Columbia University President Answers Tough Questions In Antisemitism Probe

Columbia University President Nemat (Minouche) Shafik was on the hot seat today with a congressional committee that repeatedly pressed her about the school’s response to protests and other campus conflicts arising out of the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel and the ensuing war between the two parties.

Shafik was accompanied to the more than three-hour-long hearing by the co-chairs of Columbia’s Board of Trustees — Claire Shipman and David Greenwald. Also joining them was David Schizer, former dean of Columbia Law School, who is co-chairing an antisemitism task force for the university.

Shafik set an effective tone by agreeing with her interrogators that antisemitism was a significant problem at universities and that it was important to take a tough position against such incidents when they occur. In her opening statement, she acknowledged that Columbia’s policies were not designed to handle the magnitude of the challenges the university faced in the aftermath of the Hamas attack.

Her sentiments were echoed by Shipman, who said “my thoughts are that you are right that we have a moral crisis on our campus,” adding “you’re probably tired of hearing that I find the behavior of some of our students, some of our faculty, unacceptable.”

Shafik pointed to the fact that a number of Columbia students have been suspended or placed on probation for violating campus demonstrations rules. She also said that several faculty members who had voiced anti-Israel sentiments or praised the Hamas attack were being dealt with sternly, including dismissal, although the current status of those consequences was not entirely clear from her answers.

The focus on faculty, including Joseph Massad, a tenured Columbia professor who had described the Hamas attack as a “resistance offensive,” was one main theme in the hearing, with several Republican lawmakers zeroing in on how the university was handling him.

Pressed by Kevin Kiley, (R - Calif.) if she would be willing to tell Columbia faculty who engaged in antisemitic conduct that they should find another place to work, Shafik agreed that she would.

In general, the Columbia team’s testimony was clear and direct, even as they tried to deal with the complexity of the issues and the dilemmas they present. While Shafik struggled to give crisp answers at times, and appeared flustered on occasion, she avoided major missteps for the most part. Whether some of her tougher remarks concerning the disciplining of faculty will be well received back at Columbia remains to be seen.

The hearing marked the second time in four months that presidents from the nation’s leading universities were called to testify before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about how their institutions are handling antisemitism while also protecting the safety and free speech rights of students and faculty.

The Columbia hearing attracted widespread interest in part because December’s hearing with the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania proved to be so controversial and consequential. The barbed questions at that hearing, particularly by Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), prompted answers from the three leaders that were widely panned as being overly legalistic and tone deaf.

After intense criticism of their performance at the hearing, Penn’s President Liz Magill resigned, followed shortly thereafter by Claudine Gay’s announcement that she was stepping down as Harvard’s president.

Shafik and her colleagues were called upon Wednesday to address allegations of an “environment of pervasive antisemitism” at Columbia outlined in a 16-page letter from Committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.). Prior to the hearing Columbia submitted about 4,000 pages of information pertaining to its investigations of antisemitic incidents.

When asked if calls for genocide against Jews would violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Shafik and the three other university representatives all answered “yes.” That answer was in sharp contrast to the equivocation that typified the answers by the presidents at December’s hearing.

Shafik and her team have had months to prepare for the hearing, allowing them to anticipate some of today’s questions. On Tuesday, Shafik shared with the campus an article published in the Wall Street Journal, previewing her Hill remarks.

In that essay, Shafik said that since the October 7 Hamas attack, she had “spent the most of my time addressing its aftershocks. It is hard to describe how difficult this has been, especially on a large, diverse urban campus with students from all over the world and a long tradition of political activism.”

She identified her immediate responsibility as ensuring the physical safety of the campus community, adding that, “we were for the most part successful in that respect. Most of our students, faculty and staff understood this priority, welcomed it and were crucial partners in helping us keep our campus safe.”

But a more difficult challenge was how to “reconcile the speech rights of one part of our community with the rights of another part of our community to live in a supportive environment or at least an environment free of fear, harassment and discrimination,” Shafik wrote.

Admitting that finding that balance was difficult, and that “at times we were simultaneously implementing new policies and modifying existing ones,” Shafik outlined four lessons Columbia had learned about the impact of the Israel-Hamas conflict that should help the university better address such issues going forward.

First, Shafik claimed that “contrary to the depiction we have seen on social media, the most of people protesting do so from a place of genuine political disagreement, not from personal hatred or bias or support for terrorism.” As long as those protests don’t “cross the line into threats, discrimination or harassment, they “should be protected speech on our campus, especially if it reflects diplomatic, political, historical or policy beliefs.”

However, disagreements “should happen within specific parameters,” Shafik wrote. “Calling for the genocide of a people—whether they are Israelis or Palestinians, Jews, Muslims or anyone else—has no place in a university community. Such words are outside the bounds of legitimate debate and unimaginably harmful.”

Second, Shafik admitted that drawing the line between permissible and impermissible campus speech was “enormously difficult,” pointing to two centuries of struggle for the U.S. Supreme Court to define the limits of free speech under the First Amendment. “Don’t expect universities to figure it out overnight,” she wrote. “When such fundamental issues are at stake, we need to think hard about where we set the boundaries, and we are doing precisely that.”

Shafik noted that Columbia is now defining a designated space for protests, an approach that places fewer limits on speech. “Those who don’t want to hear what is being said need not listen,” her WSJ piece said. “It also means that the core functions of the university—teaching and learning, research in libraries and labs—can continue uninterrupted.”

Third, college presidents should limit official institutional statements “to issues that speak directly to life on campus,” rather than commenting on broader social issues. “At the same time, students and faculty should feel unconstrained in developing their own opinions,” Shafik wrote.

Fourth, universities “should become models for how people grow and thrive when they live side by side with others who are different,” Shafik added. “It is a great thing for higher education to reflect society and for groups that have been marginalized or excluded to be welcomed. But in responding to this positive shift, I fear that we may have underinvested in the many things that we share and in the common human experiences that bind us together.”

Shafik closed the WSJ piece by unambiguously condemning antisemitism, an attempted prebuttal of the criticism her colleagues faced over their waffly answers at the December hearing. Writing that is not the responsibility of Jewish people to eradicate antisemitism, she argued it’s “a job for all of us. We must urgently and relentlessly fight this terrible form of hate. Universities, the great purveyors of education, must be leaders in fighting all forms of discrimination.”

Of course, as reasonable as her positions were and as artfully as they were crafted, Shafik faced the same problem her peers encountered when they were grilled on Capitol Hill. Congressional hearings are usually not about uncovering common principles. They’re about scoring partisan points and securing soundbites. They’re more political theater than serious academic discussion.

Wednesday’s hearing was no exception, as some Republican lawmakers continued to push their crusade against what they decried as “woke” universities and express skepticism about how schools like Columbia have responded to the ongoing tensions on campus. And they were given some fresh evidence to support their critique as pro-Palestinian students organized a campus occupation just hours before Shafik testified, demanding that Columbia divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Nonetheless, Shafik proved effective during much of her lengthy testimony. She was decisive but also managed to provide nuanced answers that did not appear overly evasive. When asked if phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” were antisemitic, Shafik tried to hedge her answer, “I hear them as such, some people don’t.” But after Schizer voiced his opinion that the phrase did constitute antisemitism, Shafik concurred.

In the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict, university presidents have faced the nearly impossible task of balancing the free speech rights that good universities seek to protect alongside the necessity of providing a safe and secure campus environment. At many universities, Jewish students report feeling unsafe, while at the same time Arab and Muslim students point to an increase in Islamophobia. How can those two sets of feelings be acknowledged and respected? How do you write a rule that governs how an institution handles the highly polarized beliefs of its members?

It’s a narrow path to navigate, particularly when actors on both sides — to say nothing of opportunistic politicians — can try to exploit the disagreement to gain an advantage in the battle for public support. Shafik and her colleagues gave a good example today of university leadership striving to find that path. They offered a thoughtful model for other universities to study and follow.