BY ROBERT NEWTON

This post is part of a blog series, organized by Annelise Orleck, that will focus on recent crackdowns on protests at US college and university campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza. You can read the first post and an introduction to the series here.

Across the country last fall, students took to public spaces on their campuses to protest the violence unfolding in Gaza. There were meetings, teach-ins, rallies, marches, picketing, and eventually encampments. Columbia University, where I teach sustainability science, was an epicenter of media attention but was by no means alone in the vibrance and stridency of its protests. The response was swift and severe from ultraconservative Republicans in Congress who called Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and leaders from Harvard, Penn, Northwestern, Rutgers and other universities before hearings—grilling them aggressively, subpoenaing institutional and individual communications, and establishing a narrative of antisemitism in the nation’s leading universities. That narrative quickly took on a life of its own.

At Columbia, as at many (but far from all) campuses, there followed crackdowns on student activism.  Anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian organizations were restricted in their freedoms and then suspended.  When students escalated their actions, they faced disciplinary processes.  When they escalated again, this time to a peaceful encampment in the small lawn that passes for a commons here, they were charged with trespassing. They escalated again, occupying a building full of classrooms. The NYPD was called onto campus for a second time, and students were arrested—this time in a physically aggressive manner—and disciplined again. At Columbia and across the city, more than five hundred students were arrested, some held In New York prison cells without food or water for many hours. There were numerous injuries, including to a graduate student whose eye socket was broken by a police boot while he lay restrained on the ground.

The aftermath of these disciplinary moves, including the criminalization of students, continues to ripple through the campus and our students’ lives. In much of the media, and in many parts of academe as well, the focus of activists and media alike has shifted to the behavior of students and the disciplinary process. To an extent, this is needed.  Lawyers and supportive faculty must be organized for hearings. Students banned from dorms must be housed. Ad hoc disciplinary regulations must be dismantled; fair and legitimate norms of discipline must be reestablished. The rights of students and faculty need to be protected. But in this shift toward the immediate issues of campus behavior and academic rights, the overall context of the events of the past year has been dimmed. In evaluating our students’ actions and our institutions’ reactions to them, we should never lose sight of the fact that they were protesting an ongoing attack on a civilian population that has experienced levels of destruction, dislocation, and death not seen since the carpet bombing of northern Korea in the 1950s and north Vietnam in the 1960s. This context is absolutely critical to any understanding of the events of the past year.

Screenshot of a Columbia University web page for the Task Force on Antisemitism.

At Columbia, the lack of context is nowhere more evident than in the activities of the President’s Task Force on Antisemitism, established in response to pressure from House Republican leaders, wealthy donors, and student lawsuits. On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, the task force dropped its second report. The ninety-page document is based on listening sessions conducted by task force members with about five hundred Columbia students and faculty, the very large majority of them Jewish. The task force, per its stated methodology, did not question or vet the claims of respondents. Rather, it sought to understand the perceptions, feelings, and responses of some of Columbia’s Jewish subcultures to the events of the last year.

After reporting on what they heard, task force members framed the results, settled on its own definition of antisemitism, and addressed the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Through a controversial logic, consistent with the focus on Jewish feelings as determinative, the task force’s definition of antisemitism equates anti-Zionism with animosity to both the State of Israel per se and Jewish people. Thus, they found most anti-Zionist speech to be a violation of the US federal Title VI protections against discrimination based on both national origin and ethnicity. The interim president of Columbia praised the work of the task force and posted its report on the university website. As with the first report, the task force released its second one immediately to a wide array of media. There was no internal dialogue or vetting within the faculty, most of whom found out about it from reading the news. Not everyone was thrilled. A group of twenty-four Jewish faculty members (including me) wrote a detailed and scathing critique of the methods, controversial framing, and erroneous details of the report.

The task force report refers to the violence of October 7 more than twenty times. The word Gaza is mentioned only once as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” The dislocation of virtually all Gazans, the destruction of Gaza’s schools and universities, the reduction to rubble of housing and infrastructure, the deaths of over forty thousand people, and the rising levels of childhood disease and malnutrition are nowhere to be found. Thus, the anti-Zionist animus that the report’s authors document in such detail seems to have sprung spontaneously from an antisemitic culture. Even worse, phrases like, “After October 7, many Jewish and Israeli students began to report multiple instances of harassment, verbal abuse and ostracism” imply that antisemitism was sparked by the violence against Jews in southern Israel. This framing is simply inaccurate. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, there was nearly universal empathy for Israelis and other victims, including the hostages. The surge in membership in pro-Palestinian organizations; the demonstrations, rallies, and speeches of anti-Zionist activists on campus; the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition; and the strident voices calling for a ceasefire were a response to the massive destruction wrought by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.

By writing this critical context out of their report, the authors make it impossible to understand the events of the past year at Columbia. Hundreds of student activists (a sizable number of them Jewish) who bear their Jewish peers no ill have been horrified by the actions of Israel’s government between October 8 and today. To accuse these students (and faculty) of antisemitism is wrong—and because it is inaccurate it is counterproductive. The recommendations of the task force, which flow from its one-sided framing of last year’s events, will not calm the tensions and conflict on campus.  They are more likely to inflame divisions because the targets of their criticism will correctly feel that they have been wrongly accused of a bias they do not harbor.

The task force’s reportage of the perceptions and sentiments of Jewish students at Columbia is useful and important. But it is one-sided. And these feelings and narratives have not been validated—appropriate perhaps for “listening sessions” but not for formulating policy recommendations. Student narratives have been shaped into a framework and used as the basis for policy recommendations by a task force that equates opposition to Zionism with opposition to the State of Israel per se and with antisemitism. Such an equation is both false and dismissive of the thousands of students and faculty who feel an urgent need to stop the killing in Gaza, who support equality for all people living in Israel/Palestine, who also feel love for their Jewish friends and colleagues.

At the end of its second report, the task force signals its intention to produce a third report, attending to “inclusion” in classrooms and content in curriculum. Ponder that. Professors on our campus are already being called before Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action inquiries to answer to students who feel that their discomfort at classroom speech is sufficient evidence of bias.

Columbia needs to do better.  We owe it to our students to set the recent report aside until a more appropriate, well-rounded process can be constituted. And we must not permit a politically and culturally narrow group—none of whose expertise is in educational norms, academic freedom, or curriculum development—to join the cacophony of interest groups already trying to tell faculty how and what to teach in their own fields.

Robert Newton is a member of the Columbia University AAUP Executive Committee. He retired in 2022 as a senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. Now he teaches in Columbia’s Sustainability Science program.