After nearly a year of hearings and hundreds of thousands of pages of document review, the House Education Committee released its anticipated scathing report on campus antisemitism last week.
Representative Virginia Foxx led the inquiry that prompted several several school officials to resign in disgrace not long after it began.
We covered one of the hearings earlier this year. It’s worth going back to, just to rewatch Representative Elise Stefanik hold Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s feet to the fire. She did this repeatedly throughout the months-long investigations, never failing to pin down mealymouthed school officials who refused to answer questions directly.
The report’s 325 pages confirm what was obvious from the beginning: college campuses turned into cesspits of antisemitism after October 7 because school leaders “turned their backs on their campuses’ Jewish communities.”
They also turned a blind eye to ongoing acts of intimidation and harassment of their Jewish students. Even worse, in some cases, they facilitated them.
And they got away with it, because, until the Committee’s investigation, no one held them to account. School officials viewed the antisemitism engulfing their campuses as a “public-relations issue, and not a serious problem demanding action.”
In newly revealed private texts, they express their contempt for having to answer to anyone but themselves.
The congressional hearings were just “capital [sic] hill nonsense,” Columbia University Board of Trustees Co-Chair Claire Shipman scoffed.
In fact, Senator Chuck Schumer said as much in his advice to Columbia administrators and trustees. According to the report, he assured them they would not face accountability from Democrats: “Universities’ political problems are really only among Republicans,” he said, recommending that the “best strategy is to keep heads down.”
It was a shameful betrayal by the self-styled “Shomer Yisrael” (Guardian of Israel), a play on his name:
Days after Schumer’s exchange with Columbia leadership, the current and past chairs of its board of trustees privately texted they hoped Democrats would win back the House of Representatives to avoid future scrutiny, the report says.
They weren’t interested in solving the problem; they were interested in avoiding responsibility for it. At best. At worst, they were complicit in it, as is now known from their texts.
While Columbia was “touting aggressive actions on antisemitism to the media,” such as suspending its chapters of anti-Israel student groups that had repeatedly violated university rules, Shipman was working “behind the scenes to appease the University’s antisemitic actors.”
In a private text to Shafik, she wrote that she was seeking to “unsuspend the groups.”
Shipman also proposed “partnering with Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian faculty member who has called terrorists ‘resistance fighters,’ Israel the ‘result of a settler colonial project,’ and said in 2017 that Israel’s supporters would ‘infest’ the U.S. government in the forthcoming Trump administration.”
Shipman wasn’t the only official appeasing campus antisemites, the report reveals. At Northwestern University, President Michael Schill appointed radical anti-Israel faculty members to negotiate with the students running the pro-Hamas encampment. This fox-in-the-henhouse arrangement led to “a stunning capitulation” to the encampment leaders’ anti-Israel, pro-BDS demands, applauded by their friends in the faculty:
One of those faculty friends, Professor Nour Kteily, told anti-Israel, pro-BDS political science professor Wendy Pearlman he was “inspired by the students” and was “hoping we can get some amazing wins for them”:
At other schools, administrators simply sat on their hands, refusing to enforce their own rules while their campuses descended into chaos. Taking over campus buildings, blocking Jewish students from portions of their campus, disrupting classes, and engaging antisemitic harassment—all were greenlighted by weak-kneed officials who refused to impose consequences.
The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) was one of the worst offenders. For days on end, the school stood by while its Jewish students were harassed, assaulted, and intimidated by pro-Hamas agitators camped out in a major thoroughfare on school grounds in late April. There was no response from “any kind of authority or law enforcement” to the “Jew Exclusion Zones” that effectively barred both students and faculty from going to their classes, offices, and the library.
And there were no repercussions for the students involved, the Committee found: No suspensions, no probations against any of the wrongdoers.
Columbia had “some of the most disturbing and extreme antisemitic conduct violations in the country,” including the criminal takeover of Hamilton Hall. And there too, the Committee found the school imposed “shockingly few meaningful disciplinary consequences.”
Other schools that failed to discipline for encampments and antisemitic harassment included Harvard, Berkeley, Rutgers, UPenn and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Overall, their records for holding students’ accountable, the Committee found, were “dismal.”
But while the schools refused to hold themselves or their students responsible for campus antisemitism, their donors aren’t letting them off the hook.
They got the message on day one, when the presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPenn all refused to say that calls to kill Jews violated their campus codes of conduct. It was a fiasco.
Within days, billionaire Bill Ackman began a campaign to have Harvard President Claudine Gay removed, claiming a billion dollars in donations to the school had been cancelled or put on hold:
Donors started taking their money elsewhere:
And so, long before last week’s report came out, the Committee hearings already racked up an important achievement: convincing Jewish donors they should give their money to schools that don’t hate them.
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