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A U.S. committee that is congressional Wednesday accused Columbia University’s president of failing to guard Jewish students on campus, echoing accusations leveled against three other elite university leaders at a hearing last year that sent shockwaves through higher education.
Columbia President Minouche Shafik responded to the accusations by some members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education additionally the Workforce by strongly denouncing behavior that is antisemitic students and teachers at the New York City-based Ivy League university, and also by pledging there would be effects.
Shafik said the university was facing a crisis that is”moral with antisemitism on campus, and it had taken strong actions against suspected perpetrators. It had suspended pupils who took part in unauthorized protests, for instance, and terminated a professor who supported the Oct. that is deadly 7 on Israel by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, she said.
“Trying to reconcile the speech that is free of those who would like to protest as well as the rights of Jewish pupils to be in a host free of discrimination and harassment is the central challenge on our campus and many other people across the country,” Shafik told the committee.
The presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology together with University of Pennsylvania came under razor-sharp attack due to their responses to questions by members regarding the panel at a hearing in December.
Columbia University Student Protests
In particular, the three were lambasted after declining to deliver a”yes that are simple or “no” answer to Republican U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik whenever she asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews on campus would violate the university rule of conduct.
Coming under intense pressure in the times following the hearing, Elizabeth Magill resigned from Penn’s presidency later in, and Claudine Gay left as president of Harvard in January december.
When asked the question that is exact same Wednesday, Columbia’s Shafik, who’s got offered as the university’s president for about nine months, answered with a easy “Yes, it does.”
Antisemitic and islamophobic incidents reached record high levels in the U.S. by the end of 2023, following the Hamas attack, which killed about 1,200 individuals, and Israel’s fierce counteroffensive in Gaza, that has killed more than 33,000 and left all the enclave that is hamas-led ruins.
Since that time, tensions between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrators on college campuses have boiled over, forcing university administrators to weigh the necessity to ensure students feel safe against their dedication to protecting speech that is free.
Columbia University Protesters
U.S. House Republicans seemed more satisfied with Shafik’s denunciation of antisemitism than the Ivy League presidents her to make sure her administration held offenders to account before her, but pushed.
“the issue is action on campus does not match your rhetoric today,” Representative Aaron Bean of Florida told the panel.
A brand new policy to react to misconduct at protests along with establishing a task force on antisemitism, Shafik said Columbia had place in place.
It enlisted the New York City police to greatly help secure the Manhattan campus during demonstrations and ended up being attempting to implement training that is new antisemitism for the community, she said.
Still, she said, the university had work to do to bolster its process that is vetting for professors, noting that one professor whom was recently employed had been terminated for his support for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and at the very least two professors are currently under investigation for making anti-Israel statements. She also said administrators were trying to determine what types of speech constituted a threat that is punishable.
“we have been making sure that in the years ahead faculty that cross the line and discriminate or harass students on any problem … there will be consequences,” she said.
Shafik was joined at Wednesday’s hearing by the 2 co-chairs of Columbia’s Board of Trustees and a co-chair of the school’s antisemitism task force.
