Open Letter from Jewish Faculty to Columbia University President Minouche Shafik

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN

On Wednesday, April 17 when school members nationwide shall be observing a Nationwide Day of Motion for Increased Training, Columbia College President Minouche Shafik is scheduled to testify earlier than the Home Training and Workforce Committee.  On December 5, that committee heard testimony from the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the College of Pennsylvania, with disastrous outcomes.  On April 5, a bunch of 23 Columbia Jewish school members despatched the next open letter to President Shafik.  A revised and shorter model of the letter was printed April 10 within the Columbia Day by day Spectator.  Columbia school, employees, college students, alums, and fogeys could learn and signal the April 10 assertion right here. 

April 5, 2024

To: President Minouche Shafik, Columbia College

Cc: Prof. Angela V. Olinto, Provost, Columbia UniversityFelice B. Rosan, Normal Counsel, Columbia UniversityProf. Dennis Mitchell, EVP of College LifeProf. Jeanine D’Armiento, Chair, Govt Committee, Columbia College SenateProf. Matt Hart, Chair, Coverage and Planning Committee, School of Arts & SciencesLaura Rosenbury, President, Barnard CollegeDavid Greenwald and Claire Shipman, Co-chairs, Columbia College Board of TrusteesCheryl Glicker Milstein, Chair, Barnard School Board of Trustees

Expensive President Shafik,

We write as Jewish school at Columbia and Barnard in anticipation of your look earlier than the Home Training and Workforce Committee of Congress, the place you’re anticipated to reply questions on antisemitism on campus. Primarily based on the Committee’s earlier hearings, we’re gravely involved in regards to the false narratives that body these proceedings and that operate to entrap witnesses inside them, and we want to supply our help and enter.

When a member of Congress with a historical past of espousing white nationalist politics – Rep. Elise Stefanik – calls college presidents to account for alleged antisemitism on their campuses, we see these proceedings for the disingenuous political theater that they’re, and we object to your now being solid as a villain on this political theater of a brand new McCarthyism.

The actual goal of those hearings has been to rehearse and amplify decades-long bad-faith efforts to undermine universities as websites of studying, essential pondering, and information manufacturing. The lawmakers who questioned school presidents in December made such intentions clear from the beginning. In her introductory remarks, the chairperson, Rep. Virginia Foxx, condemned universities for “assenting to the race-based ideology of the novel left” and charged that “Institutional antisemitism and hate are among the many poisoned fruits of your establishment’s cultures.” South Carolina Consultant Joe Wilson openly piled on, slamming universities as “intolerant sewers of intolerance and bigotry,” a situation precipitated, he declared, by variety and inclusion initiatives; Foxx, absurdly, cited as proof of antisemitism the existence of programs at Harvard like one known as “Race and Racism within the Making of america as a World Energy.”

In different phrases, the hearings proceed from a spurious premise – that educational examine of race (in addition to different fields within the crosshairs of tradition warriors, like gender and sexuality), have noxiously polluted campuses. From there, they assert that this pestilent tradition has precipitated antisemitism to thrive. Thus they try to determine two falsehoods as truth: that essential examine of complicated historic truths results in antisemitism and that antisemitism is rampant on campus. This reasoning is a closed loop; one can’t refute it from inside its mendacious logic.

Although antisemitism features because the Committee’s present engine of shock, their goal is to not guarantee that Jewish college students can flourish on campuses. Fairly, it’s falsely to caricature and demonize universities as supposed hotbeds of “woke indoctrination.” This depiction opens the best way to political interference at each stage – from the appointment of like-minded cronies to boards of governors to fingering particular books for banning from syllabi – as has been occurring in states like North Carolina and Texas. Florida’s college system has endured a lot politically-driven intervention – even to the purpose of taking up a liberal arts school – that the AAUP has concluded, “Significant Increased Training in Florida Could Not Survive.” Whereas such ruinous meddling has to date taken maintain at public universities, the Home Training and Workforce Committee has now declared open season on non-public ones as nicely.

This marketing campaign to destroy academic establishments has discovered incendiary gasoline from a brand new ally: a longstanding, well-organized motion to suppress pro-Palestinian speech in America. For many years, proponents of a hegemonic right-wing Zionist narrative have sought to stifle Palestinian expression in American theaters, artwork exhibitions, studying sequence, universities, and elsewhere. Over these years, Columbia, particularly, has been fallaciously charged with harboring a selected animus towards Jews (regardless of its giant and numerous inhabitants of Jewish college students, the supply of a variety of Jewish denominational non secular providers and kosher eating choices, help for a sturdy Institute for Israel and Jewish Research, and a good looking constructing devoted to internet hosting Jewish social, cultural, non secular and academic actions). The rationale? The presence of discourse round Palestinian historical past, politics, tradition, and expertise. From the Nineteen Seventies on, for instance, would-be censors lodged calumnies in opposition to Professor Edward Stated, whose hiring remains to be falsely invoked right this moment for example of antisemitism; within the early 2000s, the David Mission tried to trump up hysteria – and firings – over professors who criticized Israeli insurance policies and the ideologies behind them; a couple of years later, ideological critics incited media assaults and petition drives in opposition to a scholar as she was being thought of for tenure due to her scrutiny of Israeli archeological practices.

Immediately, these longtime crusaders in opposition to the airing of Palestinian narratives and analyses on campus have joined forces with the anti-Black, anti-queer, anti-migrant proper, whose apostles now grandstand on the Home Training and Workforce Committee. The 2 teams converge on the shared aim of shutting down essential examine of historic truths that undermine their simplistic, self-serving accounts of sophisticated occasions and concepts – whether or not by making an attempt to cancel examine of The 1619 Mission, to forestall dialogue of the millennia-long existence of human gender variance, or to silence criticism of Israel and its founding doctrine. Collectively, they’ve stirred up an ideal storm that threatens to erode our college’s basic values.

Columbia should stand sturdy in opposition to these specious assaults, and we really feel particularly known as to assist on this effort as a result of we’re Jewish. To help in defending the mission and values of the College, we provide right here our perspective, which has not had as broad a listening to on campus as these we contemplate hostile to the educational freedom and free speech which might be a mandatory foundation for scholarship and studying.

As numerous Jewish school members, we have now a spread of relationships to Jewish id, tradition, religion, follow, and institutional affiliation, and we have now a spread of views on and connections to Israel. However we’re united in our understanding of – and objection to – the methods costs of antisemitism are being weaponized. And we share alarm at and opposition to insurance policies and practices on our campus that hurt and marginalize individuals who categorical solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians. These insurance policies and practices additionally erase the presence of progressive Jews at Columbia – and certainly, all through Jewish-American historical past – and exacerbate the very menace of antisemitism they declare to discourage.

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As Jews, we’re acutely conscious that antisemitism is alive and nicely in america, and that because the journalist Peter Beinart not too long ago wrote, it’s a downside that Israel’s offensive in Gaza has solely worsened in current months. It’s a downside we take with lethal seriousness. Like racism, sexism, and homophobia, it exists in every single place, together with at Columbia. And when it rears its head, it needs to be swiftly denounced and its perpetrators held to account. However it’s not rampant on our campus. And it’s actually not what motivates the members of the College neighborhood who’ve been protesting our authorities’s navy help for Israel and calling for Palestinian liberation. There may be nothing antisemitic about taking a stand in opposition to Israel’s ongoing marketing campaign that has killed (to date) greater than 30,000 Gazans, forcibly displaced greater than 75 % of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants, demolished all of its universities, and introduced half of Gaza to the brink of famine. To argue in any other case is to pervert what antisemitism means.

The students of the Holocaust, Jewish Research, and Center East Research who drafted the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism clarify that “antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence in opposition to Jews as Jews (or Jewish establishments as Jewish).” It’s not, the Declaration specifies:

criticizing or opposing Zionism as a type of nationalism, or arguing for a wide range of constitutional preparations for Jews and Palestinians within the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. It’s not antisemitic to help preparations that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the ocean,” whether or not in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in no matter kind.

Respected students in these fields agree that Zionism – the motion, born in late Nineteenth-Century Europe, to determine a Jewish homeland within the Biblical Land of Israel (and, after the institution of the Israeli state in 1948, the ideology to maintain it as a Jewish-majority and Jewish-dominant nation) – within reason topic to critique and debate, like every political ideology. To query or denounce Israel’s underlying philosophy or its insurance policies and habits is as legit as analyzing and assessing these of any nation-state. And to critique and even condemn its important doctrines is to not condemn its inhabitants or to name for his or her expulsion or eradication. Such critique responds to state actions – to not the Jewish character of the state’s tradition and majority inhabitants. As our colleague Rashid Khalidi has put it, “If the individuals stealing Palestinians’ land had been Martians, the response would have been no totally different.”

Waving a Palestinian flag or chanting “from the river to the ocean, Palestine shall be free,” then, will not be inherently antisemitic. For some, it expresses a view that Israelis and Palestinians alike deserve futures of abundance characterised by the broad political rights that outline democracies (a view that was superior as way back as in late Nineteenth- and early 20-Century debates amongst Jews about what a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine might imply, by the likes of Judah Magnes, a main founder and the primary president of Hebrew College in Jerusalem, and the thinker Martin Buber). For others it’s a rejection of colonial energy and oppression that necessitates wholly new political imaginaries. These are legit views which might be based mostly on proof and scholarly rigor and warrant political ardour.

Such political ardour – and among the slogans that categorical it – could unsettle college students, school, and employees with opposing views. However feeling dismay will not be the identical factor as being threatened. Together with the free expression that’s basic to educational inquiry and democratic society, comes the discomfort of being uncovered to views that could be upsetting. We are able to help pro-Israel college students via their actual and legitimate discomfort with the protests advocating Palestinian liberation, whereas additionally stating clearly and firmly that this discomfort will not be a difficulty of security.

Professional-Palestinian expression will not be anti-Jewish hate speech. To label it as such requires a harmful and false conflation: a transfer that equates Zionism with Jewishness, political ideology with id.

This linking betrays a painful, crude, and woefully inaccurate understanding – or cynical misrepresentation – of Jewish historical past, id and politics. This conflation of Zionism with Jewishness not solely erases Jewish historical past, it erases post-, non-, and anti-Zionist Jews themselves, together with many who stay, examine, and work on our campus – an erasure that’s itself antisemitic.

Jewish Individuals have lengthy expressed myriad views about Zionism, many dissenting from what has grow to be, solely in current a long time, a lockstep institutional dedication to Israel that brooks no criticism. These dissenters have achieved so on a number of grounds, together with people who consider Zionism additional marginalizes Jews within the Diaspora, those that argue that the creation of a Jewish nation-state took the brutal type of imperialism, and even a sect of anti-Zionist Hasidim professing {that a} Jewish return to Zion shouldn’t happen till the Messiah comes and brings it about.

We see this vary within the positions of each celebrated and lesser recognized Jewish thinkers: political theorist Hannah Arendt, novelist Mike Gold, poets Marilyn Lowen Fletcher and Adrienne Wealthy, thinker Morris Cohen, to call a couple of. The pages of the landmark Jewish feminist journal, Bridges, printed between 1990 and 2011, had been often stuffed with vehement debates about Zionism. For a lot of the twentieth century, criticism of Zionism was the bulk opinion amongst working-class Jews. It had been central to Judaism’s Reform motion: Amongst Jews right this moment, Zionism stays a extremely contested politics, and particular Israeli insurance policies much more so. A 2020 nationwide survey of American Jews performed by J Road, for instance, discovered that 80 % of respondents favored conditioning US assist to Israel on its ending settlement enlargement within the West Financial institution. A newer ballot of American Jews, by the Jewish Voters Institute, discovered that one-quarter of respondents regarded Israel as an apartheid state and 22 % agreed that’s committing genocide. That ballot was performed in 2021 – two years earlier than the present decimation of Gaza. There has by no means been and isn’t now any consensus on Israel and Palestine amongst American Jews, nor has there been or is there any now on our campus.

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But, in what are undoubtedly troublesome instances to be working, the College has in current months failed to withstand the false equation of Jewish id with Zionism and Israel, with critical penalties for our neighborhood and our repute. This started with the suspension of scholar teams in November, on the idea of unsubstantiated accusations of menace and intimidation that relaxation on the deeply ideological assertion that criticisms of the state of Israel are harmful to Jews. New guidelines from Columbia and Barnard that quash scholar political expression – from public protest to dorm decorations – within the title of defending Jewish college students quantity to the College singling out for its particular care solely these Jews who declare to really feel threatened by sure political speech about Palestine or Israel; Jews who don’t espouse accepted political beliefs aren’t welcome underneath the College’s comforting wing. All Jewish college students are much less secure when the punitive would possibly of the college’s purported anti-discrimination effort is so explicitly turned away from consideration to white supremacist violence (the demonstrable supply of most antisemitic menace on this nation right this moment) and towards progressive political activism.

Whether or not the administration is making an ill-informed class error, favoring leaders’ personal political opinions, scrambling in concern of a wave of bad-faith Title VI fits, caving to strain from governmental officers, permitting a couple of rich and highly effective donors to dictate campus insurance policies and pedagogy (an assent that, if these donors are Jewish, would reinforce considered one of antisemitism’s most sinister tropes), or has another cause for making the concept that Zionism is identical factor as Jewishness into college coverage, we don’t presume to say. However regardless of the motivation, the results are ruinous to the individuals and the rules of Columbia. The place as soon as the College correctly stood up in opposition to smear campaigns condemning Columbia for permitting Palestinian discourse, from Professor Stated on, now it has itself voluntarily accepted the job of censoring that discourse.

Such suppression, traditionally, has by no means been good for Jews or for different marginalized peoples, and we acknowledge its stench – not least as a result of political persecution and Pink-baiting have been core elements of antisemitism in America. Within the McCarthy period, accusations of communism had been successfully leveled in opposition to the political opponents of white energy, focusing on individuals concerned in labor organizing and civil rights organizing and inflicting probably the most hurt to Individuals who had been Jewish, Black, homosexual, and poor. Simply as that marketing campaign was by no means actually about communism, right this moment’s assaults on the college aren’t actually about antisemitism.

In violation of its personal professed dedication to educational freedom and the strong and open debate of concepts, Columbia has, along with suspending pro-Palestine scholar teams, canceled scholar occasions with content material essential of Israel, harshly disciplined college students for protest actions that obtain far lighter (or no) punishment when performed on behalf of any problem aside from Palestine, and designated “free speech zones” for protests (which truly disguise and overregulate what needs to be free and open), to say simply among the draconian methods it’s cracking down on political expression. The Mailman Faculty of Public Well being issued a letter of non-renewal to an assistant professor after recordings of his lectures had been despatched to journalists and he was attacked for, educating from his personal experience, utilizing the decades-old and well-established essential framework of settler colonialism – an motion which was each a grave violation of the college’s educational freedom to show in line with their experience, and a chilling capitulation to public smear campaigns in opposition to school. We really feel ourselves on the precipice of even worse measures, together with scrutiny of syllabi and analysis, and the imposition of ideological checks in school hiring, all within the title of defending Jewish college students who really feel uneasy after they hear or see anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian expression.

In the meantime the College has achieved little to help and shield college students who’ve truly been focused or attacked. When college students had been doxxed for advocating Palestinian rights and smeared as “pro-Hamas” on vans that circled campus, it was different college students who needed to block and disrupt the vans, whereas the College did nothing. When college students are focused for vicious harassment on social media, together with by members of the College neighborhood, the College has remained silent, even because the College Senate not too long ago affirmed that the rights of educational freedom don’t embrace the best to harass or threaten. When scholar protestors had been attacked on-campus with noxious chemical substances by fellow college students objecting to their demonstration on behalf of Palestine, the College’s reluctance to acknowledge the assault and ongoing silence about it has spoken loudly of its lack of concern for the protection of scholars on this aspect of the difficulty. The failure to adequately shield and attain out to Muslim college students, regardless of an increase in violence in opposition to them nationally, has led to such a lack of belief within the College that the victims of such incidents are reluctant to report them. And when the College’s restrictive insurance policies pressure college students who need to protest off campus, it topics them to violence and arrest by the hands of NYPD — who’ve been more and more current on-campus as nicely in current months.

Furthermore, the College established a Activity Drive on Antisemitism, with unclear limits on its powers and appreciable assets at its disposal. The College ignored calls to develop this activity pressure’s focus past antisemitism to incorporate anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian hate and discrimination. The Activity Drive’s first report openly weighs in on broad problems with protest and self-discipline, seemingly reaching across the College Senate’s present committees and processes for contemplating new guidelines. The availability of fabric and administrative assets within the title of combating antisemitism – to avoid institutional process within the service of right-wing politics – will solely present college students that the College is prepared to make coverage within the title of some and never others.

These extremely disparate responses to totally different scholar populations enact materials in addition to mental viewpoint discrimination and have a profound chilling impact. All however probably the most dedicated college students will determine it’s not well worth the problem to leap via scads of regulatory hurdles to, say, set up a movie screening; professors will assume twice about educating actual scholarship, together with the writing of our personal Prof. Stated whose work gave us the instruments to confront so many pervasive types of prejudice and oppression on the planet right this moment.

Much less visibly, maybe, however catastrophically, the draconian punishments, NYPD presence, heightened surveillance, and blatant preferential remedy of scholars with one political view, have begun to undo a long time of labor to make Columbia extra accommodating to first-generation, low-income and marginalized college students. At Barnard, the place these measures have been arguably most extreme, college students have expressed non-public issues about whether or not the School is a welcoming place for them.

And we, unhappy to say, are starting to query whether or not Columbia can, underneath these circumstances, stay a spot for the secularly sacred follow of trustworthy, rigorous, difficult, inspiring, marvelously messy, and important enterprise of educating and studying.

If we had been to testify at this listening to, we’d:

Refuse to entertain the bad-faith weaponization of antisemitism. The Committee’s members who’re invested in attacking greater training have demonstrated their willingness to pose mendacious questions within the hopes of “gotcha” moments that can enable their allies to proceed attacking the College after the hearings have ended. We might reply with an affirmation of our values that refuses to concede the premise of those traps.

When requested to state whether or not sure chants or phrases “are antisemitic,” we’d remind the Representatives that phrases like “from the river to the ocean” have traditionally meant various things to totally different individuals, and that the job of an establishment of upper studying is to carry open an area the place we are able to study from one another in regards to the alternative ways such language is known.
When requested to sentence particular phrases in Arabic, like “intifada,” as inherently antisemitic, we’d affirm that phrases have histories to their meanings, and that universities are locations the place we examine and study these histories, even when they’re uncomfortable.
When pressed on slim definitions of antisemitism, we’d level out that Jews throughout the political spectrum disagree on how finest to outline the time period past the consensus baseline that it’s prejudice in opposition to Jews for being Jewish. Main students are cautious to tell apart between antisemitism and anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel.
When challenged about criticism of Israel or Zionism usually, we’d remind our viewers that these views have at all times been with us on our campus, and that they’ve at all times troubled some Jewish college students and been espoused by different Jewish college students. We might affirm that this variety of expression and rigor of debate is what makes our neighborhood sturdy and empowers us in what former College President Lee Bollinger known as our “fourth goal” – “to leverage scholarly information to create societal and international impression.”
When requested (as different Presidents had been in December) whether or not it’s acceptable to “name for the extermination of Jews,” we’d acknowledge that this can be a reprehensible assertion that you’d discover deeply disturbing and alarming to listen to from any member of the college neighborhood though, to be clear, you’ve heard no such factor from Columbia or Barnard college students, school, or employees. We might remind the committee that america already has civil rights legal guidelines that require the college to make sure college students aren’t studying in a extreme and pervasive hostile setting. Title VI prohibits “unwelcome conduct based mostly on shared ancestry or ethnic traits that, based mostly on the totality of circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so extreme or pervasive that it limits or denies an individual’s capability to take part in or profit from the recipient’s training program or exercise.” An remoted occasion of hateful speech doesn’t rise to the extent of making a extreme and pervasive hostile setting. This customary additionally covers any scholar who, in the midst of passionate political advocacy, could make an remoted hateful assertion regarding Palestinians, Muslims, or Arabs. Emphasize to the committee that Columbia is dedicated to upholding the regulation, investigating all complaints, and serving to college students discover ways to pursue their political targets whereas additionally remaining respectful of each other.
Problem the implication that swift, repressive punishment is one of the simplest ways to handle hateful habits on campus when it does happen. When their establishment punishes college students harshly quite than providing them alternatives to study and make amends after they do trigger hurt, the college loses an vital alternative for educating and studying. Such rash punitiveness doesn’t create a campus — and a society — with much less antisemitism and extra shared understanding.

Assert the College’s dedication to defending all our Jewish college students, and all members of the College neighborhood. Our enemies on the nationwide political stage will attempt to use this chance to erase the wealthy heterogeneity of Jewish life on Columbia’s and Barnard’s campuses in service of their targets, and to falsely counsel that the protection of Jewish college students comes on the expense of different teams. Each initiatives have to be strenuously rejected.

When confronted with simplistic accounts of how Jewish college students really feel or what they’re experiencing, we’d resist the erasure of our Jewish college students who’re unsure in regards to the warfare, who discover themselves in solidarity with the Palestinian trigger, or who oppose the challenge of Zionism. We might insist that every one Jewish college students are entitled to inclusion and respect in discussions of Jewishness and the query of Palestine, and in college life.
When pressured to commit assets to the prevention and punishment of antisemitism, we’d assert that to successfully confront antisemitism, the college ought to stay dedicated to combating all types of bias and discrimination. It should not single out antisemitism for particular consideration, nor ought to it conflate antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
We might agree that actual harassment and bodily intimidation and violence on campus have to be confronted severely and its perpetrators held accountable. On the similar time, the College ought to chorus at any time when potential from utilizing self-discipline as technique of addressing much less critical harms, and will by no means use punitive measures to handle battle over concepts and emotions of discomfort that outcome. Actually, the College is steadfastly dedicated to creating an setting the place neighborhood members study to anticipate and to interact in conflicts of concepts in and outdoors of the classroom.

Reject the fundamental premises of the right-wing assaults on greater training. The earlier listening to supplied ample alternative for the airing of fictions and grievances in regards to the purported “woke” menace afflicting studying on this nation. We share a dedication to the next goal: the pursuit of information via rigorous inquiry and the formation of well-rounded residents and professionals via a thriving local weather of educational freedom and experience.

We might affirm that the College has no obligation to guard anybody from the discomfort of listening to their politics disagreed with or criticized. Discussions and debates that may be uncomfortable or provocative are a part of the pursuit of information. We decide to retaining each scholar secure from actual hurt and discrimination, and we additionally decide to serving to them study to expertise discomfort and even confrontation as a part of studying tips on how to disagree productively as members of a society. Nobody has the best to demand the College shield them from having to listen to criticism of any authorities, not a international authorities and never our personal. We stay in a democracy.
We might advocate for school by reminding the viewers that the College’s dedication to free inquiry and strong disagreement is what permits Columbia to be a world-class establishment. We didn’t get right here by politicizing studying or silencing dissent, and we is not going to sacrifice our core competencies and world-class repute for studying on the behest of political assaults.
We might affirm that assaults on the college and calls to repress speech and inquiry are assaults on information itself. Limits on educational freedom about questions of Israel and Palestine will open doorways to limits on scientific inquiry that firms discover displeasing or that it’s politically trendy to assault. Whether or not it’s local weather change or the protection of prescribed drugs or the historical past of race, the information created at universities and faculties is reliable and of worth to society as a result of it’s created in environments that may be trusted to be freed from political affect.
We might affirm the College’s dedication to shared governance, and particularly to the significance of establishments that present for school involvement within the creation of college guidelines. We might categorical concern that the current strain from politicians and others has handled the administration as solely chargeable for College coverage when, in reality, Columbia College and different faculties across the nation want to guard school energy. Shared governance by school is important to making sure that our greater training establishments stay true to their educational mission.

Assert our dedication to the vigorous safety of free expression on campus. Federal- and state-level strain to self-discipline pro-Palestinian speech has put the college in an untenable place the place, to conform, it should suppress the very sorts of expression which might be essential to scholar growth, to their studying outdoors of the classroom, and to American democracy.

We might implore the Committee to acknowledge that exactly as a result of college college students are studying uncomfortable truths, participating with world points, crafting their identities, and infrequently residing within the very place the place that is all occurring, they desperately want to have the ability to categorical themselves within the course of. They should categorical themselves in numerous methods to affirm their humanity – whether or not it’s via poetry, paint, posting indicators, sporting insignia, or attending protests – and whether or not it’s about their LGBTQ or racial id or their emotions about Israel or Palestine. Additionally they must have the liberty to make errors, offend with out desiring to, and study from and restore no matter hurt they might have achieved. The college should help college students’ studying and humanity by selling free expression in virtually each campus area outdoors of the classroom.
We might share our delight in representing Columbia College for its custom of protest. As our colleague Professor Rashid Khalidi not too long ago put it, “Have been it not for scholar protests, the struggles for civil rights and in opposition to apartheid in South Africa and the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and for abortion rights, homosexual rights, and lots of different freedoms (all of which had vital echoes on the Columbia campus) would have been hobbled or extinguished.” He added that, in distinction to a legacy blemished by institutional hyperlinks to slavery, the opium commerce, racial discrimination, and antisemitism, Columbia’s custom of protest is among the best distinguishing marks within the [University’s] historical past.”

As school of Columbia and Barnard, as dedicated lecturers of our college students, and as invested stewards of the establishment who care deeply for its current and its future, we stand with you in opposition to these assaults in opposition to not simply our College however all universities and faculties, and we stand able to help you on this work nonetheless we are able to.

Sincerely,

Debbie Becher, Barnard CollegeHelen Benedict, Columbia Journalism SchoolSusan Bernofsky, Faculty of the ArtsElizabeth Bernstein, Barnard CollegeNina Berman, Columbia Journalism SchoolAmy Chazkel, School of Arts & SciencesYinon Cohen, School of Arts & SciencesNora Gross, Barnard CollegeKeith Gessen, Columbia Journalism SchoolJack Halberstam, School of Arts & SciencesSarah Haley, School of Arts & SciencesMichael Harris, School of Arts & SciencesJennifer S. Hirsch, Mailman Faculty of Public HealthMarianne Hirsch, School of Arts & Sciences (Emerita)Joseph A. Howley, School of Arts & SciencesDavid Lurie, School of Arts & SciencesNara Milanich, Barnard CollegeD. Max Moerman, Barnard CollegeManijeh Moradian, Barnard CollegeSheldon Pollock, School of Arts & Sciences (Emeritus)Bruce Robbins, School of Arts & SciencesJames Schamus, Faculty of the ArtsAlisa Solomon, Columbia Journalism Faculty