Columbia president to lawmakers: Balancing right to protest and Jewish students rights is a ‘central challenge’

Columbia University’s top leaders defended their response to antisemitism and campus protests that have roiled their institution in the wake of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war before Congress on Wednesday.

The conflict has upended colleges across the country. But Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chair of the House Education panel, said despite antisemitism being an issue on several campuses, “Columbia University stands out as one of the worst offenders.”

On Wednesday, Columbia President Minouche Shafik acknowledged that her campus has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents. She also defended her administration's efforts to address them, including by creating reporting channels for incidents, hiring additional staff to investigate complaints, launching an antisemitism taskforce and developing new policies on demonstrations.

“Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of discrimination and harassment has been the central challenge on our campus and numerous others across the country,” Shafik told lawmakers.

Shafik testified alongside Board of Trustees Co-Chairs Claire Shipman and David Greenwald, and law professor David Schizer, one of the university’s antisemitism taskforce chairs.

Foxx grilled Shafik for not properly disciplining students who violate the university’s demonstration policy, which requires disciplinary action to be initiated soon after an unapproved event occurs. Other lawmakers also took issue with the small number of students who have been suspended, despite the dozens of protests held on campus.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said, according to documents turned over to the committee, the institution “only suspended three students for antisemitic incidents between Oct. 7 and March 24.”

“When I first started at Columbia, our policies, our systems and our enforcement mechanisms were not up to the scale of this challenge,” Shafik said. “They were designed for a very different world.”

Shafik also told Foxx that the school sent warning letters, developed in consultation with the antisemitism taskforce, to students.

“The students don't seem to be afraid of your letters,” Foxx said.

Shafik, who has been in the job for less than a year, is the latest Ivy League leader to be grilled by lawmakers. The last antisemitism hearing held by the House Education panel led to the resignations of two university presidents, outrage from alumni and donors who have reconsidered their gifts, about half a dozen congressional probes and dozens of Education Department civil rights investigations.

This time, lawmakers are armed with more information about the school’s policies because of their investigations, allowing for more targeted questions.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), at a press conference with more than a dozen Jewish Columbia students ahead of the hearing, took a victory lap for the resignations of two Ivy League presidents after their “morally bankrupt answers” during what she called “the most viewed testimony in the history of the United States Congress.”

The students behind Stefanik also slammed Shafik for not enforcing its demonstration policies and for her Tuesdayop-ed in The Wall Street Journal. They pushed back on Shafik’s idea that people protesting on campus are coming from a place of genuine political disagreement.

“What pro-Israel students at Columbia have been subjected to is not well intentioned political debate,” said Yola Ashkenazie, a Columbia student. “Shafik doesn't want us to believe our own eyes and ears. What our university president calls a ‘political disagreement,’ a bipartisan resolution in Congress makes it clear that the slogan, ‘From the river to the sea,’ is antisemitic.”

Democrats at the hearing pushed back on the idea that antisemitism on college campuses is new. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), who showed video clips of the 2017 Unite the Right rally, which wound through the University of Virginia, said that other forms of discrimination are a problem on college campuses as well.

“What we saw in the video was not an isolated event,” Scott said in his opening remarks. He called it a byproduct of the country's “long history of white supremacy and antisemitism,” and said people “should not feign surprise at hate speech on America's college campuses.”

“Fact is that college campuses are polarized, as is our society, and we have witnessed a disturbing rise in incidents not only of antisemitism but also in racism, Islamophobia, homophobia and other forms of hate,” he went on to say.