Faculty at Columbia University Divided Over Plan to Open a Center in Israel
“the aim of the Tel Aviv Global Center is to be inclusive, building partnerships across Israeli society, including Palestinians, and to provide access to all segments of the society”
You can probably guess why some faculty members are opposed to this.
Gothamist reports:
Columbia University’s plan to open a center in Israel divides faculty
Columbia University’s announcement that it would open a new global center in Tel Aviv, Israel, has divided its faculty and raised concerns from some that the site would be off-limits to many students and faculty due to Israeli government restrictions.
“There are a number of people who would not be able to use that global center because of Israel’s essentially apartheid policies,” said Katherine Franke, a law professor who was barred from entering Israel in 2018 because of her work with Jewish Voice for Peace, a group critical of the Israeli government’s policies and its treatment of Palestinians.
“We would never tolerate this in the United States, of not allowing people to participate in Columbia programs because they have a criticism of the United States foreign policy, but we’re doing exactly that in the state of Israel,” said Franke, who signed a faculty letter opposing the new site. Some 107 faculty signed the letter as of Friday.
But an even larger faculty contingent – numbering 171 as of Friday – signed on to a separate letter voicing support for the new center, saying it would be “a positive step in the intellectual life of the university.” It urged the administration not to back down in the face of faculty opposition.
University spokesperson Ben Chang told Gothamist, “the aim of the Tel Aviv Global Center is to be inclusive, building partnerships across Israeli society, including Palestinians, and to provide access to all segments of the society.”
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Comments
If Prof. Franke is claiming that Israel’s universities exclude Muslim students, someone should tell her that Arab and Muslim students enrolled in Israel’s universities are a greater percentage than their percentage of the population, or so I have been told.
But if she means that people dedicated to the state’s destruction rh’l risk being denied a visa, then she can cry me a river.
To the sea.
Let her pontificate from Morningside Heights
Oh it’s in Tel Aviv and wants to establish relations with the Palestinians. No wonder there are some at Columbia supporting it. To them it’s just a question of whether having such a center is more effective than having no center, in subverting traditional Jewish control of the land of Israel.