Recent photos of a text conversation between multiple Columbia University administrators prove what everyone already knew: University officials don’t care about rising antisemitism on college campuses.
While watching a discussion about Jewish life at Columbia, four deans at the school mocked the panel and dismissed concerns about antisemitic behavior by students.
The administrators were largely ignorant of what had unfolded at the university since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, from questioning whether Jewish students had been kicked out of any clubs (they were) to using a vomit emoji to describe an article that had been written by the campus rabbi, Yonah Hain.
In Hain’s op-ed, he proclaimed that “our community’s normalization of Hamas is a point-of-no-return moment at Columbia” and that many “administrators, faculty and students” have lost their “moral core” by celebrating the terrorist attacks against Israel.
“By using the October 7 attacks as a rallying point for the movement, attendees of the campus rally can no longer argue that their activism differentiates between the two. They are now saying the quiet part out loud: Dead Jews don’t matter,” he wrote in late October.
Nevertheless, many at Columbia University redoubled pro-Hamas rhetoric, as was apparent by the later takeover of campus by anti-Israel demonstrators. The vitriol toward the Jewish community expressed by administrators in the recent text messages should come as no surprise to anyone who followed their nonresponse to the encampment and occupation of Hamilton Hall.
This trend spread far beyond the Columbia administration, as many universities met the demands of pro-Hamas protesters while ignoring the concerns of Jewish students.
Brown University agreed to help facilitate divestment from companies connected to the Israeli military, while Northwestern University was heavily criticized by numerous Jewish organizations for a similarly spineless agreement.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee made a particularly ridiculous agreement with the terrorist sympathizers, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and referring to Israeli military operations as “genocide.” Moreover, the school agreed to review study abroad programs in Israel and open discussions with the UWM Foundation board about divestment.
The University of Wisconsin system president criticized UWM for this statement, and UWM’s president issued an apology for weighing “in on deeply complex geopolitical and historical issues” but did not actually rescind any part of the agreement.
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The stunning failure of dozens of universities to regulate antisemitism on campus, the continued resentment of the Jewish community by university administrators, and the cowardly agreements negotiated by campus leadership show that they sided with the pro-Hamas demonstrations all along.
University officials failed Jewish students, and they failed at their job to keep students safe. At Columbia and beyond, they need to start losing their jobs.