Written by by Jane Coleman at legalinsurrection.com
A well-rehearsed Columbia University panel testified before the House committee investigating campus antisemitism this week, and, for now, it looks like they’ll all keep their jobs.
The last time the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held hearings on campus antisemitism, it went badly for the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT. One straightforward question brought them down: Does “calling for the genocide of Jews” violate your campus code of conduct?
Remarkably, none of them could give a straight answer—not without “context.” And not long after the hearings, Penn President Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay (with the help of a plagiarism scandal) resigned in disgrace.
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik had dodged a bullet. Thanks to a scheduling conflict, she avoided appearing before the committee in December. The delay gave her time to study where her colleagues had gone wrong before she was summoned to appear again.
So, yesterday, when Shafik and three other school leaders came before the House committee to testify about what a cess pit of antisemitism Columbia is, they knew one thing: When the committee asks you whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia’s code of conduct, the correct answer is “Yes.” This time when they were asked that question, they all got it right.
But Shafik still had a lot of other questions to answer. And by the time the hearings were over, she had beaten around the bush every bit as much as the other school presidents did at last year’s hearings. Maybe more.
Columbia is one of the worst hotbeds of campus antisemitism, Chairwoman Foxx said, and the school had done “far too little, far too late,” to protect students and staff from episodes like these: