastatio­n in Gaza: the urgent reason for the student protests that the committee caricature­s and condemns as antisemiti­c.

It’s hard to believe that the hearings genuinely seek to protect Jewish students when its grandstand­ing inquisitor­s include Representa­tive Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who has trafficked in white nationalis­t conspiracy theories, and Representa­tive Rick Allen, a Republican from Georgia, who quoted Bible verses as a source for dictating policy at a religiousl­y diverse, secular university. The hearings’ purpose, rather, is to attack universiti­es as sites of learning and critical thinking.

Such efforts to squelch expansive learning have torn through K-12 education across the country with bannings of books by Black, queer and Jewish authors, and have made devastatin­g forays into public universiti­es in several states, where it is no longer permissibl­e to teach with intellectu­al honesty about such subjects as the history of slavery and the complexiti­es of gender. Now the House committee is attacking private universiti­es as well. While playing loose with facts about the curriculum at Columbia, the committee bullied our president into flouting rules of faculty governance, peer review and academic procedure. We were appalled to see her threaten specific professors on the spot and promise to change university policies singlehand­edly.

The campaign against the independen­ce of higher education has now found incendiary fuel from a new ally: a longstandi­ng, well-organized movement to stifle pro-Palestinia­n speech in American theaters, art spaces, literary venues and schools. For decades, this effort has relied on the false premise that any expression of a Palestinia­n narrative is an attack on Israel’s very existence, and that any support of Palestine is pro-Hamas.

Today, as student protests against Israel’s actions have grown in size and fervor, hawkish defenders of Israel have intensifie­d efforts to quash them, often asserting, speciously, that protest rhetoric – even the mere sight of a keffiyeh – makes Jewish students unsafe. They then go further to claim that, therefore, Jews are being targeted and threatened.

Apart from ignoring that many of the protesters are themselves Jewish these conclusion­s require two sleights of logic. First, describing political speech as discrimina­tory requires conflating Jewishness with Zionism – an identity with a political ideology. Feeling a connection to Israel, as most

American Jews tell pollsters they do, does not constitute an identity. Second, the faulty reasoning equates discomfort with actually being unsafe. We are not saying that there have been no anti-Jewish incidents on campus. Sadly, there have, as there have been antiPalest­inian and anti-Muslim incidents; all of them must be addressed clearly and firmly. But protesting Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza – which uses an arsenal supplied by the US – is not driven by bias against Jews any more than objecting to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is driven by bias against Russians.

Still, this is the disingenuo­us impetus for the House committee’s hearings. Together, those defenders of Israel who insist on a single exculpator­y narrative about Zionism, along with the committee’s “anti-woke” Republican­s, not only threaten to erode academia’s fundamenta­l values, but those of democracy itself. Yet President Shafik made little effort to defend them.

The role of a university is to teach students how to think critically and courageous­ly. This means that students might feel unsettled when their world views differ from their peers’ or when what they discuss in class – or hear on campus – challenges their beliefs. University education involves learning to engage disagreeme­nt and even confrontat­ion, and to contest ideas rather than seek to suppress them.

While it is probably impossible to come out entirely unscathed from hearings that are largely designed to produce gotcha social media moments for the Maga base, President Shafik did not have to align herself with the anti-intellectu­al and anti-democratic bigotry of the questioner­s or accede to their cynical weaponizat­ion of antisemiti­sm, a move that dangerousl­y makes Jews the face of repression.

Having watched other university leaders driven from their positions after the December hearings, President Shafik seems to have developed the tactic of harshly punishing students protesting the war on Gaza (with the heaviest brunt borne by students of color) precisely so she could point to those measures when facing her interrogat­ors in April. When committee members were not satisfied, she promised to intensify the draconian crackdown.

Early yesterday morning, student activists, harking back to demonstrat­ions at Columbia against the Vietnam war and against South African apartheid, pitched tents on campus to create a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”. As we write, the flashing lights of police cars are cutting across the campus. President Shafik is already carrying out her promise to the committee, risking the very foundation­s of our university.

Alisa Solomon is a writer, professor of journalism, and the director of the arts and culture concentrat­ion at the Columbia Journalism School. Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent professor of English and comparativ­e literature at Columbia University and professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Sarah Haley is associate professor of history at Columbia University. Helen Benedict is a novelist and professor at Columbia Journalism School.

President Shafik did not have to align herself with the antiintell­ectual and antidemocr­atic bigotry of the questioner­s or accede to their cynical weaponizat­ion of antisemiti­sm

 ?? ?? ‘It’s hard to believe that the hearings genuinely seek to protect Jewish students when its grandstand­ing inquisitor­s include Representa­tive Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who has trafficked in white nationalis­t conspiracy theories’ Photograph: José Luis Magaña/AP
‘It’s hard to believe that the hearings genuinely seek to protect Jewish students when its grandstand­ing inquisitor­s include Representa­tive Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who has trafficked in white nationalis­t conspiracy theories’ Photograph: José Luis Magaña/AP

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