Four months after an explosive congressional hearing on antisemitism precipitated the resignations of two Ivy League presidents, another university president is about to step to the hot seat.
On Wednesday, Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, will testify about antisemitism before the same House committee that grilled the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When asked a question about whether calling for the genocide of Jews would break their universities’ rules, the presidents responded with lawyerly answers that sparked a spiraling backlash.
The December hearing was a political showcase for Elise Stefanik, a New York lawmaker who is the No. 4 Republican in the House and whose questions elicited the most damaging testimony. Afterward, Ms. Stefanik counted the resignations of the president of the University of Pennsylvania, M. Elizabeth Magill, and Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, as personal wins.
“I will always deliver results,” Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard alumna and a prospective vice-presidential pick for Donald Trump, said after Dr. Gay’s resignation.
Dr. Gay, who also faced plagiarism allegations, said she had resigned, in part, to “deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency.”
This hearing may be different, because Dr. Shafik and Columbia University already know many of the questions they will face and have had months to prepare.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Columbia has made substantial — and some say heavy-handed — efforts to manage campus protests and pro-Palestinian student organizing. Now, Dr. Shafik’s college president peers, along with students, faculty and alumni across the political spectrum, will be watching to see whether those efforts will change her reception.
The hearing may also serve as a weather vane indicating how politics surrounding campus protest have shifted in the last six months. Colleges across the country, including Columbia, have been tightening rules and increasing enforcement against campus protests and expression.
Those moves have caused deep concern among faculty members monitoring academic freedom.
“If you don’t have vigorous debate on campus, if you don’t permit the expression of views that make you uncomfortable, do you have a university anymore?” said Sheldon Pollock, a professor on the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors at Columbia.
During the earlier hearing, some Republicans homed in on the double standards they argue have infected Ivy League campuses, where conservative thinkers have at times faced sanctions or been barred from speaking, even as protest chants like “globalize the intifada” that many Jews find hurtful have been allowed.
That hearing also made clear that it was not enough to give lawyerly answers about what is permitted speech on campus. Private universities have the power to make their own rules about what can and cannot be said, and they have used that power in the past to shape a safe and inclusive community for other groups.
The presidents “went into that session beautifully prepared to discuss the really hard constitutional questions about whether a speech about a Jewish genocide is protected or not under the First Amendment,” said Burt Neuborne, a civil liberties lawyer at New York University and the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice, about the December hearing.
“But wasn’t the question,” he added. “The question was: What do you want to do on your campus? If you have the power to build your campus, what kind of a campus do you want to build?”
Supporters of Dr. Shafik, who goes by her nickname, Minouche, are hoping she will benefit from her decades of experience with diplomacy in high-profile settings. She is an economist who, before joining Columbia last summer, held senior leadership roles at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the…
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