Columbia University president, at House hearing, says university can do more to fight antisemitism

• Published date: 18 April 2024
• Author: ANDREW LAPIN/JTA
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Just minutes into a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism on Wednesday, Nemat Shafik had been asked, "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia's code of conduct?"

It was a knowing repeat of the now-infamous question that cost the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania their jobs. When those two leaders faced the same House panel in December amid rising antisemitism on their campuses, they hedged in their answers. This time a Democrat, Oregon Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, posed the question, defanging it before it could be claimed by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who posed it in December.

Shafik, who assumed the presidency days before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, avoided the December hearing owing to her travel schedule. On Wednesday, she and her three co-panelists — two of whom are Jewish and all of whom are in positions of senior leadership at Columbia — answered in the affirmative.

Their responses led one Republican to sarcastically congratulate them on "beating" Harvard, Penn and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose president also spoke at the last hearing.

Discourse on campus antisemitism has changed

The exchange demonstrated how the discourse on campus antisemitism has changed since the December hearing — as well as how Shafik aimed to distinguish herself from the three university presidents who testified then. Columbia, like other schools across the country, has had a volatile climate surrounding the Israel-Hamas war (as Shafik prepared to testify, competing pro-Palesitinan and pro-Israel protests were taking shape on campus).

But over the course of the hearing, Shafik pointed to actions she's taken to curb antisemitism, such as suspending pro-Palestinian student groups; agreed that some professors had crossed the line with their rhetoric; and in general avoided the kinds of viral stumbles that doomed her counterparts at Penn and Harvard.

"One of the things I've said over and over is that antisemitism isn't a problem for Jewish people to solve," Shafik said. "It's actually a problem for all of us."

Shafik's effort to show that she was on top of the issue was countered at times by Republicans and a few Democrats. They instead sought to advance the narrative that Shafik and her leadership had been negligent in their handling of antisemitism on campus since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

"You have no action, no disciplinary action," Stefanik told Shafik, accusing her and Columbia of being too lenient on...