This doesn’t sound completely on the level. If you read the excerpt below, you’ll see they’re lumping anti-Semitism in with pro-Palestinian concerns.
The Jerusalem Post reports:
Columbia University announces new initatives amid antisemitism controversiesColumbia University in New York announced a series of initiatives last week to, in the university’s words, “foster a community where debates and disagreements are rooted in academic rigor and civil discourse.” The initiative comes after protests, press conferences, and police presence on campus in the months since Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the ongoing war in Gaza.The Office of the President will host “Listening Forums” throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, Columbia said, while a “Dialogue Across Difference” initiative will hold “panels, conversations, and workshops [to] tackle contentious, challenging societal issues from multiple viewpoints, assess obstacles to civic dialogue, and explore potential solutions.”These events will be concentrated in a “Week of Dialogue” in February. The initiative also involves grants for faculty and students to support new dialogue-based initiatives on campus.The university says the Dialogue Across Difference initiative will have a professional development component, referring to “a range of new workshops and resources for faculty as they navigate challenging classroom dynamics.”The statement says that the university has “retained expert advisors” to help staff “in navigating differences and implementing de-escalation strategies, and specifically on addressing the current conflict.” The statement did not say who these experts were.In a video announcement, the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, described this period as “truly challenging for many at Columbia,” adding that “because we are a global, diverse, and engaged university, everything that happens in the world spills over onto our campus.”In a statement accompanying the video, Shafik and Columbia’s interim provost Dennis Mitchell say that they “feel very keenly the fear and feeling of devastation, particularly among the Arab, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, and Palestinian members of our community.”
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