The president of Columbia said the university had suspended 15 students. She promised that one visiting professor “will never work at Columbia again.”
And when she was grilled over whether she would remove another professor from his leadership position, she appeared to make a decision right there on Capitol Hill: “I think I would, yes.”
The president, Nemat Shafik, disclosed the disciplinary details, which are usually confidential, as part of an all-out effort on Wednesday to persuade a House committee investigating Columbia that she was taking serious action to combat a wave of antisemitism following the Israel-Hamas war.
In nearly four hours of testimony before the Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce, Dr. Shafik conceded that Columbia had initially been overwhelmed by an outbreak of campus protests. But she said its leaders now agreed that some had used antisemitic language and that certain contested phrases — like “from the river to the sea” — might warrant discipline.
“I promise you, from the messages I’m hearing from students, they are getting the message that violations of our policies will have consequences,” Dr. Shafik said.
Testifying alongside her, Claire Shipman, the co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, made the point bluntly. “We have a moral crisis on our campus,” she said.
Republicans seemed skeptical. But Dr. Shafik’s conciliatory tone offered the latest measure of just how much universities have changed their approach toward campus protests over the last few months.
Many schools were initially hesitant to take strong steps limiting freedom of expression cherished on their campuses. But with many Jewish students, faculty and alumni raising alarms, and with the federal government investigating dozens of schools, some administrators have tried to take more assertive steps to control their campuses.
With 5,000 Jewish students and an active protest movement for the Palestinian cause, Columbia has been among the most scrutinized. Jewish students have described being verbally and even physically harassed, while demonstrators have clashed with administrators over limits to where and when they can assemble.
In bending toward House Republicans in Washington, Dr. Shafik may have further divided her New York City campus, where students had pitched tents and set up a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” early on Wednesday in open violation of university demonstration policies. Activists have rejected charges of antisemitism, and say they are speaking out for Palestinians, tens of thousands of whom have been killed by Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
Sheldon Pollock, a retired Columbia professor who helps lead Columbia’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said Dr. Shafik had been “bulldozed and bullied” into saying things she would regret.
“What happened to the idea of academic freedom?” Dr. Pollock asked. “I don’t think that phrase was used even once.”
Dr. Shafik, who took her post in July 2023 after a career in education and international agencies, did repeatedly defend the university’s commitment to free speech. But she said administrators “cannot and should not tolerate abuse of this privilege” when it puts others at risk.
Her comments stood in contrast to testimony last December by the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Appearing before the same House committee, they offered terse, lawyerly answers and struggled to answer whether students should be punished if they called for the genocide of Jews. The firestorm that followed helped hasten their ousters.
Dr. Shafik missed that earlier hearing…
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