Columbia Professor Departs With Shot at “Bankers and...Capitalists”

Plus, anti-Israel group pays to settle federal fraud allegations

Columbia University in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights seen in a file photo by The Editors.

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.

Is it really that long a distance from Franke’s claim that the pro-Israel bankers, capitalists, and hedge fund managers are ruining Columbia to Martin Luther’s arguments against Jews in his 1543 book “On the Jews and their Lies”?: “Their breath stinks with lust for the Gentiles’ gold and silver; for no nation under the sun is greedier than they were, still are, and always will be, as is evident from their accursed usury....the Jews are the ones who desire gold and silver more avidly than any other nation on earth.” Wrote Luther, “They let us work in the sweat of our brow to earn money and property while they sit behind the stove, idle away the time, fart, and roast pears. They stuff themselves, guzzle, and live in luxury and ease from our hard-earned goods. With their accursed usury they hold us and our property captive.” Luther said he had heard that “a rich Jew is now traveling across the country with twelve horses...devouring princes, lords, lands and people with his usury.”

Or is it that far from Franke to Karl Marx, in his 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question”? Marx was raised as a Lutheran by parents who had converted to Christianity from Judaism. Marx: “Let us consider the actual worldly Jew...What is his worldly God? Money. ...Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.”

That “the war against the Jews is a war against capitalism” is a long-running theme here, for which evidence mounts.

As for the theory that what really ails Columbia is that there’s a surplus of bankers on the governing board, it seems unsupported by empirical evidence. The state-controlled universities in the non-capitalist countries haven’t exactly covered themself in great distinction.

There was a 2022 book by Charlie Eaton, “Bankers in the Ivory Tower,” that made the argument that “elite university boards are especially valuable to financiers as conduits for endowment capital and private information from other elites that they use to raise capital and invest in assets that they think are undervalued by public financial markets.” Eaton is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced.

Garry W. Jenkins, who is now the president of Bates College, wrote a 2015 article, “The Wall Street Takeover of Nonprofit Boards.”

In some of the most dysfunctional institutions of higher education, the professors blame the board, the board blames the professors, and they both blame Washington. The institutions, instead of improving, remain mired in recrimination. Whether Columbia can escape that pattern is a question still being answered. It has a greater chance of doing so without Franke than with her.

Anti-Israel group settles loan fraud complaint: The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia reports that a nonprofit organization, A Jewish Voice for Peace, Inc., has agreed to pay $677,634 “to resolve PPP fraud allegations.”

Jewish Voice for Peace, whose presence at some protests has been a convenient tool for extreme anti-Israel groups to claim that they aren’t antisemitic, certified as part of getting a Paycheck Protection Act Program loan that it was not “primarily engaged in political or lobbying activities.” A press release from the federal lawyers reports, “The investigation revealed that A Jewish Voice for Peace was primarily engaged in political activities. A Jewish Voice for Peace contends that any misstatements in this application were inadvertent.”

“The settlement announced today stems from a Federal investigation that was initiated when another public interest group, TZAC, filed a whistleblower complaint pursuant to the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act,” the release says.

The executive director of The Zionist Advocacy Center, David Abrams, said similar settlements had been reached with the Middle East Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies.

In a brief phone interview with The Editors, Abrams said he’d describe the complaints his organization has filed against the anti-Israel activists as “lawfare,” but “not bad lawfare.” He said the suits helped enforce the principle that while people have First Amendment rights, they are not entitled to government funding for political activity when the funding is obtained on false pretenses.