Columbia prez must go: She’s now privileging antisemitic protesters over all other students
We had our doubts that Columbia President Minouche Shafik would stick to her guns after calling in the NYPD to roust the “pro-Palestine” occupiers last week, but we didn’t expect her to turn around and start privileging the protesters over the rest of the Columbia community.
Since she has, she clearly needs to go — and that can only be the start of rooting out the antisemitic radicalism infesting the school
Note that the “protesters” have only grown worse these last few days: They’re now openly pro-Hamas, and telling campus Jews that they’ll be next.
Their encampment is larger, too.
Yet the school’s leaders are not just tolerating a new settlement by the same crowd, but privileging the protesters over all other students by going all-remote — penalizing kids whose tuition was supposed to pay for in-person education.
And actively securing the campus from those who want to voice an opposing view — on the grounds that it can’t protect law- and rule-abiding opponents of the Jew-haters from the goons.
Israel-born biz-school assistant professor Shai Davidai says his keycard read “deactivated” Monday when he sought to enter the school’s Morningside Heights central quad, and that administrators told him they’d banned him because they can’t ensure his safety.
Huh? As a member of the Columbia community, he has every right to enter the core campus and speak freely.
Yet the school is instead enforcing the protesters’ “hecklers’ veto” — allowing their threat of force to prevent legitimate counter-protest.
Shafik is a creature of the establishment: on the board of the Gates Foundation, former president of the London School of Economics, ex-deputy governor of the Bank of England, onetime World Bank veep and International Monetary Fund poobah — even, as Baroness Shafik, a member of the House of Lords.
Her statement Monday announcing remote classes epitomizes that institutional blandness: She’s “deeply saddened” at how the community’s bonds “have been severely tested in ways that will take a great deal of time and effort to reaffirm”; what’s needed is “serious conversations about how Columbia can contribute” to “to help alleviate” the “devastating human consequences” of the “terrible conflict raging in the Middle East”; given the “many views across our diverse community,” she offers to “sit down and talk and argue and find ways to compromise on solutions.”
That is, she’s publicly pleading for the protesters to talk to her — and they’re refusing.
She can’t come back from that. Time to go, Minouche.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the pro-terror protests at colleges across the US:
- Tear gas sprayed at UCLA encampment as cops face off with anti-Israel protesters wielding fire extinguishers
- Stanford submits ‘deeply disturbing’ photo of campus anti-Israel protester wearing Hamas headband to FBI
- Iranian college offers free tuition to US students expelled for participating in anti-Israel protests: ‘Our people’
- MAP: US colleges where students have been arrested over anti-Israel protests
Columbia needs a president who will call back the cops, clear the quad, expel every student who’s breaking the rules — and fire any faculty among them.
And a board of trustees willing to back up that firm leadership.
Mind you, the school’s corruption runs far deeper than Baroness Shafik.
For decades, Columbia has filled its classrooms with a cabal of radically anti-Israel instructors, starting with the late Edward Said.
Today’s crop includes Professor Joseph Massad, who called the Oct. 7 attack on Israel “awesome,” and lecturer Kayum Ahmed, who prior to the Hamas attack was teaching his students that Israel is a “colonial settler state” that has “oppressed indigenous populations.”
To be clear: Everyone has a right to orderly protest, and academic freedom extends to radical faculty, too.
Antisemitism controversy at Columbia University: Key events
- More than 280 anti-Israel demonstrators were cuffed at Columbia and the City of New York campuses overnight in a “massive” NYPD operation.
- One hundred and nine people were nabbed at the Ivy League campus after cops responded to Columbia’s request to help oust a destructive mob that had illegally taken over the Hamilton Hall academic building late Tuesday, NYC Mayor Eric Adams and police said.
- Hizzoner blamed the on-campus chaos on insurgents who have a “history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos” instead of protesting peacefully.
- Columbia’s embattled president Minouche Shafik, who has faced mounting calls to resign for not cracking down sooner, issued a statement Wednesday saying the on-campus violence had “pushed the university to the brink.”
- Columbia University president Minouche Shafik was accused of “gross negligence” while testifying before Congress. Shafik refused to say if the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is antisemitic.
- More than 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who support the “military action” by Hamas.
But free speech, free thought and the academic project all require civilized debate and dissent.
The kids actively attacking those ground rules (and all faculty encouraging that assault) need to go.
And so does every university leader who can’t stand up for civilization against mob rule.