Columbia’s Antisemitism Task Force Pleads for Tolerance and Inclusion

That won’t be enough, and it may be part of the problem

Columbia University

Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism is out today with a 91-page document describing the problems there and suggesting solutions. I read it and can offer some highlights and analysis here.

The first observation is that the report provides more evidence, as if it were needed, for “The war against Jews is a war against capitalism.” (See also here.)

From the report:

Some students reported that in the human rights sessions of the Core curriculum, during the first week of the year’s Masters of Public Health program, a faculty member presented concerning content. In the first session, the professor extensively discussed, by name, Jewish donors to Columbia University, one for whom the school is named and another for whom one of the school’s buildings is named; the faculty member called these Jewish men “wealthy white capitalists” who “laundered” “dirty money” and “blood money” at Columbia. In a second pair of lectures, students were required to engage in a case study in which they played the role of the executive director of a fictionalized new health and human rights nonprofit. Their job was to conceptualize and lead the organization’s first human rights mission. The prompt instructed students to fund a project in one of three sites: the Palestinian Aida Refugee Camp; Ukraine/Mariupol; or the Navajo nation. The professor instructed students that their funding decisions should consider that some “are eager to support your efforts, but your development team is concerned that working in Palestine could turn off wealthy U.S. donors that support Israel.”

…At the time of this writing, The School of Public Health has not communicated to the over 400 students exposed to this content that there was anything problematic about it. For these rising second year graduate students, the content described remains part of the mandatory material they were taught at Columbia.

Just as the anti-weapons people seem to hate the profits as much, or more, as they hate the weapons, the anti-Israel people seem to hate the wealth as much as they hate the Jews.

The Columbia Task Force, whose key players include former Paul E. Peterson graduate student Ester Fuchs and my former Harvard Crimson colleague Jeremy Dauber, and also my first post-college employer, Nicholas Lemann, proposes a new working definition of antisemitism—call it the Columbia definition:

Antisemitism is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis. Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.

The report says, “This working definition draws on experiences of many Jewish and Israeli students, who were on the receiving end of ethnic slurs, stereotypes about supposedly dangerous Israeli veterans, antisemitic tropes about Jewish wealth and hidden power, threats and physical assaults, exclusion of Zionists from student groups, and inconsistent standards. We propose this definition for use in training and education, not for discipline or as a means for limiting free speech or academic freedom.” The “antisemitic tropes about Jewish wealth” line is welcome, and on point, but the definition is flawed in my view for its failure to convey the important fact that antisemitism is false, a lie. The widely accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, with its language about “mendacious” and “myth,” does a better job than the Columbia definition does on that issue.

The report is part a description of the problem, part recommendations for a solution. The problem-description part is extensive and looks to be fairly well done.

The task force faulted Columbia administrators for referring to psychological counseling students who complained about antisemitism. “some felt that their concerns were not taken seriously. Indeed, we have heard that students have been referred to counseling and psychological services—which they correctly understood as implying that they just need to learn to accept and cope with antisemitic experiences,” the Columbia report says. “While mental health services should be available to anyone who wants or needs them, administrators should not medicalize a student experience of discrimination in lieu of addressing it.”

The report offers a devastating summary account that is likely to provide support for the lawsuits against Columbia: “This report documents a pattern of behavior toward Jewish and Israeli students that is troubling and violates norms of behavior and speech that are central to the values of our university. Particular aspersions cast upon Jewish and Israeli students resonate with the history of antisemitism and, given what we know about the past, such representations can lead to further acts of aggression and exclusion. That such acts and words are being inadequately addressed suggests that the University has failed to set standards of civil behavior. We think these student experiences constitute evidence of a broken social compact, a failure to provide all students with equal respect and access to the vibrant, pluralistic community that Columbia promises to all its members.”

The report says, “Many Jewish students said they now avoid walking alone on campus. Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls, while walking back to their dorms on Friday afternoon and when they were on their way to synagogue. There were also multiple reports of visibly Jewish individuals simply walking past 116th Street who have been followed, stalked, and subjected to ethnic slurs and hateful statements, like ‘go back to Poland’ and ‘I hope you guys suffer….’ A student who was writing a thesis on Israeli artists reported that each time that student made a presentation in their senior thesis seminar, the thesis seminar leader would say, ‘I hate Israel.’”

More:

The Mailman School of Public Health Class Day featured a single student speaker, whose speech promoted the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) platform, including the demand for “the university to divest from all partnerships with Israeli entities”...After the speech, a dean applauded the speech from the podium and thanked the student for “an inspiring message” and a third dean congratulated the student speaker with an embrace.

The “solutions” part is trickier. The Columbia task force gets quite granular and specific in recommending process-oriented concrete solutions, including training and reporting mechanisms. It leaves “challenges in the classroom” for a future report, even though that seems to be a central issue and one of the most difficult to solve because of the so-called “academic freedom” issues and the fact that some of Columbia’s most vicious antisemites and most tenacious defenders of the most vicious antisemites are tenured faculty members. 

(There’s some noise online about the report urging a wholesale reevaluation of the diversity, equity, and inclusion “oppressed/oppressor” framework, but I am not seeing that a main thrust of the report, just in some footnotes reporting student reactions, and I think it’s a mistaken interpretation to focus on that aspect.)

The Columbia task force concludes with this appeal: “We urge administrators and faculty to reaffirm their commitment to providing a rigorous educational environment embedded in principles of tolerance, inclusion, and pluralism. A campus that is more reliant on the courts than universal agreement on its mission is a community at risk.” 

There’s a paradox in calling for “tolerance, inclusion, and pluralism” alongside “universal agreement on its mission.” Pluralism is the opposite of universal agreement, and “universal agreement” implies a lack of tolerance or inclusion for those who do not agree with whatever it is that is supposedly universally agreed upon. The professors and students who thought and think that October 7 was a praiseworthy act of Palestinian national liberation against Israeli settler-colonialism may reasonably ask where’s the tolerance and inclusion for their viewpoint, and why doesn’t the vaunted “pluralism” protect their beliefs and ideas? At worst, “tolerance, inclusion, and pluralism” becomes a battering ram for the boycott-Israel crowd to seize control of the campus Hillel. And if “inclusion” is the key value, how do Columbia’s college, law school, business school and medical school justify rejecting so many of the prospective students who apply? All these selective universities talk about how inclusive they are while also bragging about how exclusive they are, at least when it comes to admissions.

If a university’s primary core values are “tolerance, inclusion, and pluralism,” it’s going to lack the foundation to fight back against the lies. It’s like trying to stand up on quicksand instead of bedrock. At least Harvard has Veritas, or “truth,” as its motto. Yale has “lux et veritas.” Scour the Columbia website pages on “our values” and university “mission statement” or college mission statement. The word “truth” is nowhere to be found. The closest I could find are the nods to excellence in the university mission statement (“advance knowledge and learning at the highest level”) and the Barnard mission statement (“the highest-quality liberal arts education…rigorous academic standards.”) The reference to “rigorous” in the task force language is encouraging, but it could use more emphasis and unpacking.

Compare it to Gann Academy’s recently released core values statement, which starts with the idea that all people are created in the image of God, and includes, “we tell the truth.” Gann is a Jewish high school while Columbia in its current iteration is a global university with no formal religious affiliation, though it began as part of the Church of England. I’m not at all suggesting that Columbia should adopt Gann’s mission statement. And I’m not opposed to “tolerance, inclusion, and pluralism.” But “pluralism” and “inclusion” and “tolerance” are not sufficient principles for Columbia or any other university to find its way out of its present predicament. Progress will instead require some deeper notions of humility, human dignity, rule of law, or, my own favorite, the commandment to “not bear false witness” found in the Torah or Hebrew Bible (texts the Columbia Antisemitism Task Force bizarrely if comically and inartfully refers to as the “Old Testament”).

As I’ve mentioned before here, I’ve been working my way through the six-and-a-half year cycle of Daf Yomi, or page-a-day, study of the Talmud. On one level, the Talmud is all about pluralism, with different interpretations of the law being aired and argued, and with minority views recorded alongside the majority opinions of the sages. Every once in a long while, though, the Talmud records an instance when someone behaves so obnoxiously that he gets thrown out of the study hall, at least temporarily. 

The emphasis on “tolerance, inclusion, and pluralism” is in line with the argument that the problems on campus are a lack of old-fashioned liberalism, and the solution is liberalism rather than leftism or radicalism or progressivism. I’m less concerned with the labels and more with the ideas and the consequences. It could be that the reason Jewish students at Columbia say they avoid walking alone on campus is not a lack of “tolerance, inclusion, and pluralism” on the campus but an overabundance of it, to the point that other values—truth, rule of law, excellence—get trampled. The right move for the Jews is not to beg to be tolerated or included as part of Columbia’s “pluralism.” The right move is for those who care about the institution—from parents, faculty members, and alumni to governing board members and government officials—to ask, as the Foxx Committee has, why any university that aspires to high quality would tolerate and include deans and professors indoctrinating students in lies. Without the ability to throw a scholar out of the study hall, at least temporarily, any educational institution, whether a Babylonian talmudic academy or a 21st century Ivy League university, isn’t an example of pluralism and tolerance but of anarchy.

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