Columbia, "the bedlam of 1968" redux [by Franklin Foer]

People are talking about "Columbia University’s Anti-Semitism Problem" by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic:

Here are a few excerpts.

"If the bullying of Jewish students had happened to any other group, the institution would be appalled."

<<<
In January, when the historian Avi Shilon returned to Columbia University from winter break, a thought coursed through his mind: If calm can take hold in Gaza, then perhaps it could also happen in Morningside Heights. Just a few days earlier, in time for the start of the semester, Hamas and Israel had brokered a cease-fire in their war.

Over the many months of that war, Columbia was the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May.

Shilon felt that the tamping of hostilities in Gaza made the moment ripe for the course he was scheduled to teach, “History of Modern Israel,” which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives about his native country’s founding.

But Columbia soon disabused him of his hopes. About 30 minutes into the first session of his seminar, four people, their faces shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into his classroom. A protester circled the seminar table, flinging flyers in front of Shilon’s students. One flyer bore an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow.

In the Israeli universities where Shilon had studied and taught, he was accustomed to strident critiques of the country. Sometimes he even found himself sympathizing with them. Taking up difficult arguments struck him as the way to navigate tense disagreements, so he rose from his chair and gingerly approached the protesters. “You’re invited to learn,” he told them.

But the protesters ignored him. As one held up a camera to film, another stared at it and delivered a monologue in which she described Shilon’s class—which had barely progressed beyond a discussion of expectations for the semester—as an example of “Columbia University’s normalization of genocide.”

After she finished her speech, the demonstrators left the room, but a sense of intrusion lingered. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella group that organized protests on campus, posted a video of the action, with the caption: “We disrupted a zionist class, and you should too.” The university later offered to provide security for Shilon’s class because it couldn’t be sure if CUAD was bluffing.

Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest.

Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue, they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including [the historian Avi] Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators tended to choke on their own fears.

Many of the protesters followed university rules governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse.

It was as if Columbia was reliving the bedlam of 1968, which included a student takeover of the university and scarred the institution for decades. And just like in the Vietnam era, the university became a ripe target for demagogues on the right, who are eager to demolish the prestige of elite higher education. And now that Donald Trump and his allies control the federal government, they have used anti-Semitism as a pretext for damaging an institution that they abhor. In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university. Trump officials then sent a letter demanding—as preconditions for restoring the funds—a series of immediate, far-reaching steps, including suspending and expelling Hamilton Hall protesters, producing a plan to overhaul admissions, and putting the school’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership.” >>>

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/columbia-antisemitism-israel-palestine-trump/682054

painting on left: "Visigoths Sack Rome"

 

Comments

[Raymond Hopper]

Is anti-Semitism mainly a pretext for Trump to attack an institution he abhors? Is that a given, or is it possible  that Trump anb co. are in favor of law, order, discipline, public safety, which is what they campaigned on? What Trump is asking Columbia is: Is this rabble-rouser with a  visa really worth $400 million to you? Foer speaks well about anti-Sermitism. But he still suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

[Rivkah Rubinstein]

But Foer does acknowledge, later in the piece, "Trump’s autocratic presence unbalances every debate. But just because his administration is exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism does not mean that anti-Jewish activism is not an issue at Columbia. Somewhere along the way, one of the nation’s greatest universities lost its capacity to conduct intellectual arguments over contentious issues without resorting to hyperbole and accusations of moral deficiency."

[Beth Tenny]

Also in Foer's Piece: << [Profesor Joseph} Massad [of Columbia's Middle Eastern-studies department] has long been accused of carrying [his wrathful] polemical style into the classroom. In the course description for a class called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” he wrote in 2002: “The purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides.” On the one hand, that’s an admirable admission. On the other hand, Jewish students complained that he treated those with dissenting opinions as if they were moral reprobates, unworthy of civility. >>> Brings to mind Harry Truman's quip: give me a one-armed economist!

[Chuck Bendarik]

Schumer is publishing a warning about antisemitism at the same time he’s embroiled in the party’s infighting over Israel, Palestine and campus protests targeting Jews. He’s taken a weaker stand against campus antisemitism than the Trump administration has and opposes deporting Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian immigrant studying Columbia University, for his anti-Israel activism. Yet Schumer outraged progressive opinion yet again on Sunday, when answers he gave in an interview with The New York Times led critics to his left to accuse him of essentially agreeing with Trump’s decision to withhold $400 million in federal funding from Columbia because of its poor record in combating antisemitism. Late last year, however, a report by the House Education and Workforce Committee — under Republican control, it should be noted — claimed Schumer had told Columbia’s then-president, Minouche Shafik, not to worry about a reckoning over antisemitism if Democrats took over the Senate.

[Bobby Mitchell]

Is "The Iliad" for or against war?

[Bruno Anthony]

Professor Said hated "The Catcher in the Rye." He was wrong.