[ Like other universities, the school has cracked down on activism
among students, citing fears of antisemitism. Some professors think
it’s gone too far.]
[[link removed]]

COLUMBIA SUSPENDED PRO-PALESTINE STUDENT GROUPS. THE FACULTY REVOLTED
 
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Andrew Marantz
December 2, 2023
The New Yorker
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_ Like other universities, the school has cracked down on activism
among students, citing fears of antisemitism. Some professors think
it’s gone too far. _

Protesters gathered on Columbia’s campus on Tuesday to protest the
banning of the university’s chapters of Students for Justice in
Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace., Bing Guan for The New York
Times

 

It was a bright morning two Wednesdays ago, and Manan Ahmed, a
professor of South Asian history at Columbia, was rushing across
Broadway, trying to find a print shop that could make a giant poster
on short notice. As he walked, he texted a few
colleagues—classicists, anthropologists, other historians—asking
whether anyone knew where to get a megaphone. “We’re nerds,
man,” he told me. “Tracking down a medieval scroll in some dusty
archive? That we know how to do. We have no goddam idea how to
organize a protest.”

Ahmed, who is fifty-two, wears chunky black glasses, several rings, a
salt-and-pepper beard, and nail polish on his left hand. That day, he
had on a charcoal-gray suit, a white scarf, and a green watch cap.
“The colors of the Palestinian flag,” he said. “Well, most of
them. I couldn’t find anything red that went with this ’fit.” On
Broadway, he found a shop that could handle his request: a huge blue
poster (“Faculty Protest for Academic Freedom”) and an even bigger
black poster with the marquee headline “_we, the faculty,
demand_.” (The five demands below were too wordy to be read at a
distance. “I told you, we’re academics,” he said. “We don’t
really do bumper stickers.”) In a couple of hours, he and several
dozen other faculty would hold a rally—organized hastily, via
semisecret text threads—on the steps of Low Library, at the center
of campus. The administration, citing vague and protean rules, had
recently ordered the Columbia chapters of two student
groups—Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for
Peace—to disband for the rest of the fall semester. “They said it
was for ‘student safety,’ and of course Jewish students, like all
students, deserve to be protected,” Ahmed said. “But the way the
university did it was totally shady.”

According to _New York_ magazine
[[link removed]],
during a rally sponsored by those two groups, “a passerby
unaffiliated with any Palestinian organization made a scene, shouting
an antisemitic, racist rant,” and one of the organizers “took the
bullhorn to condemn him.” Both student organizations were suspended
the next day. Ahmed and the other professors, arguing that the
university had violated its own principles of free expression, were
demanding that the groups be reinstated. “Columbia students have
organized plenty of actions like this at Low Library, most famously in
1968,” Ahmed told me, referring to an escalating series of protests
[[link removed]] led
by Students for a Democratic Society and other groups. “Faculty, as
far as I know, have never done anything like this before.”

This semester, like most semesters, Ahmed is teaching a course called
Colonization/Decolonization. Six weeks in—after the class had read
Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism
[[link removed]]” and
before a series of discussions on whether the modern university,
including Columbia University, was an extension of the colonialist
project—came October 7th
[[link removed]]:
Hamas’s attack on southern Israel and the Israeli military’s
retaliatory bombing in Gaza. “I had students asking, in class and
outside of class, ‘Should we understand this through the lens of
anti-colonial resistance, or does that not apply?’ ” Ahmed said.
“Asking questions, trying to interpret what they’re seeing—the
kind of thing we’re supposed to be encouraging around here, I was
led to believe. But the students were getting the message ‘If you
say the wrong thing, you will be punished.’ ”

This fall has been the season of a thousand open letters, and Columbia
is no exception. On October 11th, twenty Columbia student groups
published a letter
[[link removed]] under
the heading “Oppression Breeds Resistance.” It began by mourning
“the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis”
but then asserted, in bold, that “the weight of responsibility for
the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist
government.” Some people on campus agreed that this claim was
undeniable. Others found it distasteful or misguided, and responded
with counter-arguments. Adam Guillette, a right-wing activist with no
affiliation to Columbia, didn’t bother with counter-arguments. (“I
identify as a classical liberal,” Guillette told me.) Instead, he
parked a “doxxing truck
[[link removed]]”
outside the campus gates, displaying the names and faces of some of
the students who had co-authored the letter (or so Guillette thought),
beneath the words “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.” Two of them,
law students who had been offered jobs at a white-shoe firm, had those
offers rescinded
[[link removed]];
another student, who denied having any connection to the letter, is
reportedly suing
[[link removed]] Guillette
for defamation. (“We’ve never doxed anyone, nor would we,”
Guillette told me. “They dox me pretty much every day.”)

On October 11th, according to police, an Israeli Columbia student who
was hanging a hostage poster was beaten
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a stick. Two weeks later, a swastika
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drawn on a bathroom wall. Yinon Cohen, a professor of Israeli and
Jewish Studies at Columbia, told me in an e-mail that antisemitic
incidents have increased since October 7th but that the letter from
the student groups was not one of them: “Only if you conflate harsh
criticism of Israel’s actions with antisemitism can you view this
statement as antisemitic.” This line of thinking didn’t deter
Guillette, who previously worked for the vigilante culture-war
outfit Project Veritas
[[link removed]] and
who now runs a smaller organization called Accuracy in Media. Accuracy
in Media bought dozens of URLs, under the names of the students it had
just doxed, and also the URL columbiahatesjews.com, where visitors
were encouraged to send a prewritten form letter to Columbia’s Board
of Trustees. (“Tell them to take action against these despicable,
hateful students.”) In late October, a hundred and seventy-seven
Columbia faculty responded to all this with another open letter
[[link removed]],
arguing that “one of the core responsibilities of a world-class
university is to interrogate the underlying facts of both settled
propositions and those that are ardently disputed,” a responsibility
that is “profoundly undermined when our students are vilified.” A
larger group of faculty denounced this letter in yet another letter
[[link removed]] (“the
University cannot tolerate violence, speech that incites it, or hate
speech”).

What could have been a contest of ideas was instead devolving into a
call-the-manager competition, with each side attempting to
out-complain the other. The manager, in this case, was Minouche
Shafik, an Egyptian British baroness who has served as a
vice-president of the World Bank, a member of the House of Lords, and,
beginning in July, the twentieth president of Columbia University. She
released statement after statement
[[link removed]], satisfying no one.
Barnard, the women’s college within Columbia, has its own president,
Laura Rosenbury, who was also a few months into the job. (Prior to
that, she was the dean of the law school at the University of Florida,
where she was accused
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“kowtowing” to the McCarthyite whims of that state’s
governor, Ron DeSantis [[link removed]].)
“I am appalled and saddened to see antisemitism and anti-Zionism
spreading throughout Barnard and Columbia,” Rosenbury wrote in one
of her “community messages
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a soothing, ecumenical tone, but her apparent conflation of
antisemitism with anti-Zionism—with the latter implicitly
categorized as appalling hate speech, rather than a legitimate form of
critique—only led to more outrage.

“Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism are
directed against persons for who they are,” Nadia Abu El-Haj, an
anthropology professor at Barnard and Columbia, wrote
[[link removed]] in a
public letter to Rosenbury. “To render anti-Zionism equivalent to
the first three is to commit a fundamental category mistake that is
not sustainable on any serious intellectual grounds.” Rosenbury and
Barnard’s provost met with Abu El-Haj, she told me, but “it was
totally disingenuous. They wanted to have it both ways. In private, it
was, ‘We hear you, we know that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are
not necessarily the same, we didn’t mean it.’ But then they
wouldn’t publicly retract the statement conflating the two, I guess
because they think that’s what donors want to hear.” (“Our
president and provost both strongly dispute that characterization,”
a spokesperson for Barnard College said.)

Accusations of donor manipulation can be fraught, especially when it
comes to this particular issue. Yet some donors, at least, have had no
problem admitting that they are trying to exert ideological influence
over university policy. Leon Cooperman
[[link removed]]—a
conservative Zionist, a hedge-fund billionaire, and a Columbia
alumnus—was interviewed
[[link removed]] on
Fox Business in late October. The anchor asked him about Joseph
Massad, a Columbia professor who had characterized
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Hamas militants on paragliders as “an innovative Palestinian
resistance,” and also about a walkout that was under way at
Columbia, where student activists were demanding a ceasefire. “Where
are we in the world,” the anchor began, “when thirteen hundred
Israeli civilians—”

“I think these kids at the colleges have shit for brains,”
Cooperman said, interrupting. “I’ve given to Columbia probably
about fifty million dollars, over many years, and I’m gonna suspend
my giving.”

“Wow,” the anchor said. “So, right here, right now, you’re
saying no more money to Columbia?”

“Unless I see a change,” Cooperman said. “I’ve told them that
they should fire this professor.” A few days later, Henry Swieca,
another hedge-fund billionaire, resigned from the board of overseers
at Columbia Business School, writing, “With blatantly anti-Jewish
student groups and professors allowed to operate with complete
impunity, it sends a clear and distressing message that Jews are not
just unwelcome, but also unsafe on campus.”

This was all a bit exhausting—some Columbia students joked that they
hardly had time for classwork, what with all the statements and
counterstatements they were expected to read. (I, too, signed an
open letter
[[link removed]] in
support of a ceasefire last month.) Still, apart from the doxing,
these forms of discourse might have made John Stuart Mill proud:
objectionable speech answered with more speech. Then came the bans.
The Barnard Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
posted a statement on its official site expressing solidarity with
“the Palestinian people who have resisted settler colonial war,
occupation, and apartheid for over 75 years.” On October 22nd,
without warning, Barnard administrators took the statement down,
claiming that it was “in violation of existing College policies.”
Three weeks later, Columbia suspended the campus chapters of Students
for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, citing
“University policies” regulating “the time, place and manner of
certain forms of public expression.” (The Columbia student paper,
the _Spectator_, reported
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some of the relevant “university policies” had been subtly altered
two weeks prior.) Some students and professors rushed to the defense
of the student groups, arguing that the allegations against them were
trumped up or that the university was, at best, enforcing its rules
selectively. “There’s no precedent for simply banning a student
group—certainly not like this, unilaterally, without
transparency,” Joseph Howley, a Columbia classics professor, told
me. “There are clear procedures for how such claims and
counter-claims are supposed to be adjudicated, going back to 1968, and
the administration seems to have ignored those procedures on the way
to getting the outcome it wanted.” (“We are committed to
preserving an environment in which debate and protest are encouraged
and protected,” a Columbia spokesperson wrote in a statement
to _The New Yorker_. “The two groups in question” were given
“numerous warnings that clearly laid out that failure to respect the
required processes would have consequences.”)

Howley is well known on campus; he is the chair of Literature
Humanities, the core canonical-literature course that all first-year
undergraduates are required to take. “The other day, in class, we
were discussing the Oresteia,” he said, and students had drawn
connections “between what the play has to say about retributive
justice and what was in the news.” He began our conversation with a
phlegmatic bearing—imagine a classics professor during office
hours—but, when he was talking about students’ speech being
chilled, his voice tightened with indignation. “Isn’t this why we
ask students to read these ancient texts, because it’s supposed to
help them understand the world?” he went on. “If we can’t allow
our students to notice patterns and raise them in the classroom, then,
as educators, what are we doing?”

Famous lines from Supreme Court opinions, like canonical movie quips,
are often punched up in the collective retelling. Gordon Gekko’s
best-known maxim actually included a few filler words, but the way
it’s remembered—“greed is good”—is better. Similarly, if you
ask a law student to recite the counter-speech doctrine, you might get
something pithy, like “the best answer to speech you don’t like is
more speech.” The original sentence, in a concurring opinion from
1927, was more orotund: “If there be time to expose through
discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the
processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not
enforced silence.”

The author of these words was Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish
Supreme Court Justice. In 1948, Brandeis University was established in
his honor. Earlier this month, Students for Justice in Palestine held
a rally on the Brandeis campus, in Waltham, Massachusetts, and police
were called to the scene. “The lead speakers chanted loudly into the
bullhorns using an animated and passionate tone that was mirrored by
the crowd,” a police report read. “Some chants, such as ‘From
the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and ‘intifada,’
were determined by the University to be anti-Semitic hate speech.”
These chants, the report continued, “created an environment which
created a hazardous or physically offensive condition by an act that
served no legitimate purpose of the defendant; their actions had
affected the public in an alarming way.” Police officers broke up
the rally and arrested seven of the protesters. Enforced silence,
indeed.

Defenders of Israel’s actions often repeat the claim that it is the
only free country in the Middle East, but since October 7th there has
been an alarming effort, both in Israel
[[link removed]] and
abroad, to stifle speech that is critical of Israel’s actions or
supportive of Palestinians. Last month, Suella Braverman, the British
Home Secretary, suggested
[[link removed]] that
it might be illegal in the U.K. to wave a Palestinian flag. (She has
since been removed from her post.) In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s
administration ordered
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universities in Florida to “deactivate” chapters of Students for
Justice in Palestine; the next day, the Anti-Defamation League asked
universities across the country to investigate S.J.P. students for
“materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.” In
Calgary, a man who chanted “from the river to the sea”
was charged
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a hate crime; in California, the editor of a science magazine
was fired
[[link removed]] after
retweeting _The Onion_. On MSNBC, three Muslim anchors were
temporarily removed
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the air, though the network said that the removals were coincidental;
one of them, Mehdi Hasan, recently had his show cancelled
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though the network would not say why.

Nathan Thrall, a Jewish author who was born in California and lives in
Jerusalem, spent the past several years working on a narrative
nonfiction book called “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
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The book, a searing yet understated account of one Palestinian
family’s travails under occupation in the West Bank, was published
four days before the Hamas attack. “Obviously, the book is not a
polemic about the recent conflict,” Thrall told me. “It hardly
even mentions Gaza.” Still, when he embarked on an international
book tour, several of his long-scheduled events were abruptly
cancelled. “I hope we can have it in person soon, when this dies
down,” an organizer who withdrew an invitation in Los Angeles told
[[link removed]] the _Guardian_.
Thrall was on his way to speak at Conway Hall, in London, when he
heard that the Metropolitan Police had ordered the venue to close its
doors; a concert of Palestinian classical music, at Southwark
Cathedral, was also postponed, owing to “safety concerns.”
“It’s a moral panic,” Thrall told me. “People would rather
hear nothing than hear anything that challenges their assumptions
about the root causes of the conflict.”

“We’ve seen this many times over the years, but the vehemence this
time does feel different,” Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia
and probably the most prominent living historian of Palestine, told
me. Khalidi was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Middle
East peace talks in Madrid, in 1991, and in Washington, D.C., in 1993.
His most recent book, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
[[link removed]],”
was published in 2020; this year, after October 7th, it became a
best-seller.

The book’s subtitle frames the conflict in terms of “settler
colonialism and resistance.” “The 1988 Hamas charter is full of
blatant anti-Semitism, no doubt,” he told me, “but the issue of
Palestinian resistance is not fundamentally an anti-Jewish issue. It
is an anti-colonial issue. If the people stealing Palestinians’ land
had been Martians, the reaction would have been no different.” At
the same time, he has rejected the claim that all forms of
anti-colonial resistance are justified, and he has been clear since
October 7th that Hamas’s targeting of Israeli civilians was a war
crime. “If a Native American liberation movement came and fired an
R.P.G. at my apartment building because I’m living on stolen land,
would that be justified?” he said. “Of course it wouldn’t be
justified. . . . You either accept international humanitarian law or
you don’t.” This combination of views has earned him antagonists
on all sides, but, he said with a shrug, “That’s what tenure is
for.” His foes on the Israel-apologist right have often lamented,
sometimes in racist terms, how difficult it is to get professors like
Khalidi fired. The most recent issue of _The New Criterion_ opens
with an essay
[[link removed]] fulminating
against Khalidi and his “anti-Semitic, historically illiterate”
colleagues, under the headline “Tenured Barbarians.”

Khalidi holds an endowed professorship named for Edward Said, who
began teaching at Columbia in 1963 and stayed for four decades. During
that time, Columbia built an internationally famous department of
Middle Eastern studies, with a particular focus on Palestine. I spoke
to one Jewish professor who referred to Columbia as “Birzeit on the
Hudson”; he meant this as a compliment, but other Jews, throughout
the decades, have not. “A million Jews live in New York, more than
in any other city in the world except Tel Aviv, and it is safe to say
that whenever something involving Jews unsettles the Columbia campus,
uptown in Morningside Heights, New Yorkers know,” Jane Kramer wrote
[[link removed]], in _The
New Yorker_, in 2008. “Israel is the cause that can raise a
constituency out of an otherwise fractious, and famously skeptical,
Jewish population, and push it into a kind of collective panic.”
Kramer was writing about another series of disputes at Columbia over
critiques of Zionism and academic freedom. The article mentioned
Khalidi and Joseph Massad—and a few students who reported feeling
marginalized in Massad’s class, including a recent Columbia graduate
named Bari Weiss—but its main focus was the anthropologist Nadia Abu
El-Haj, who had done her field work in Israel and had recently come up
for tenure. “No one in her department doubted she would get it,”
Kramer reported—until a Jewish Barnard alumna started a campaign to
derail Abu El-Haj’s career. (The alumna told Kramer that she
considered Abu El-Haj’s ethnic background—her father was born in
Palestine—to be a “red flag.”)

Late last month, Abu El-Haj was one of a few Barnard professors who
had the idea to organize protests against the administration. “I
didn’t expect much heroism from administrators, I have to be honest,
but even I have been shocked by how thoroughly they have caved to
outside pressure,” she said. “It’s not only about the question
of Palestine. It’s about the next time mega-donors pressure you to
make an exception to academic freedom and robust debate, how can we
trust that you’ll stand your ground?” Administrators told her that
they were hearing from Jewish students who found phrases like “free
Palestine” threatening. “I told them, ‘If you want to go down
that road, then I have plenty of Arab students who feel threatened by
the Israeli flag or the Israeli national anthem. Are we going to ban
all of it?’ They had no response to that.”

Ahmed dropped the posters at his office in the history department,
then walked across Amsterdam Avenue to the law school, where students
had invited him to participate in a lunchtime teach-in about South
Asia and Palestine. Flyers for upcoming teach-ins were laid out on a
table, along with a “Boycott List” (“Starbucks is suing its
union after the union expressed support for Palestine. Buy Joe Coffee
instead”) and a “Genocide Report Card” (“Law firms are
enabling Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and Palestinian
genocide. . . . Remember this during recruiting season”). Before the
event, the student tasked with introducing Ahmed asked whether she
should pronounce his first name with the emphasis on the first or
second syllable. “Depends which side of the border you’re on,”
he replied, referring to India and Pakistan; in Morningside Heights,
he went on, “anything goes.”

The teach-in covered a lot of ground: the repressive imperial
strategies of Lord Curzon, the militant resistance of Bhagat Singh,
the revolutionary poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. While Ahmed spoke
(“I’d like to think together with you about the definitional
question of what constitutes legitimate resistance”), trays of food
were delivered, and the scent of saffron wafted through the classroom.
A student organizer returned to the dais and said, “I’d like to
acknowledge that the biryani has arrived.” The students broke for
lunch. Ahmed left, gathered the posters from his office, and headed
for Low Library.

Several dozen faculty, graduate students, and staff stood on the
library steps, while a police helicopter hovered overhead. “I’m
tenured, but a lot of adjuncts and others here are taking a real
risk,” Ahmed said. The demonstration began, and Ahmed spoke first,
doing his best to distill his discursive style into something closer
to call-and-response. “We come together to reject all efforts to
curtail or prohibit political speech on campus,” he shouted into a
megaphone. “Make some noise for freedom of expression!”

About a hundred students were there, including students from the two
banned groups, some holding up cardboard signs (“I am a Jewish voice
for peace”), or banging pots and pans in lieu of applause. Behind
them, about two dozen counter-protesters—many of them Israeli
faculty at Columbia, including professors of engineering and computer
science—held up red posters bearing the names and photos of hostages
taken by Hamas. “Bring them home!” they chanted. On the steps,
Joseph Howley delivered a nuanced and surprisingly personal speech.
“My Jewish ancestors were killed and made refugees by pogroms like
the ones carried out by Hamas militants on October 7th, and like the
ones that have been happening all year in the West Bank,” he said.
“No Jews anywhere are safe from the scourge of antisemitism as long
as a nuclear superpower governed by extremists carries out daily
atrocities in our name.” The counter-protesters did not seem to be
listening. “Look at the babies!” a woman holding a hostage sign
shouted. “You don’t care about the babies!” One
counter-protester, an Israeli professor, told me, “The things these
protesters are doing, blocking streets, occupying buildings—Jewish
students would never do this.” I asked him why, and he looked at me
as if the answer were too obvious to bear mentioning. “Because
they’re more civilized,” he said.

The Columbia chapters of S.J.P. and J.V.P. have not been reinstated as
of this writing, and administrators have declined to provide specific
information about when they might be or precisely how the decision
will be reached. (“The action taken was limited and proportional to
the violations,” the Columbia spokesperson wrote. “It is a
temporary suspension that invites the groups to get back into dialogue
with their official advisers so that the suspension can be lifted.”)
The day after the faculty protest, in a small, wood-panelled room on
campus, the undergraduate dean of humanities introduced a conversation
between Rashid Khalidi and Yinon Cohen, on the capacious topic of
“War and Peace in Israel/Palestine.” Cookies and coffee were
served (not Starbucks). Abu El-Haj sat in the front row. Ahmed tried
to get in, but the room was full by the time he arrived, with students
packing the aisles, and he was turned away.

The two professors held forth for an hour and a half, mostly taking
questions from the audience. Khalidi spoke extemporaneously; Cohen
seemed to have a slide deck prepared for every question. When someone
asked whether Hamas had a democratic mandate in Gaza, Cohen stood,
plugged in his laptop, and opened a PowerPoint, dense with polling
data, called “What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas.” When
another audience member asked whether “from the river to the sea”
was an inherently genocidal phrase, Cohen, with a weary sigh, stood
again and pulled up a PowerPoint called “From the River to the
Sea.” On his way out, Khalidi was surrounded by admirers, but he did
his best to push through: he was scheduled to speak at another event
across campus, and he was already late. The same day, Columbia law
students had scheduled a teach-in with Omar Shakir, the Israel and
Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch. Shortly before that event
began, the university cancelled it, citing “security concerns.”

_Andrew Marantz
[[link removed]] is a staff
writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Antisocial: Online
Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American
Conversation
[[link removed]].”_

* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Student protests
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* Jewish Voice for Peace
[[link removed]]
* Columbia University
[[link removed]]
* Free Speech
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*
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*
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