If failure is the best teacher, several Ivy League schools are in contention for the title of 2023-24 Teacher of the Year. In December, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania distinguished themselves when their presidents failed to give a straight answer to lawmakers who asked if advocating genocide of Jews violated their schools’ disciplinary codes; both presidents soon resigned. But this spring, Columbia might have outdone them.
Protesters set up an unauthorized encampment on South Lawn and defied the administration’s demands to shut it down. “We don’t want no Zionists here!” they screamed into bullhorns. “Globalize the intifada!” Jewish students said they were barred from clubs, assaulted, threatened and spat on for speaking Hebrew.
On April 30, dozens of protesters smashed windows and barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall until the New York City Police Department removed them. A week later the university canceled its main graduation ceremony, citing security concerns.
Columbia was a hotbed of student protest in the 1960s. In the late ’90s, when I was an undergraduate, a spirit of hostility toward “the man” and the administration lingered. But until now I had never heard about Columbia students turning on each other.
Yet maybe there’s hope. In December, Columbia impaneled a Task Force on Antisemitism. It’s a classic bureaucratic response to a crisis—other Ivies have done the same—but one of the panel’s three co-chairmen, David Schizer, speaks of the problem with clarity and force.
“There’s no way that I’m giving up this territory,” Mr. Schizer says. “Jewish people had to fight to get into Columbia decades ago. If we decide to walk away, there are a lot of people who’d like to take our places. But why should that happen? We’ve contributed a lot to making Columbia what it is, and that should continue.”
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Author: Ruth King
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