“We Have Lost Our Way,” Columbia’s Board Co-Chair Confesses to Congress
“We Have Lost Our Way,” Columbia’s Board Co-Chair Confesses to Congress
Plus, Trump and Climate Change, Skoll to Florida
The co-chairs of Columbia’s Board of Trustees offered a harsh assessment of their own university to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
“We have a specific problem on our campus right now, and that is rampant antisemitism,” Claire Shipman, co-chair of the Columbia board of trustees, testified before the committee, calling it “outrageous.”
“You are right. We have a moral crisis on our campus,” Shipman told Rep. Rick Allen of Georgia, who had warned the Ivy League representatives that, according to Genesis 12:3, they could be cursed by God if they mistreated the Jews.
“I am not satisfied with where Columbia is at the moment,” Shipman said. “We have a lot of work to do. It’s shocking. We have lost our way.”
The other Columbia trustees co-chair, David Greenwald, was similarly emphatic. “The antisemitism on our campus makes me sick to my stomach,” he told the committee.
Both Greenwald and Shipman said that in retrospect, they would not have supported tenure for Joseph Massad, one of Columbia’s more outspokenly anti-Israel faculty members.
Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, said Massad and another anti-Israel activist on the faculty, Katherine Franke, “are currently under investigation for discriminatory remarks,” and that a third professor that Congress asked about “will never work at Columbia again.”
Pressed about the tilt of the university’s Middle East studies faculty, Shafik said, “Many of these appointment were made in the past, in a different era, and that era is done.”
Members of Congress alternated between praising Columbia for being better than Harvard, MIT, and Penn and criticizing it for still failing to adequately protect Jewish students on campus.
The committee’s chairwoman, Virginia Foxx, said one Jewish student was beaten with a stick, and others had to be locked inside the Kraft Center, the Hillel building, for their own safety. At another event, speakers linked to terrorist groups promoted terrorism, Foxx said. A video showed Columbia protests with participants chanting “death to the Zionist state” and “we will honor all the martyrs.” A former dean of Columbia Law School, David Schizer, testified that one of his students who wears a kippah was approached in the Columbia Law School lobby by someone who said “F* the Jews.”
“You’ve given some good answers today,” said Rep. Nathaniel Moran of Texas.
“Columbia beats Harvard and U. Penn,” said Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida. “You’re saying the right things.”
Yet Bean said students are telling a different story. “This once prestigious university’s reputation is just going down the toilet,” he said.
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