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Key points
- Columbia University issued a lengthy report detailing extreme antisemitism and failures to address it.
- The current structure for reporting bias incidents does not have a mechanism for reporting antisemitism.
- The report recommends DEI trainings, including for implicit bias, despite many incidents of explicit bias.
- Faculty want Columbia to clarify and enforce the school’s nondiscrimination and anti-harassment rules.
As campuses were roiled by anti-Israel demonstrations and encampments last year following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, at many schools, including Columbia University, where 23% of undergraduates and 16% of graduate students are Jewish, Jewish students faced a hostile environment in which it became increasingly difficult for them to learn and to participate in campus life.
To combat “the harmful impact of rising antisemitism,” Columbia empaneled a Task Force on Antisemitism. Its first report, in March 2024, recommended that the university clarify the kinds of speech that contribute to a hostile learning environment. The second report, recently released, described “not just feelings of exclusion” on campus last year, “but actual exclusion from extracurricular, curricular, and dorm spaces,” along with a double standard when reporting antisemitism versus other incidents of bigotry.
In public-facing materials put out by the University’s DEI offices, which are scattered among its various schools, with only one exception, antisemitism wasn't even mentioned. The omission, the report revealed, fed a perception of “a notable absence of concern for Jewish students.” In the DEI framework itself, Jewish students “figured as oppressors in an oppressor/oppressed binary whose power meant they could not be discriminated against.”
The Task Force reported high levels of stress, anxiety, fear, and exhaustion among Jewish students as a result of being “repeatedly targeted by bullying.” Jewish students “witnessed and sometimes experienced threats of violence” and “actual violence,” according to the report. Without administrative support, students felt “totally unprotected on campus” and several reported declining mental health as the year wore on.
Many Jewish students who sought help through DEI offices and other administrative channels reported being steered toward counseling instead of mediation or disciplinary pathways. More than one student was explicitly told they were the only one complaining about antisemitism—and were referred for therapy. In several cases, student reports went unanswered, and in many other cases, students “were told that their experiences fell outside the purview of DEI.” One was flatly told that there was “not an antisemitism problem” on campus.
On the positive side, the report noted that “it is neither empirically accurate nor desirable to divide identity groups into two master categories, marginalized and privileged.” The report admitted that “in this typology, Jews are considered privileged”—an idea that has often been “supported by DEI offices.”
The report exhorts Columbia’s DEI offices to “celebrate differences and to encourage interactions that promote understanding, collegiality, and friendships across differences” instead of “restrict[ing] the University's multicultural embrace to members of the [marginalized] category.” Then, the “newly expanded DEI parameters” should be standardized across the university.
The report goes on to suggest “implicit bias and stereotype training” for “all community members” to help “uncover and address unconscious biases and stereotypes” using “tools like the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to reveal hidden biases.”
When questioned about the shortcomings of implicit bias training, Task Force co-chair David Schizer told me they are aware that not everything is equally effective and that the Task Force doesn't see training as a “panacea.” However, he said, implicit bias training is already part of the university's anti-discrimination toolkit and is regularly used to address potential harassment based on gender, race, and sexuality. So it should also be used to address harassment of Jews and Israelis.
Even if implicit bias had a consensual scientific definition (it doesn’t), and trainings were known to be effective (they’re not), and IAT scores were related to behavior change (they aren’t), it’s not clear that a significant amount of antisemitism on today’s campus is the implicit kind. Incidents reported to the task force include explicitly antisemitic rhetoric and jokes (even referencing Hitler); exclusion, ostracism, and refusal to provide services because of Jewish and/or Israeli identity; explicit threats to Jewish students’ safety; and even physical violence.
Implicit bias training would not have prevented classes, office hours, and meetings from being held in the encampments. Holding school activities in the encampments required Jewish students to encounter “vigils” for Hamas terrorists—with language like “glory to our martyrs”—and signs like “whoever is in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets is a hypocrite.” It also made it mandatory for all students in those classes to break the school’s rules in order to access their education.
Implicit bias training would not have prevented “critiques of Zionism on campus” from incorporating “traditional antisemitic tropes about secretive power, money, global conspiracies, bloodthirstiness, and comparisons of Zionists to Nazis or rodents.” Nor would it have stopped lecturers from disparaging Jewish donors as “wealthy ‘white capitalists’ who laundered ‘dirty money’ and ‘blood money.’”
Implicit bias training would not have prevented an Israeli student from encountering a demonstrator who flashed “a phone adorned with a Hamas flag” and told her, “we will follow you to Israel and burn your family.” It would not have inhibited the medical professional who refused to treat a student at the university health center because she is Israeli.
Nor would such training have prevented protesters (on campus and off) from chanting at Jewish students, “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” or yelling, “we are Hamas, pig,” “you have no culture,” “all you do is colonize,” “stop killing children,” “go back to Europe” “go back to Poland,” “go back to Belarus,” “Nazi bitches,” “get the hell out of here” “keep walking” “kill yourself; jump off a building,” and “7th of October is about to be every day for you”—all while hiding their faces behind keffiyehs.
It would not have prevented the physical attack on an Israeli student while he was hanging posters of people kidnapped from Israel on October 7, 2023, and still held hostage in Gaza. Nor the false complaint he endured—one of many lodged after October 7 targeting Israeli students. Nor would implicit bias training have helped when non-Jewish students explicitly “refused to collaborate on group projects with Israeli students.”
And it would not have prevented the chilling campus incident in which Jewish students were physically pushed out of the encampment. “We have Zionists!” the organizer called out. (“We have Zionists” the others repeated.) “Who have entered the camp!” (“Who have entered the camp.”) Demonstrators created a human chain at his command. As the mob advanced, arm-in-arm, toward the Jewish students, the call-and-response escalated: “Walk and take a step forward!” (“Walk and take a step forward.”) “So that we can” (“So that we can”) “Start to push them” (“Start to push them”) “Out of the camp.” (“Out of the camp.”)
The student who orchestrated that incident achieved notoriety after he posted a recording of himself saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” “I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die,” and “be glad, be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
The report also indicates that Jewish students, fearing for their physical safety, began hiding markers of their Jewish identity while on campus. A rabbi even recommended that Jewish students go home for their own safety.
The report also noted that teaching assistants and resident assistants do not appear to be adequately trained on matters such as discrimination, harassment, or safety, and that many students reported an “insufficient definition of safety.”
After the second report's release, a number of faculty found the two reports lacking. They have been circulating a letter asking the administration “to follow the lead of peer institutions like NYU and the University of California and issue a plain English statement on permissible student conduct.”
Although the report insists that “Individuals need to approach disagreements with tolerance and respect,” one student interviewed noted: “When I was doing orientation there were programs on sexual respect, DEI, lots of programs in these areas. Something I don't remember seeing was how to engage in respectful dialogue with people you disagree with.”
If Columbia is to be a place in which disagreement is honored as a valuable aspect of education, providing tools for civil disagreement might be a good place to start.
