NEW YORK – A US congressional committee on April 17 accused Columbia University’s president Minouche Shafik of failing to protect Jewish students on campus, echoing accusations levelled against three other elite university leaders at a hearing in 2023 that sent shockwaves through higher education.
Ms Shafik responded to the accusations by some members of the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce by strongly denouncing anti-Semitic behaviour by students and professors at the New York City-based Ivy League university and by pledging there would be consequences.
Ms Shafik said the university was facing a “moral crisis” with anti-Semitism on campus, and it had taken strong actions against suspected perpetrators.
It suspended students who participated in unauthorised protests, for example, and terminated a professor who supported the deadly Oct 7 attack on Israel by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, she added.
“Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of discrimination and harassment has been the central challenge on our campus and numerous others across the country,” Ms Shafik told the committee.
At a hearing in December, the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania came under sharp attack for their responses to questions by members of the panel.
In particular, the three were lambasted after declining to provide a simple “yes” or “no” answer to Republican US Representative Elise Stefanik when she asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews on campus would violate the university code of conduct.
Coming under intense pressure in the days after the hearing, Ms Elizabeth Magill resigned from Penn’s presidency later in December, and Ms Claudine Gay left as president of Harvard in January.
When asked the same question on April 17, Columbia’s Ms Shafik, who has served as the university’s president for about nine months, answered with a simple: “Yes, it does.”
Anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents reached record high levels in the US at the end of 2023 following the Hamas attack, which killed about 1,200 people, and Israel’s fierce counter-offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 33,000 and left most of the Hamas-led enclave in ruins.
Since then, tensions between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrators on college campuses have boiled over, forcing university administrators to weigh the need to ensure students feel safe against their commitment to protecting free speech.
US House Republicans seemed more satisfied with Ms Shafik’s denunciation of anti-Semitism than the Ivy League presidents before her, but pushed her to make sure her administration held offenders to account.
“The problem is action on campus doesn’t match your rhetoric today,” Representative Aaron Bean of Florida told the panel.
In addition to establishing a task force on anti-Semitism, Ms Shafik said Columbia had put in place a new policy to respond to misconduct at protests.
It also enlisted the New York City police to help secure the Manhattan campus during demonstrations and was working to implement new training on anti-Semitism for the community, she added.
Still, Ms Shafik said, the university had work to do to bolster its vetting process for hiring professors, noting that one professor who was recently hired had been terminated for his support for Hamas’ Oct 7 attack and at least two professors are currently under investigation for making anti-Israel statements.
She added that administrators were working to determine what types of speech constituted a punishable threat.
“We are making sure that going forward, faculty that cross the line and discriminate or harass students on any issue... there will be consequences.”
Ms Shafik was joined at the hearing on April 17 by the two co-chairs of Columbia’s Board of Trustees and a co-chair of the school’s anti-Semitism task force. REUTERS
