The benefits of President Trump’s war on campus anti-Semitism are manifold, and one such benefit was on display this week where it is most needed: Columbia University.
Nearly 200 members of the Columbia faculty wrote a letter to university President Katrina Armstrong and the board of trustees, urging them to make structural changes to weed out the rampant anti-Jewish bigotry on campus. It’s a reminder that when you have allies on the outside, you feel more confident to make demands of your own.
The letter, according to the Times of Israel, calls on Columbia to enforce a mask ban (with health exceptions) and adopt—as Harvard recently did—the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which is the mainstream Jewish community’s consensus guidepost for defining the term because it closes the “anti-Zionist loophole” that enables activists to discriminate against Jews by claiming they are “only” discriminating against Zionists.
The letter also calls for the expulsion of students who break into buildings and classrooms—something that has happened recently at the school and which, if not deterred, will quickly make schooling impossible. It calls for accountability for faculty and administrators who enable, either through their own participation in anti-Jewish harassment or in designing racist curricula, the Jew-baiting anarchy that currently prevails on campus.
There are other, more Columbia-specific demands, but this is the basic strategic outline that is emerging across U.S. higher education to battle anti-Semitism. The significant part of this letter is that faculty members are more willing to speak out and less concerned about professional retaliation.
And not a moment too soon.
Columbia in particular has accelerated its self-destruction. After anti-Zionist activists carried out a rather psychotic intrusion into an Israeli history class, forcing the school to post security at classrooms where Jews might be targeted, the Columbia branch of Students for Justice in Palestine announced it had cemented the sewage lines of a school building.
Another university anti-Semitism club is holding a teach-in designed to instruct attendees on how to replicate the first intifada. When these groups chant “globalize the intifada,” they mean it. Back in November students were even handed a new newspaper called The Columbia Intifada.
These modern pro-Palestinian activist groups are essentially what you’d get if you somehow put Louis Farrakhan in charge of the British Union of Fascists.
Which also helps explain why the Trump administration is going on the offensive. The Biden administration’s policy was to wait until federal civil-rights complaints were filed and then sweep them under the rug. In practice, this meant that when Jews filed complaints about being assaulted on the way to class, the violent anti-Semites would file their own grievance that their feelings were hurt by the accusation. The administration would then throw up its hands as if the complaints offset each other.
Those days appear to be over. In addition to presidential executive actions on anti-Semitism, the Department of Justice announced a new task force this week whose “first priority will be to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.”
The Department of Education has hit the ground running as well. Yesterday Jewish Insider reported that the department has opened investigations into five schools, one of which is Columbia. “As you are surely aware,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor wrote to Columbia’s president, “more than 500 Columbia students testified as to the university’s longstanding pattern of tolerating antisemitic harassment, intimidation, and acts of violence. Columbia is alleged to have systemic failures in its application of discipline for antisemitic harassment and conduct that violates the university’s disciplinary policy, in part because of the intervention of its faculty members. Equally troubling are allegations that suggest extensive Columbia faculty involvement and material support for campus-destabilizing encampments and for the criminal break-in and occupation of Hamilton Hall.”
The investigation, Trainor wrote, “will examine whether Columbia discriminates against, enables harassment of, or violence against, students and faculty on the basis of their Jewish ancestry in violation of Title VI and its implementing regulations.”
Columbia bet on long-term federal indifference to institutional anti-Semitism. It deserves everything it’s got coming to it.