Columbia Gives Up on Finding Individuals Who Threw Water at Jews

“We were unable to identify” the perpetrator, the university says

Columbia University

Despite frequent claims that the campus Israel wars are largely about “free speech,” fairly often there are situations that aren’t about speech but are about actions. For example, at Columbia, Jewish students reported, and posted a video, of having water thrown at them when they ventured out during the period that an anti-Israel mob was occupying an area of the Columbia campus.

Now the Washington Free Beacon reports that a Columbia interim hearing officer, Jeremy Liss, sent a student an email: “Columbia Public Safety conducted a thorough investigation into other reported incidents at the Sundial on the evening of April 20, 2024, specifically the individuals that made remarks, and that allegedly threw water at students, and we were unable to identify specific individual respondents. As a result, we will be closing this case.”

Columbia gives out the Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting. It has a journalism school that offers a special track in investigative reporting. It has a law school that trains future federal prosecutors and civil litigators who will have to investigate crimes and conduct fact-finding in complex legal investigations. Does the university really expect people to believe that they can’t figure out who did this water-throwing?

Some of the possible techniques that might be used if someone really did want to find out who did it might be offering a cash reward for information that leads to the perpetrator, or setting up an anonymous tip line for information. Other people who were present on the site might be called in and advised that they better tell what they know. Video cameras and card swipes could be checked.

Imagine if it had been, say, a group of Columbia Republican men throwing water at a group of Barnard students demonstrating in favor of reproductive rights. Imagine if it had been a bunch of Columbia Law School Federalist Society members in Make America Great Again hats throwing water at a group of Columbia students demonstrating in favor of migrants and asylum-seekers. Somehow, I think that in those cases, the university would have found a way to use its investigative powers to identify and punish the students involved, rather than giving up and declaring the case closed.

At least one Jewish Columbia student interviewed as part of the probe told me that the investigation seemed sincere but was hindered by the fact that so many of the anti-Israel mob were masked and hooded.

You could say that this is just water-throwing and not something more serious such as, heaven forfend, a shooting or throwing a more toxic substance. Okay, but it was part of a pattern of violent actions that included breaking into and occupying a campus building and intimidating the university into canceling its universitywide commencement ceremony. 

And lest anyone think that it’s just an Ivy League ivory tower with no real-word implications: Eugene Kontorovich has a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the panel of “experts” on which the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, relied in seeking arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Among those Kontorovich mentioned is Amal Clooney, who is the wife of actor George Clooney, a Biden campaign fundraiser. Kontorovich doesn’t mention it, but Amal Clooney is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute. She’s been teaching international law and human rights courses at Columbia Law School for years.

So it’s not just student hijinks. Columbia has a direct line into the international legal maneuvering against the Israeli government as that government tries to defend Israel against a murderous, kidnapping Iran-backed terrorist organization, Hamas.

Getting back control of these universities from the mob is going to require administrators who follow up complaints ruthlessly and with robust investigative powers, rather than giving up and closing the cases so that the mob members are free to attack all over again. 

This is being understood by perceptive leaders on many campuses. The new executive director of Harvard Hillel, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, just hired away from Yale, talked tonight in a conversation with alumni about the importance of disciplinary follow-through in serving the function of “reaffirmation of shared norms.” 

At Harvard Alumni Day, May 31, Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, was attacked by an animal-rights protester who dumped glitter on him. 

James Q. Wilson nailed this all in a 1972 piece for Commentary, “Liberalism Versus Liberal Education.” 

Wilson wrote: “The liberal values that have become precarious in the very institution that once defended them are those of civility, free speech, equality of opportunity, and the maintenance of a realm of privacy and intimacy safe from the constant assaults of the political and the societal. These are not, as I shall point out, the only elements of the liberal faith, but they are important ones and they are very much in jeopardy. I realize that the vast majority of faculty and students do not approve of acts which jeopardize these values; from time to time they even say, quietly, that they deplore them; yet the vast majority also have created a communal setting and institutional culture that permits such acts to continue.”

Columbia interim hearing officer Jeremy Liss is today’s representative of what James Q. Wilson called the “institutional culture that permits such acts to continue.”

Wilson is known mainly as a scholar of policing and crime and bureaucracy, not of trends in higher education. Yet in the risks that a culture of disorder poses, there is common ground between the stories of American campuses and American cities. The decades that followed 1972 saw significant progress in restoring order to American cities and even some forward progress at some of the universities. If there’s hope of a similar recovery from today’s abyss it rests with the students and professors and alumni and clergy and journalists and politicians willing to make the complaints and to persist in pursuing accountability.

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