“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.
The hearing returned to some familiar themes from the post October 7 campus environment. An earlier hearing of the committee led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania and helped to propel Rep. Elise Stefanik to consideration as President Trump’s running mate.
One such theme is ideological diversity, or the lack of it, on the faculty. “When we are talking about diversity, it should be ideological, too,” said Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina.
“Why don’t you aim for a little more ideological diversity,” Rep. Glenn Grothman said.
Schizer described himself as a conservative, and Shafik mentioned Glenn Hubbard, the Russell Carson Professor of Economics at Columbia Business School.
“I am personally incredibly committed to viewpoint diversity,” Shafik said.
“I’d love more conservatives,” Schizer said.
Another theme is, as I have been stressing, that the war on Jews is a war on capitalism. Wilson asked Shafik about a Columbia School of Social Work orientation glossary that “identified capitalism as a system of oppression.” Wilson called it “so insulting and stupid and historically incorrect.”
Stefanik pressed Shafik about changing her testimony during the hearing and being uncertain about whether Massad been removed from an academic leadership role. Shafik, under questioning from Stefanik, agreed to remove him, resisting what must have been a strong impulse to defend the independence of the university from congressional pressure.
Foxx closed the hearing by suggesting that Shafik misled the committee with testimony claiming that 15 students had been suspended for October 7-related activity, noting that many of the suspensions had been lifted, but that suspensions remained in place for a couple of Jewish students who used a “fart smell” prank spray at an anti-Israel protest remained suspended. Shafik also announced that the university is investigating an Israeli professor, Shai Davidai, for “harassment,” saying they’d received more than 50 complaints about him. Davidai has been one of the most outspoken public critics of Columbia’s handling of anti-Israel protests and antisemitic incidents.
Skoll to Florida: The flow of talent and capital to lower-tax state, lower-regulation states like Florida and Texas and New Hampshire from high-tax, high-regulation states like California, Illinois, and New York has been a long-running topic around here, with examples including Ken Griffin, Sean Hannity, Jeff Bezos, Billy Joel, Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, Ken Griffin, Carl Icahn, Paul Tudor Jones, Paul Simon. Add to the list: eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll, who, the New York Times notes in passing today, moved to Florida from California in December 2021, “citing smoke from wildfires.”
The wildfire smoke explains why he left California but not why he chose to move to Florida rather than, say, some other place without a lot of wildfire smoke but with higher taxes, such as Boston, New York, Chicago, or Washington, D.C.
Trump and climate change: When John Kerry last month dismissed the idea that a Trump presidential victory in 2024 would be an insurmountable setback for the climate, I wrote, “If the Trump campaign is clever, it might consider using this clip in messages targeted at climate-concerned voters. It could help neutralize the issue.”
Now Al Gore is sounding a similar note. He tells the New York Times: “If Trump were to be elected, I think that the favorable trends in renewable energy, battery storage, electric vehicles, green hydrogen, circular manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, sustainable forestry, would all continue to move in the right direction.” Again, if the Trump campaign is smart, they’ll be making sure that climate-concerned voters hear this message from Gore.
The Times Gore interview is in question-and-answer format, and in some sense, the questions from Times reporter Cara Buckley are nearly as newsworthy as Gore’s answers. One says, “What does that mean for the need to stop burning fossil fuels, which scientists say is imperative?”
Recent work: “After Review, New York Times Stands by Its Editorial on Pausing Aid to Israel,” is the headline over my latest column at the Algemeiner. Please check it out there if you are interested in that topic.
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