United States: Almost four months after two Ivy League presidents stepped down following a highly debated congressional hearing, the president of Columbia University will be appearing before the same committee to answer questions about antisemitism at the University and what the school did not do during the obvious fighting on its campus during Israel-Hamas war, as reported by Associated Press.
Examining Antisemitism
The leader of the Expert Panel, Nemat Shafik, was initially asked by the House Education and Workforce Committee to testify before its session in December, but she declined, saying she had scheduling conflicts.
The only witnesses called for the December hearing were the president of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, whose word choices contributed to the controversy. The past Penn and Harvard presidents recently resigned.
In front of the public during the December hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., cross-examined the university leaders, asking for their response on the matter of “calling for the genocide of Jews” and its violation of universities’ codes of conduct.
Liz Magill, the ex-president of Penn, and Claudine Gay, the ex-president of Harvard, both said it would be dependent on the particulars of the while averring. Sally Kornbluth, MIT’s President, had not heard of such genocidal calls against Jews on MIT’s campus. Thoughts of this kind and speech addressed to people and not a public discussion will all be considered harassment.
Responses and Reactions
The responses by the university presidents were prompt and well-intended, but they came with mixed reactions from the donors, alumni, and local politicians. Magill quickly tendered his resignation following the hearing. Gay resigned in January after the election campaign finished while accusing her of plagiarism.
The executive director of the Center for Global Development, Shafik, is predicted to corroborate their statement Wednesday along with the University’s board of directors. In shameful resemblance to the climate in sister schools, Columbia was plagued by rumors of racial prejudice and conflict. Shafik, wiser in choosing phrases she will use in the speech, will have the advantage of hindsight to overcome those. In an article shown in the Wall Street Journal in the March 12 issue, Shafik had a clear argument on the balance between freedom of expression and security in college stations.
“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,” Shafik wrote. “Such words are unimaginably harmful and outside the bounds of legitimate debate.”
On October 7, 2014, the Hamas attack on Israel broke down, and tensions were set high on the university campuses. Jewish students have reported that their schools have not taken measures that tackle antisemitism sufficiently. While students who support Palestinians on campus say they are disproportionately censored and disciplined separately, the campus administrations say they are only fulfilling their speech code obligations, as reported by Associated Press.
Legal Battles and Civil Rights Concerns
While there are many other institutions, as well as school districts, which are under the microscope of the Department of Education that is looking out for cases of antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus, Columbia is among them. It has proved equally as a target for lawsuits, e.g. from parties on both sides. The NY Civil Liberties Union settled a lawsuit focusing on whether or not the University only targeted two pro-Palestinian student groups through allegations of complicity in campus protests in late 2015. Jewish organizations have joined, as well, with the members filing lawsuits for antisemitism on campus has violated their civil rights.