Columbia’s Challenge to Reverse Years of Antisemitism on Campus

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The Trump administration is going after colleges and universities which, in Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s words, have “ignored relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses” since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led genocidal attacks inside Israel. Early last March, the Trump administration showed it meant business by announcing the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, which became ground zero for the post October 7^th campus mayhem against Jews. The Trump administration is cracking down on other institutions of higher learning as well, most notably Harvard University which has chosen to resist rather than deal meaningfully with its own antisemitism crisis.

For its part, Columbia University’s leaders early on showed callous indifference to the safety of Jewish students, faculty members, and staff caused by the antisemitic mob activities on campus. They only requested New York City police assistance as a last resort. But the university’s Task Force on Antisemitism did manage to produce two meaningless reports in March and August of last year.

The first task force report discussed disciplinary issues. However, while the task force recommended that the university should “intervene more proactively in real time” before a demonstration gets out of hand, it cautioned strongly against any physical confrontation. In other words, the university should avoid forcible removal of protesters, no matter how disruptive and threatening the protesters become. The report recommended instead such milquetoast responses as telling the offending protesters that they are violating the rules, handing them cards containing the relevant rules, and asking them to disperse within a specified time. This report makes no mention of long suspensions, expulsions, or rescinding the offending protesters’ diplomas, much less filing criminal charges.

The second report, which offered its own “working definition” of antisemitism that is “rooted in recent experiences at Columbia,” stated that its definition of antisemitism should not be used “for discipline or as a means for limiting free speech or academic freedom.” It is just to be used for “training” as well as to help in “fixing flawed administrative systems, improving campus climate, and building consensus for a more inclusive and pluralistic university.”

One of the remedial actions that the second report recommended was fostering “consistency and coordination between Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Deans of Students Offices.” In short, the woke authors of this report concluded that better use of the university’s DEI resources was a better solution than instituting and implementing consistent and tough disciplinary policies and practices.

No wonder that the Trump administration had to step in to prevent more assaults and harassment of Jewish students and faculty at Columbia University who supported the Jewish State of Israel. The announcement of the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia got the ball rolling.

Education Secretary McMahon explained that “Universities must comply with all federal anti-discrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus. Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer.”

In a follow-up letter to Columbia’s then-interim president Katrina Armstrong, the Trump administration outlined the “next steps” the university must take to restore “Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.” These steps include:

*Enforcing meaningful disciplinary policies, which should include expulsion or multi-year suspension;

*Abolishing the University Judicial Board and centralizing all disciplinary processes under the Office of the President;

*Implementing permanent, comprehensive time, place, and manner rules to prevent disruption of teaching, research, and campus life;

*Banning masks that are intended to conceal identity or intimidate others;

*Beginning the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years. This means, according to the Department of Education, that the academic department would be “removed from the faculty and an outside chair is put in place by the college or university administration;” and

*Ensuring that Columbia security has full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators who foster an unsafe or hostile environment, or interfere with classroom instruction or normal university operations.

Unlike Harvard University, which refuses to comply with directives from the Trump administration to combat its rampant antisemitism problem and has taken the administration to court, Columbia University has chosen to cooperate. Columbia announced that it planned to undertake several administrative actions and policy changes that would meet the Trump administration’s demands at least part of the way.

Unfortunately, however, Columbia did not commit to putting the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department, which includes the Center for Palestine Studies, under academic receivership as the Trump administration had demanded. This department includes rabid antisemites whom the university has hired over the years with little regard for their despicable past statements, writings, and conduct. Instead, Columbia turned these terrorist supporters loose to indoctrinate their students to hate Jews and the West, providing the breeding ground for the pro-Hamas mayhem that engulfed Columbia and the adjacent vicinity last year.

For example, Hamid Dabashi, Columbia’s Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, charged back in 2018 that “The Israeli flag, the very term ‘Israel’ are now and forever synonymous with mass murderers… with massacres, with land thieves, with incremental genocide, with war crimes, with crimes against humanity.” He supported the so-called “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that disrupted Columbia’s normal operations and students’ education in April and May of 2024.

Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government and anthropology, has called for the “dismantlement” of the Jewish State of Israel and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. He offered words of encouragement to the pro-Hamas agitators involved with the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and participated in the encampment himself.

Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies and a former spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), retired in October 2024 after twenty-two years of contaminating Columbia students’ minds with Palestinian propaganda. This includes the fictional Palestinian narrative that the Israelis are the oppressing colonizers of Palestinian indigenous land and that Palestinian terrorists are “resistance fighters.”

Rashid Khalid defended the pro-Hamas mob that had illegally encamped on Columbia University’s campus and occupied Hamilton Hall. He spoke just outside the gates of Columbia on May 1, 2024, shortly after New York City police officers entered Hamilton Hall to remove the agitators who had occupied and vandalized the building and physically assaulted a janitor. According to Khalid, the right to “free speech” includes criminal trespass, destruction of property, intimidation of Jewish students, and physical assault. Whatever the pro-Hamas agitators were doing to oppose what he falsely labeled as “genocide in Gaza” was no more than “the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids,” according to Khalid. This former spokesperson for the murderous PLO decades ago evidently believes that a person with a real “conscience” should support the savage Hamas terrorists who massacred, raped, and kidnapped defenseless civilians in Israel on October 7th.

At least Rashid Khalid is no longer poisoning the minds of Columbia students in class. But perhaps the worst Israel hater of all at Columbia is still there. He is Joseph Massad, Columbia’s professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history. His courses have been nothing more than antisemitic diatribes against the Jewish State of Israel, which he spoon-feeds down his gullible students’ throats.

Massad has long glorified Hamas as the best positioned group, in his words, to “resist the Israeli occupation.” Thus, it was no surprise that Massad described the October 7^th Hamas-led barbaric terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians as “astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome,” and “incredible.” He called the attack a “major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies.”

Despite Professor Massad’s despicable history of antisemitism, Columbia decided that Massad should teach a spring 2025 course entitled History of the Jewish Enlightenment in 19th century Europe and the development of Zionism. The stated purpose of this course was to provide “a historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background of the current situation.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) compared Massad’s teaching assignment to “David Duke teaching a course on anti-racism.” Rep. Torres also questioned why American taxpayers should subsidize “ideological indoctrination that glorifies mass murder.”

That is a great question, especially considering that Columbia University’s history of antisemitism goes back a long way.

In the late 1920’s, for example, Columbia decided to segregate Jewish students by sending them to an inferior and isolated campus located eleven miles from the main campus. In 1933, Columbia invited a Nazi official to speak at its campus who boasted about the Hitler regime. Columbia University engaged in student exchanges with Nazi-controlled German universities during the 1930s. And it sent a delegate to a celebration at the University of Heidelberg in 1936, even though that German university had previously ousted its Jewish faculty members and hosted a burning of books written by Jews. While this was going on, Columbia’s leadership forcefully suppressed protests by its own students against Columbia’s coziness with the Nazis, including by calling in the police and expelling a student leader of the protests.

Decades later, as previously discussed, Columbia University hired more and more antisemitic professors, who planted the seeds for Columbia University to become the initial focal point for the vile pro-Hamas campus mayhem last year.

It took President Trump’s threat to cut off Columbia University’s federal gravy train for the university’s administration to finally begin taking the rampant antisemitism on its campus seriously. A test came when more than one hundred hate-filled anti-Israel agitators stormed Columbia’s main library last month, effectively shutting the building down to normal operations and causing injuries and destruction. This time, instead of trying to reason with these fanatics, the university’s security police, helped by NYPD officers, responded forcefully by removing the agitators from the building and arresting those who refused to budge.

The acting president of Columbia University, Claire Shipman, did not mince words. Displaying a modicum of moral clarity, she said that a “clear line between legitimate protest and actions that endanger others and disrupt” the university’s operations was crossed. Ms. Shipman expressed confidence that “disciplinary proceedings will reflect the severity of the actions.” The university placed more than sixty-five students on interim suspension for their role in the invasion and occupation of the library.

“Interim” suspension, whatever that means, falls well short of multi-year suspensions or expulsions, but it is a small step in the right direction. Columbia must do much more. It should impose much sterner disciplinary consequences for students’ disruptive conduct and wearing masks to conceal their identities, get rid of even tenured antisemitic faculty members when possible, and revise course curriculums to remove all traces of antisemitism.

There is still a long road ahead to drain the antisemitic poison from Columbia and other universities and colleges across the United States. But at least there is a president in the White House determined to keep the pressure on the higher education institutions where it hurts – their pocketbooks.