Columbia President Admits School Was ‘Not Up To’ Challenge of Oct. 7 Fallout

Columbia University president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik told a congressional committee Wednesday that the school wasn’t prepared for the firestorm stemming from Hamas’s attack on Israel last fall, which has led to numerous protests, instances of antisemitism, and claims by Jewish students that they feel unsafe on campus.

“When I first started at Columbia, our policies, our systems, and our enforcement mechanisms were not up to the scale of this challenge,” Shafik said. “They were designed for a very different world.”

Shafik, who became Columbia’s president last July, faced scores of pointed questions from committee members critical of the school’s response to instances of antisemitism on campus since the outbreak of war in the Middle East last October.

The questions were part of a 3 ½-hour hearing held by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The same committee in December elicited responses from two Ivy league presidents that led to their eventual resignations.

The fallout from the war in Gaza has been particularly intense on many college campuses, with many students torn over the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s response. Universities have faced the challenge of balancing speech rights on the one hand with the rights of students to attend school without feeling harassed.

Jewish students at Columbia have alleged incidents of assault, antisemitic graffiti such as swastikas, calls for the destruction of Israel at rallies, and speaking invitations from student groups to members of foreign terrorist groups.

At the outset of the hearing, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the committee’s chairwoman, called Columbia one of the nation’s hotbeds of antisemitism. “Columbia stands guilty of gross negligence, at best, and at worst has become a platform for those supporting terrorism and violence against the Jewish people,” Foxx said.

Committee members repeatedly probed decades of faculty attacks on Israel which they said had set the stage for the antisemitism that burst forth on campus after Oct. 7. Shafik responded that the school continues to ramp up processes to address antisemitism on campus and that professors who have expressed antisemitic viewpoints wouldn’t be hired under her watch.

The hearing comes four months after heated exchanges before the same committee prompted the resignations of Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill.

At that hearing, lawyerly answers to questions asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), sparked a backlash from politicians, alumni and donors. Magill resigned on Dec. 9. Gay stepped down a month later following accusations of plagiarism. Of the three university presidents at the hearing that day, only Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth has retained her position.

Shafik was invited to the Dec. 5 hearing but was speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai. She appeared Wednesday morning with the co-chairs of the school’s board of trustees, Claire Shipman and David Greenwald, and David Schizer, a law professor and former dean of Columbia’s law school.

The four elite schools—Harvard, Penn, MIT and Columbia—all had experienced unrest on campus following the attack by Hamas on Israel. But so had many other campuses. The committee didn’t make clear why it called those four schools to testify.

During testimony Wednesday, Shafik and others emphasized the steps the school has taken since Oct. 7 to clamp down on antisemitism. Shafik said the school has revised its policies on student behavior and had suspended 15 students and put six on disciplinary probation for violating them. At the end of the hearing, Foxx chastised Shafik for misleading the committee and said only two students had been suspended.

Shafik and the other Columbia officials also conceded the school has more work in front of it. “The last six months on campus have served as an extreme pressure test,” said Shipman. “Our systems clearly have not been equipped to manage the unfolding situation.”

In their questions, some committee members focused on statements by professors attacking Israel, how they were hired and retained in positions of leadership.

Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich) singled out Prof. Joseph Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics at Columbia. According to Walberg, Massad called Israelis “cruel and bloodthirsty colonizers” and said foreigners who join the Israeli military are “baby killing Zionist Jewish volunteers for Israeli Jewish supremacy.”

Massad called Walberg’s description of his work and words false and defamatory and said Shafik’s insinuation that he had been reprimanded was false.

Stefanik asked whether Massad was still the department chair. “Do you stand behind Professor Massad remaining Chair of the Academic Review Committee, giving his support for terrorism and harassing Jewish students?” she asked.

Shafik said many of the faculty were hired before she arrived. “I think many of these appointments were made in the past in a different era,” she said.

Rep. Burgess Owens (R., Utah) asked about the positive reaction some Columbia faculty allegedly expressed to the Hamas attacks.

“Would Black students be forced to attend a class if a Columbia professor was describing the massacre of Black men and women, children…as stunning, awesome and astonishing?” Owens asked.

“What you’ve described, congressman, is completely unacceptable,” Shafik said.

Antisemitic activity reported on college and university campuses increased in 2023 by 321% from 2022, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations reported a 56% increase in anti-Muslim incidents last year, the highest in its 30-year history.

Palestinian advocates say Columbia has been heavy handed in dealing with them—including suspending pro-Palestinian student groups. Across the country, advocates for Palestinians say schools are infringing on their speech rights for expressing their anger at Israel as the death toll in Gaza rises.

On Monday, the University of Southern California canceled its valedictorian’s speech, to be given by a pro-Palestinian Muslim woman, citing security after she posted views opponents called antisemitic and anti-Zionist.

Testimony on Capitol Hill coincided with rallies around the country organized by local chapters of the American Association of University Professors.

Irene Mulvey, president of the AAUP, called the hearings “McCarthyism 2.0.”

“The idea that faculty critical of Israel, or the policies of any country or government, can be punished or fired for their protected extramural speech is extremely dangerous,” she wrote in an email. “Higher education is based on a robust exchange of ideas. Academic freedom includes the right to free speech.”

The House committee has cast a wider net since its first hearing. It held a roundtable with Jewish students from nine schools in February, and in recent weeks sent letters requesting information on how the University of California, Berkeley, and Rutgers University have handled antisemitic incidents on their campuses.

A Berkeley spokesman said Wednesday the school is responding to the committee’s requests and that it is focused on ensuring students on campus feel safe and respected. Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway said in a letter last week to the committee that the university has worked to respond to all reported incidents of antisemitism, including with increased police patrols.

Leaders of public-school districts in New York City, Berkeley and Montgomery County, Md., are expected to testify at a hearing on antisemitism in K-12 education next month.

Melissa Korn contributed to this article.

Write to Douglas Belkin at [email protected]

Corrections & AmplificationsProf. Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics at Columbia University. An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled his name in one reference as Mossad. Corrected on April 17.