Earlier today the House Education and the Workforce Committee grilled Columbia University president Nemat Shafik about antisemitism on campus. Some of you may recall what happened the last time the presidents of elite universities testified before Congress.
Watch entire hearing here.
On April 10, twenty-three Jewish faculty at Columbia published an op-ed in the Columbia Spectator (with a link to a longer letter to Shafik) arguing that congressional hearings are not the place to talk about the complexity of these issues. Here is a taste of the piece:
We write as Jewish faculty of Columbia and Barnard in anticipation of your appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, where you are expected to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. Based on the committee’s previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses. We urge you, as the University president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism.
Rather than being concerned with the safety and well-being of Jewish students on campuses, the committee is leveraging antisemitism in a wider effort to caricature and demonize universities as hotbeds of “woke indoctrination.” Its opportunistic use of antisemitism in a moment of crisis is expanding and strengthening longstanding efforts to undermine educational institutions. After launching attacks on public universities from Florida to South Dakota, this campaign has opened a new front against private institutions.
The prospect of Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of congress with a history of espousing white nationalist politics, calling university presidents to account for alleged antisemitism on their campuses reveals these proceedings as disingenuous political theater.
In the face of these coordinated attacks on higher education, universities must insist on their freedom to research and teach inconvenient truths. This includes historical injustices and the contemporary structures that perpetuate them, regardless of whether these facts are politically inexpedient for certain interest groups.
To be sure, antisemitism is a grave concern that should be scrutinized alongside racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and all other forms of hate. These hateful ideologies exist everywhere and we would be ignorant to believe that they don’t exist at Columbia. When antisemitism rears its head, it should be swiftly denounced, and its perpetrators held to account. However, it is absurd to claim that antisemitism—“discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” according to the Jerusalem Declaration’s definition—is rampant on Columbia’s campus. To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term.
Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness, of political ideology with identity. This conflation betrays a woefully inaccurate understanding—and disingenuous misrepresentation—of Jewish history, identity, and politics. It erases more than a century of debates among Jews themselves about the nature of a Jewish homeland in the biblical Land of Israel, including Israel’s status as a Jewish nation-state. It dismisses the experiences of the post-Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist Jews who work, study, and live on our campus.
The political passions that arise from conflict in the Middle East may deeply unsettle students, faculty, and staff with opposing views. But feeling uncomfortable is not the same thing as being threatened or discriminated against. Free expression, which is fundamental to both academic inquiry and democracy, necessarily entails exposure to views that may be deeply disconcerting. We can support students who feel real and valid discomfort toward protests advocating for Palestinian liberation while also stating clearly and firmly that this discomfort is not an issue of safety.
As faculty, we dedicate ourselves and our classrooms to keeping every student safe from real harm, harassment, and discrimination. We commit to helping them learn to experience discomfort and even confrontation as part of the process of skill and knowledge acquisition—and to help them realize that ideas we oppose can be contested without being suppressed.
Read the rest here.