History of bad faith: Columbia’s pledge to fight antisemitism can’t be trusted - opinion

by Asaf Romirowsky
July 30, 2025
Read the original article in The Jerusalem Post.

Call it Christmas in July: After more than a year of doing absolutely nothing to punish students who seized university property, disrupted classes, injured university employees, threatened Jewish classmates, and shared propaganda by terrorist organizations, Columbia University finally took some action that, if you squint just right, may look a bit like justice.

More than 70 of the poisoned Ivy’s students were hit with suspensions ranging from one to three years. “Our institution must focus on delivering on its academic mission for our community,” said a university spokesperson in a statement. “And to create a thriving academic community, there must be respect for each other and the institution’s fundamental work, policies, and rules.”

Speaking of respect for each other, anyone applauding Columbia for finally delivering something like real punishment to its homegrown jihad enthusiasts should recall that the university’s interim president, Claire Shipman, advocated in private last year, while still the co-chair of the university’s board, for the removal of Shoshana Shendelman, a fellow board member who was critical of the school’s failure to protect its Jewish students, and her replacement with an Arab board member. 

Once her communications were made public earlier this month, Shipman apologized; it’s not far-fetched to think that the university’s latest actions may have been in part an attempt to save face and spare it the wrath of the Trump administration, which, unlike its predecessor, takes antisemitism seriously. Earlier this year, the administration hit Columbia hard by freezing more than $400 million in federal funding, a decision the school is now negotiating to reverse. 

Given its long history of bad faith, however, we shouldn’t take Columbia’s promises, or even its latest actions, as a guarantee that the school has learned its lesson. Slapping a few dozen kids with what is essentially a gap year while refusing to share their names – citing privacy considerations but protecting the perpetrators from facing further consequences from employers, say, who may want to avoid hiring a convicted hooligan – is little but a rudimentary first step.

Anyone who believes there’s any future at all for Columbia University – a big if, that – should instead insist on the following measures to make sure the school doesn’t slide back into its Jew-hating ways.

The Trump administration understands all that perfectly well, which is why it signaled early this year that it was considering pursuing a consent decree for Columbia, a process that would give a federal judge the authority to oversee Columbia’s affairs and ensure its policies align with the dictates of the federal government. 

Yet even if such a far-reaching decree is rejected – and Columbia made it clear it viewed such a measure as an assault on its academic freedom – there’s still much that could be done to help keep Columbia accountable. 

How to keep Columbia accountable

First, the university must agree to an independent process of oversight. Previously, the school concluded its investigations into anti-Jewish violence on campus by hiring a private firm, letting it work for a handful of days, and then concluding no culprits could be found, despite the fact that the culprits posted pictures and videos of themselves harassing fellow students and waving the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah on social media.

The administration can and should demand that before the school sees another federal dollar, it agrees to a fairly selected committee of independent scholars – dedicated to academic freedom, not inflamed ideological commitments – that would oversee Columbia’s handling of antisemitic agitation on its campus. 

Second, the same independent committee, or one like it, should step in and help the school choose a competent and unbiased leader. Shipman, as her own private correspondence makes abundantly clear, is at best a craven partisan operative and at worst a Jew-hater eager to silence her critics on the board. 

Her predecessors proved no better; the best you can say for Minouche Shafik, for example, Columbia’s last permanent president, is that she was slightly better prepared, when questioned by Congress, than her disgraced colleagues at Harvard and Penn, and therefore managed more ambiguous language in response to simple questions about wrong and right. 

Third, and perhaps most important, it’s time for Columbia to seriously overhaul the university senate. The school’s policy-making body, it was created in 1968 as a response to the previous wave of entitled self-styled radicals taking over buildings, throwing violent tantrums, and demanding that their whims be met or else.

In the aftermath of that wave of mayhem, the university empaneled a committee of inquiry, the Cox Commission, which interviewed nearly 100 people and produced 3,790 pages of recorded transcripts before suggesting very real structural changes. It’s time for another Cox Commission, and another subsequent overhaul of how decisions are made in Morningside Heights.