EDITORS' CORNER
Jewish student says next step should be to discipline faculty who support ‘outright discrimination’
It’s taken more than two years for Columbia University to re-open its campus after a spate of violent pro-Palestinian protests rocked the Ivy League institution.
On Monday, the university announced on X that it has stopped requiring Columbia ID cards to access academic buildings during regular business hours.
The decision came from the new Campus Safety Advisory Committee, which held its first meeting in November, according to a news release.
Columbia also recently added new “Special Patrol Officers,” who have the authority to “detain and issue summons.” These officers “enable the University to more effectively and promptly respond to campus disruptions, while reducing reliance on the NYPD,” the news release states.
Limiting access to campus buildings was one of the safety measures the New York university took in response to the anti-Israel violence. Other actions included cancelling its university-wide graduation ceremony in 2024 and moving classes online for a period.
“For many juniors and seniors, memories of chaos, disruption, and destruction remain seared in our brains,” Jewish student Elisha Baker, a senior, wrote Tuesday at The Columbia Spectator.
In the op-ed, Baker praised Columbia leaders for taking action to address the violence and antisemitism on campus.
However, Baker wrote that the university still needs to do more, especially regarding faculty who have supported “outright discrimination on campus.”
“The administration has taken meaningful steps with student discipline, structural reform, and its agreement with the federal government. But without a parallel reckoning for faculty misconduct, the project remains incomplete,” he wrote.
The unrest began in October 2023 soon after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Protests and encampments followed in the subsequent months, most notably the April 2024 take-over of Hamilton Hall, in which two janitors said they were held captive, and more than 100 individuals later were arrested, The College Fix reported at the time.
The university expelled, suspended, and revoked the degrees of several students involved in the incident; the exact number of students who were disciplined was not disclosed, but reports suggest it was in the dozens, The Fix reported previously.
In May, 80 more pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested after taking over part of the university’s library. Two public safety officers were injured when the mob attempted to force its way into the building, acting President Claire Shipman stated at the time.
Some of these protests involved faculty as well as students, Baker wrote in his op-ed this week.
Although students were disciplined, he wrote that “the dozens of faculty members who supported, affiliated with, and physically enforced the exclusionary encampment” got a pass.
He continued:
The fact that dozens of professors openly participated in an encampment that barred certain students from a public campus space and then returned to teaching as if nothing happened is not just a failure of will; it is a failure of the institution’s structure. It reveals a university in which responsibility is diffuse, confusing the lines of authority and making moral accountability optional. And it sends a message that, somehow, academic freedom protects faculty members’ right to enforce a discriminatory space and encourage their students to join it. Such a concept of academic freedom has no moral or intellectual credibility.
Baker suggested firing them, revoking their tenure, or even just removing them temporarily from the classroom as potential consequences.
“Columbia faces a choice. It can treat the encampment era as an unfortunate but concluded chapter, hoping its memory will fade with time,” he wrote.
“Or, it can confront the reality: A cohort of professors used their positions to abet discrimination, and the University lacked—and evidently still lacks—the mechanisms to respond. The credibility of any future commitments to combatting antisemitism and discrimination hinges on addressing this gap,” Baker wrote.
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