Columbia Professor Departs With Shot at “Bankers and...Capitalists”
Plus, anti-Israel group pays to settle federal fraud allegations
At a party in New York City on January 1, I encountered an eminent professor at Columbia Law School. What the professor said was off the record, but what I said was not. I asked the professor about a colleague who has been leading the anti-Israel forces at Columbia Law School. I said something to the effect of, “How is that Katherine Franke treating you? Does she hate the Jews because she hates capitalism, or does she hate capitalism because she hates the Jews?”
Ten days later, Franke issued a statement. While it doesn’t conclusively answer my question, at least it explains some of the basis for my asking.
Franke’s statement accused Israel of a “genocidal assault on the Palestinians.” It announced her departures from teaching and from participating in faculty governance, exits she described as “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.” And it also took a swipe at the members of Columbia’s governing board:
As Columbia’s Board of Trustees has become constituted largely by hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists, the university has become more of a real estate holding concern than a non-profit educational institution. With this degradation of the university’s leadership has come, in some cases, an inability to resist pressures placed on the university by outside entities carrying a brief for the destruction of higher education, and in other cases, a shared commitment to a right-wing, and pro-Israel, ideology.
Got that? The anti-Israel professor manages to get off a shot against “hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists” on her way out the door.
It’s not even accurate to claim that Columbia’s board “has become constituted largely by hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists.” (It’s not accurate that Israel is waging a genocidal assault on the Palestinians, either, so there are multiple dimensions in which Franke seems to have challenges in ascertaining reality.) The Columbia board co-chairs are a lawyer and a journalist. The other 18 members are a banker-turned-real-estate-investor, six financiers, two people who run manufacturing businesses, two people who work at biotechnology companies, two physicians, the president of Minnesota Public Radio, someone from the fashion industry, a lawyer who served in senior government posts, an investor, and a tech company CEO. Only eight of the 20 board members meet even the broadest definition of “I work in finance.” There’s not a single hedge-fund manager on the board.
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