Columbia University is in the midst of its biggest crisis since the student protests of the late 1960’s.
Back then, students opposed the university’s war-related research and the building of a gym on public land in Morningside Park.
They occupied five university buildings for a week, took a dean hostage and shut down the university. President Grayson Kirk called in the NYPD to bust up the protest and 700 people were arrested.
President Kirk didn’t last too long after that. He resigned along with the university provost.
It was a trauma Columbia suffered from for decades.
This past week, the current president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, called on the NYPD to enter the gates at 116th Street and Broadway on Morningside Heights. She needed the cops to clear out a pro-Hamas/Hezbollah tent city on the campus’ south lawn. The students called it their Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
Shafik said the encampment posed a clear and present danger to the functioning of the university.
The police arrested more than 100 protestors and as some of them were being carted off, they were chanting, we don’t want no Jew state, we want ’48 and remember 10/7, it’s going to be every day for you.
Isn’t free speech a beautiful thing, especially when it’s exercised by some of the most prized students at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities? Are you listening AOC, Jamaal Bowman and Ilhan Omar?
President Shafik was compelled to act after being lambasted by a congressional committee for letting antisemitism fester on her campus, amongst her students and her professors.
On Capitol Hill, Shafik was accompanied by the head of the so-called Columbia anti-semitism task force and the two co-chairs of the board of trustees.
She was totally unimpressive. In response to a question from Rep. Lisa McClain whether chants of, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, or long live the intifada were antisemitic, Shafik waffled, until one of her colleagues on the panel confirmed that they were.
How could she not have expected questioning about the Jew-hating, professor of Middle East studies, Joseph Massad, who called the butchery of 10/7, awesome? When asked if he was still heading up an important academic review committee, she stumbled and bumbled and said no, until it was shown to her in a simple Google search that, if fact, he was.
But let’s put aside Shafik’s weak performance. The important takeaways from the hearings came from the two co-chairs of Columbia’s board of trustees, Claire Shipman and David Greenwald.
Trustee Greenwald said, the antisemitism on our campus makes me sick to my stomach and we are taking steps to address it. He said, there must be consequences.
Ms. Shipman said, we have a moral crisis on our campus.
She added, the last six months on our campus have served as an extreme pressure test. Our systems were not equipped to manage the unfolding situation.
If Minouche Shafik couldn’t or wouldn’t articulate the state of Jew hatred on the Columbia campus, the trustees said it for her, loud and clear.
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Columbia is a boiling cauldron of Jewish hatred.
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It is rampant amongst its students and faculty.
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Columbia has not done nearly enough to protect its Jewish students, from harassment, intimidation and bodily harm, not only since October 7th, but even before that awful day.
Tellingly, there was no vote of confidence by the board for President Shafik prior to the hearing. I have no inside information but I am pretty good at reading between the lines when bosses speak about their companies and management teams.
Trustee Shipman said it clearly that their work to end the moral crisis at Columbia is far from done. That means, Shafik’s work is far from done.
The direct language of the trustees at the hearing stood in stark contrast to Shafik’s humina, humina, huminas. She’s been on the job for nine months, so she’s still a honeymooner. But the congressional hearing and the bat-call for the NYPD call marked the end of that grace period.
On Thursday, she started to do it by busting up the pro-terror encampment, but it can’t be a one-off.
If you believe the words of Shipman and Greenwald, and I must say they were convincing, then Minouche Shafik is on the clock.
As Claire Shipman said under oath, I can tell you plainly that I am not satisfied with where Columbia is at this moment.
Read that to mean, Columbia is a complete mess and she expects Shafik to fix it. If she doesn’t, the board will find someone who can and will.
The Columbia trustees saw what happened to their counterparts at Harvard and UPenn who defended their flawed presidents, Claudine Gay and Liz Magill, for too long. They aren’t going to make those same mistakes and go down with Shafik’s ship.
The board has told congress, on the record, that it expects action, not lip service, to get the Jew hatred at Columbia under control. It wants students and professors that violate university policy to face real consequences and not slaps on the wrist.
So, fauda on Morningside Heights is far from over. It may actually get worse before it gets better.
After Wednesday of this past week, I have doubts Minouche Shafik is the person who’s going to fix Columbia. If I were her (and thankfully I’m not), my advice would be to go out and buy the biggest pair of galoshes she can find.
Why galoshes? Because as they say in the Ivy League, in the most refined manner, shit flows downhill and it’s about to come at Minouche Shafik in torrents.