Updates on Columbia and the Columbia Antisemitism Task Force

BY ROBERT NEWTON

This submit is a part of a weblog collection, organized by Annelise Orleck, that may deal with current crackdowns on protests at US faculty and college campuses towards Israel’s battle on Gaza. You’ll be able to learn the primary submit and an introduction to the collection right here.

Throughout the nation final fall, college students took to public areas on their campuses to protest the violence unfolding in Gaza. There have been conferences, teach-ins, rallies, marches, picketing, and finally encampments. Columbia College, the place I train sustainability science, was an epicenter of media consideration however was on no account alone within the vibrance and stridency of its protests. The response was swift and extreme from ultraconservative Republicans in Congress who referred to as Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and leaders from Harvard, Penn, Northwestern, Rutgers and different universities earlier than hearings—grilling them aggressively, subpoenaing institutional and particular person communications, and establishing a story of antisemitism within the nation’s main universities. That narrative shortly took on a lifetime of its personal.

At Columbia, as at many (however removed from all) campuses, there adopted crackdowns on scholar activism.  Anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian organizations had been restricted of their freedoms after which suspended.  When college students escalated their actions, they confronted disciplinary processes.  Once they escalated once more, this time to a peaceable encampment within the small garden that passes for a commons right here, they had been charged with trespassing. They escalated once more, occupying a constructing filled with lecture rooms. The NYPD was referred to as onto campus for a second time, and college students had been arrested—this time in a bodily aggressive method—and disciplined once more. At Columbia and throughout town, greater than 5 hundred college students had been arrested, some held In New York jail cells with out meals or water for a lot of hours. There have been quite a few accidents, together with to a graduate scholar whose eye socket was damaged by a police boot whereas he lay restrained on the bottom.

The aftermath of those disciplinary strikes, together with the criminalization of scholars, continues to ripple via the campus and our college students’ lives. In a lot of the media, and in lots of components of academe as effectively, the main target of activists and media alike has shifted to the habits of scholars and the disciplinary course of. To an extent, that is wanted.  Legal professionals and supportive college should be organized for hearings. College students banned from dorms should be housed. Advert hoc disciplinary rules should be dismantled; truthful and legit norms of self-discipline should be reestablished. The rights of scholars and college should be protected. However on this shift towards the rapid problems with campus habits and tutorial rights, the general context of the occasions of the previous yr has been dimmed. In evaluating our college students’ actions and our establishments’ reactions to them, we must always by no means lose sight of the truth that they had been protesting an ongoing assault on a civilian inhabitants that has skilled ranges of destruction, dislocation, and demise not seen for the reason that carpet bombing of northern Korea within the Fifties and north Vietnam within the Sixties. This context is totally crucial to any understanding of the occasions of the previous yr.

At Columbia, the dearth of context is nowhere extra evident than within the actions of the President’s Job Power on Antisemitism, established in response to strain from Home Republican leaders, rich donors, and scholar lawsuits. On the Friday earlier than Labor Day weekend, the duty drive dropped its second report. The ninety-page doc relies on listening periods performed by activity drive members with about 5 hundred Columbia college students and college, the very massive majority of them Jewish. The duty drive, per its acknowledged methodology, didn’t query or vet the claims of respondents. Relatively, it sought to know the perceptions, emotions, and responses of a few of Columbia’s Jewish subcultures to the occasions of the final yr.

After reporting on what they heard, activity drive members framed the outcomes, settled by itself definition of antisemitism, and addressed the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Via a controversial logic, in keeping with the deal with Jewish emotions as determinative, the duty drive’s definition of antisemitism equates anti-Zionism with animosity to each the State of Israel per se and Jewish folks. Thus, they discovered most anti-Zionist speech to be a violation of the US federal Title VI protections towards discrimination primarily based on each nationwide origin and ethnicity. The interim president of Columbia praised the work of the duty drive and posted its report on the college web site. As with the primary report, the duty drive launched its second one instantly to a wide selection of media. There was no inner dialogue or vetting inside the college, most of whom came upon about it from studying the information. Not everybody was thrilled. A gaggle of twenty-four Jewish college members (together with me) wrote an in depth and scathing critique of the strategies, controversial framing, and misguided particulars of the report.

The duty drive report refers back to the violence of October 7 greater than twenty instances. The phrase Gaza is talked about solely as soon as as a “humanitarian disaster.” The dislocation of nearly all Gazans, the destruction of Gaza’s colleges and universities, the discount to rubble of housing and infrastructure, the deaths of over forty thousand folks, and the rising ranges of childhood illness and malnutrition are nowhere to be discovered. Thus, the anti-Zionist animus that the report’s authors doc in such element appears to have sprung spontaneously from an antisemitic tradition. Even worse, phrases like, “After October 7, many Jewish and Israeli college students started to report a number of situations of harassment, verbal abuse and ostracism” suggest that antisemitism was sparked by the violence towards Jews in southern Israel. This framing is solely inaccurate. Within the wake of the October 7 assaults, there was almost common empathy for Israelis and different victims, together with the hostages. The surge in membership in pro-Palestinian organizations; the demonstrations, rallies, and speeches of anti-Zionist activists on campus; the Columbia College Apartheid Divest coalition; and the strident voices calling for a ceasefire had been a response to the large destruction wrought by the Israeli Protection Forces in Gaza.

By scripting this crucial context out of their report, the authors make it not possible to know the occasions of the previous yr at Columbia. Tons of of scholar activists (a large variety of them Jewish) who bear their Jewish friends no sick have been horrified by the actions of Israel’s authorities between October 8 and in the present day. To accuse these college students (and college) of antisemitism is flawed—and since it’s inaccurate it’s counterproductive. The suggestions of the duty drive, which circulation from its one-sided framing of final yr’s occasions, won’t calm the tensions and battle on campus.  They’re extra more likely to inflame divisions as a result of the targets of their criticism will accurately really feel that they’ve been wrongly accused of a bias they don’t harbor.

The duty drive’s reportage of the perceptions and sentiments of Jewish college students at Columbia is helpful and necessary. However it’s one-sided. And these emotions and narratives haven’t been validated—applicable maybe for “listening periods” however not for formulating coverage suggestions. Scholar narratives have been formed right into a framework and used as the premise for coverage suggestions by a activity drive that equates opposition to Zionism with opposition to the State of Israel per se and with antisemitism. Such an equation is each false and dismissive of the hundreds of scholars and college who really feel an pressing must cease the killing in Gaza, who help equality for all folks dwelling in Israel/Palestine, who additionally really feel love for his or her Jewish mates and colleagues.

On the finish of its second report, the duty drive indicators its intention to provide a 3rd report, attending to “inclusion” in lecture rooms and content material in curriculum. Ponder that. Professors on our campus are already being referred to as earlier than Workplace of Equal Alternative and Affirmative Motion inquiries to reply to college students who really feel that their discomfort at classroom speech is enough proof of bias.

Columbia must do higher.  We owe it to our college students to set the current report apart till a extra applicable, well-rounded course of might be constituted. And we should not allow a politically and culturally slim group—none of whose experience is in academic norms, tutorial freedom, or curriculum improvement—to affix the cacophony of curiosity teams already attempting to inform college how and what to show in their very own fields.

Robert Newton is a member of the Columbia College AAUP Government Committee. He retired in 2022 as a senior analysis scientist at Columbia College’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. Now he teaches in Columbia’s Sustainability Science program.