Civil Rights and Antisemitism at Columbia University
A hostile environment for Jews could mean a cutoff of federal funding and liability under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
WSJ
If failure is the best teacher, several Ivy League schools are in contention for the title of 2023-24 Teacher of the Year. In December, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania distinguished themselves when their presidents failed to give a straight answer to lawmakers who asked if advocating genocide of Jews violated their schools’ disciplinary codes; both presidents soon resigned. But this spring, Columbia might have outdone them.
Protesters set up an unauthorized encampment on South Lawn and defied the administration’s demands to shut it down. “We don’t want no Zionists here!” they screamed into bullhorns. “Globalize the intifada!” Jewish students said they were barred from clubs, assaulted, threatened and spat on for speaking Hebrew.
On April 30, dozens of protesters smashed windows and barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall until the New York City Police Department removed them. A week later the university canceled its main graduation ceremony, citing security concerns.
Columbia was a hotbed of student protest in the 1960s. In the late ’90s, when I was an undergraduate, a spirit of hostility toward “the man” and the administration lingered. But until now I had never heard about Columbia students turning on each other.
Yet maybe there’s hope. In December, Columbia impaneled a Task Force on Antisemitism. It’s a classic bureaucratic response to a crisis—other Ivies have done the same—but one of the panel’s three co-chairmen, David Schizer, speaks of the problem with clarity and force.
“There’s no way that I’m giving up this territory,” Mr. Schizer says. “Jewish people had to fight to get into Columbia decades ago. If we decide to walk away, there are a lot of people who’d like to take our places. But why should that happen? We’ve contributed a lot to making Columbia what it is, and that should continue.”
Mr. Schizer, 55, is a professor and dean emeritus at Columbia Law School. An Orthodox Jew, he was named for his paternal grandfather, who was orphaned at 17 in western Ukraine. When the Russian Civil War broke out in 1917, counterrevolutionaries entered the grandfather’s village and lined Jews up against a wall, preparing to shoot them. Communists showed up, and in the crossfire, Mr. Schizer’s grandfather slipped away. He made it to America with two younger siblings, matriculated at Columbia’s Teachers College, and was so grateful to his adopted country that he voluntarily overpaid his taxes.
“Now, I’m a tax lawyer by training, so I don’t overpay my taxes,” Mr. Schizer says. “But I share his view that I am fortunate every day to live in the United States of America.”
After graduating from Yale Law School, where he was a member of the Federalist Society, Mr. Schizer served a clerkship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who hired him to disagree with her. “She actually used me to vet arguments,” he says. “You know, ‘Tell me why you don’t agree with that, David,’ and I would.”
At 35, he was appointed dean, the youngest in the law school’s history. He left that post in 2014 after serving out the 10-year term limit. He is putting his legal training to use on the task force, warning administrators that they could face liability under federal civil-rights laws for failing to control antisemitism on campus.
After the NYPD retook Hamilton Hall, Police Commissioner Edward Caban said that “professional, external actors are involved in these protests.” Mr. Schizer sees this as something of a cop-out.
“It was not just outside agitators,” he says. “What’s going on is that students have not believed that there would be meaningful discipline for breaking rules. And it’s because the university was so ineffective initially. And it’s also because there are faculty members who are encouraging it.”
In January, a law-school colleague, Katherine Franke, told PBS’s “Democracy Now!” that she was concerned about having graduate students from Israel on campus because they are veterans of the Israel Defense Forces and “they’ve been known to harass Palestinians and other students seriously in the past.”
That comment could be evidence of illegal discrimination, Mr. Schizer says: “Almost everyone in Israel serves in the military. So nearly any Israeli is a veteran. And Columbia has a rule that we don’t discriminate based on your status as a veteran. We also don’t discriminate based on national origin. So those comments were problematic, not just morally but also legally.”
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes any institution that receives federal funding liable if it creates a hostile environment for students with a “shared ancestry.” Jews qualify as such a group. If the Education Department finds that Columbia had violated Title VI, the university could lose federal funding—an outcome Mr. Schizer calls “catastrophic.” The university could also face liability in court. Jewish and Palestinian students have separately sued Columbia alleging civil-rights violations, and three Education Department investigations are under way.
Mr. Schizer is particularly troubled by reports that Jewish students have been barred from several student-run associations unless they renounce Zionism. He calls that exclusion “the most painful thing that I’ve seen in 26 years at Columbia.”
“It is completely unacceptable for Jewish students to be excluded from student groups because they care about Israel,” he says. “That kind of exclusion is clearly a violation of the university’s legal obligations.”
A week before the Hamilton Hall takeover, campus security advised Jewish students not to enter certain areas of campus because it couldn’t guarantee their safety. That’s another potential Title VI violation. “The law requires universities to provide equal access to educational opportunities to everyone,” Mr. Schizer says. “You can’t limit the access of Jews or any other minority group—and that includes clubs, and it includes programs and classes and it includes physical spaces.”
Columbia attempted to accommodate students who felt unsafe on campus by allowing them to attend classes remotely. That isn’t good enough, Mr. Schizer says: “A university cannot fulfill its responsibility by saying, ‘For you, this has to be online.’ We cannot have some people allowed to be there in person and others only able to participate online. And that’s true if people are explicitly told they have to be online, and it’s true also if the university is unable to protect them so that it seems prudent to participate only online.” Another potential violation: Some professors taught class from within the “Zionist-free” encampment.
Mr. Schizer hesitates when I ask if he has faced any discrimination or hostility as a Jewish faculty member. “I don’t know that I, myself have been—well, I was about to say I haven’t been a victim of this, but I have. There has been a lot of bad-mouthing of me because of my connection to the task force.”
After his appointment, he says, “faculty would say to each other, ‘God, I wonder how much they’re paying these people.’ ” But everyone on the faculty knows that committee service is unpaid. He calls the rumor “strange and, frankly, offensive.” Discrimination against Jewish faculty, administrators or staff—including graduate students—could constitute a violation of Title VII, which bans employment discrimination.
Some universities have considered dealing with the antisemitism problem by expanding their “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs to protect Jews. Mr. Schizer thinks that’s the wrong answer. Instead, he proposes that Columbia create a Title VI office, staffed by lawyers and modeled after the Title IX offices that police sex discrimination.
Mr. Schizer acknowledges that aggressive enforcement of antidiscrimination laws can run up against the freedom of speech. His central argument is that antidiscrimination law must protect all groups equally. That may mean scaling back certain protections for all minorities. But administrators aren’t free to adjust the dials to different settings based on the groups they favor—suspending students for “misgendering” or displaying a Confederate flag but shrugging off calls for Jewish students to “go back to Poland” or allowing them to wave the banner of Hamas or Hezbollah.
“It’s not OK to defer to the subjective experience of some minorities but to apply a different test to Jews,” Mr. Schizer says. “Personally, I am in favor of free speech to the maximum extent possible. If that means that Jews need to be resilient in hearing speech that offends them, then that may be the right rule. But it has to apply to everyone.”
Mr. Schizer says that much of the discussion about the protesters’ free speech misconstrues the First Amendment. For one thing, long-settled law holds that reasonable restrictions on the “time, place and manner” of speech are permissible. Punishing violations of content-neutral restrictions—for instance, by suspending or expelling students who unlawfully occupy portions of campus—is consistent with free speech, even at a public institution.
Nor does the First Amendment enshrine a heckler’s veto. “My right to speak can’t get in the way of other people’s right to speak,” Mr. Schizer says. “So Columbia has to make sure that doesn’t happen. And the fact that some professors at Columbia seem to think that the ability to disrupt other people’s speech and work is ‘free speech’ is just wrong, and it’s very disappointing that they see it that way.”
A protest that disrupts classes, drowns out disfavored speakers, and bars or intimidates students from using the services of the university isn’t a constitutionally protected protest. It’s a mob. That is true whether the protesters call themselves pro-Palestinian or pro-life. “If we were to go so far as to say, yes, disruption is fine, then what we’re essentially saying is: The rights of the people who disrupt are superior to the rights of everyone else,” Mr. Schizer says.
Punishment for rule violations is essential and, if administered quickly and consistently, ought to be sufficient to maintain order on campus without police. A student who is suspended must pay a hefty sum ($32,670) for an extra semester and can’t return to school for one year.
Mr. Schizer says he believes Columbia students who refused to leave the encampment will be suspended and those who occupied Hamilton Hall will be expelled. A Columbia spokesperson, citing student privacy, wouldn’t confirm whether any suspensions and expulsions had actually occurred, saying only that “disciplinary processes have begun.”
But enforcing its own rules could bring Columbia’s administration into open conflict with a significant portion of the faculty. Hundreds of Columbia professors signed a letter strenuously objecting to the university’s “rushing” to suspend or expel the students who took over Hamilton Hall.
That gets to the heart of the problem: Ultimately, rules are only as strong as the will to enforce them. At many top universities, administrators seem anxious to appease rule breakers by offering concessions that amount to ransom payments. Northwestern promised full-ride scholarships for five Palestinian undergraduates and the hiring of two Palestinian visiting faculty members. Princeton pledged to consider “new curricula in Palestine studies.” Brown agreed to put the matter of divestment to a vote. Johns Hopkins granted amnesty to all student protesters. Harvard offered rule-breakers the invitation to discuss divesting from Israel.
On Wednesday, however, the Harvard Corp. overruled the recommendation of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to allow the graduation of 13 students who were suspended or placed on probation for violating the university’s rules at an encampment on Harvard Yard.
It was too little, too late for my husband, a member of the Class of 1999. We were supposed to attend his 25th reunion next week. But we had already canceled our flights. Neither of us has the stomach to go.
