Columbia University’s decision to move classes online is inexcusable, and it does nothing to solve the university’s antisemitism problem.

Columbia is moving most of its classes into a hybrid model, meaning that most in-person classes will become, at least in part, online classes. This is in reaction to antisemitic student mobs harassing Jewish students and setting up an encampment from which they are celebrating genocidal terrorists while claiming to oppose genocide.

The university’s decision is both cowardly and inexcusable. It is inexcusable, given that the university charges students nearly $70,000 per year in tuition for what are now glorified online courses. But it is also inexcusable because this “solution” doesn’t solve anything. University President Minouche Shafik said that “we need a reset” and that this move was done “to de-escalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps.”

This “de-escalation” means nothing if Columbia allows the encampment to remain. The university already pushed back the deadline to clear the encampment from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning before granting students another 48 hours, dragging it out until Friday. So long as the encampment continues, there is no possibility of “de-escalating the rancor,” especially when the university is now allowing the encampment to police its own hatred.

But more importantly, moving classes online and patting antisemitic student protesters on the back as they walk out of the encampment will do nothing to resolve Columbia’s actual problem. The university has fostered a culture of antisemitism, one that runs back to at least 2004. The diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology that teaches students to become more hateful based on people’s racial, ethnic, or religious identities was crafted by a Columbia Law School professor, Kimberle Crenshaw, who was hired by the university in 1995.

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This environment was created by Columbia, and moving classes online (while still allowing the encampment to exist) will not make its campus culture or its student body any less antisemitic. All this does is admit that the university is incapable of protecting Jewish students as a result of the campus culture the university created. The university’s ideal “fix” is not addressing antisemitic hatred and examining how its own ideological bent has attracted or molded an antisemitic student body, but instead papering over the problem so it doesn’t have to worry about it until it flares up again.

Columbia solves nothing by brushing this antisemitism under the rug. A campus quarantine will not stop the spread of hatred coming from the university’s professors, DEI bureaucrats, or courses. Columbia’s hiring process, courses, and DEI agenda-setting all need to be examined and reformed, and Columbia isn’t showing the stomach to do so by going virtual and hoping the antisemitism on display just magically disappears.