Anti-woke Republicans attacked Columbia University. It capitulated

As Jewish faculty at Columbia University, we watched with alarm as our president, Minouche Shafik, appeared before the House education and workforce committee on Wednesday to answer questions about antisemitism on our campus. While we are deeply concerned about antisemitism, we are also disturbed by the ways the hearing – like those in December, and surely those to follow – used specious charges of rampant antisemitism to advance an illiberal agenda.

We were shocked that President Shafik capitulated to its mendacious premises and failed to stand up for fundamental academic principles of honest intellectual inquiry and free expression. Most galling was the absence of any acknowledgment of the relentless devastation in Gaza: the urgent reason for the student protests that the committee caricatures and condemns as antisemitic.

It’s hard to believe that the hearings genuinely seek to protect Jewish students when its grandstanding inquisitors include Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who has trafficked in white nationalist conspiracy theories, and Representative Rick Allen, a Republican from Georgia, who quoted Bible verses as a source for dictating policy at a religiously diverse, secular university. The hearings’ purpose, rather, is to attack universities as sites of learning and critical thinking.

Such efforts to squelch expansive learning have torn through K-12 education across the country with bannings of books by Black, queer and Jewish authors, and have made devastating forays into public universities in several states, where it is no longer permissible to teach with intellectual honesty about such subjects as the history of slavery and the complexities of gender. Now the House committee is attacking private universities as well. While playing loose with facts about the curriculum at Columbia, the committee bullied our president into flouting rules of faculty governance, peer review and academic procedure. We were appalled to see her threaten specific professors on the spot and promise to change university policies single-handedly.

The campaign against the independence of higher education has now found incendiary fuel from a new ally: a longstanding, well-organized movement to stifle pro-Palestinian speech in American theaters, art spaces, literary venues and schools. For decades, this effort has relied on the false premise that any expression of a Palestinian narrative is an attack on Israel’s very existence, and that any support of Palestine is pro-Hamas.

Today, as student protests against Israel’s actions have grown in size and fervor, hawkish defenders of Israel have intensified efforts to quash them, often asserting, speciously, that protest rhetoric – even the mere sight of a keffiyeh – makes Jewish students unsafe. They then go further to claim that, therefore, Jews are being targeted and threatened.

Apart from ignoring that many of the protesters are themselves Jewish these conclusions require two sleights of logic. First, describing political speech as discriminatory requires conflating Jewishness with Zionism – an identity with a political ideology. Feeling a connection to Israel, as most American Jews tell pollsters they do, does not constitute an identity. Second, the faulty reasoning equates discomfort with actually being unsafe. We are not saying that there have been no anti-Jewish incidents on campus. Sadly, there have, as there have been anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim incidents; all of them must be addressed clearly and firmly. But protesting Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza – which uses an arsenal supplied by the US – is not driven by bias against Jews any more than objecting to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is driven by bias against Russians.

Still, this is the disingenuous impetus for the House committee’s hearings. Together, those defenders of Israel who insist on a single exculpatory narrative about Zionism, along with the committee’s “anti-woke” Republicans, not only threaten to erode academia’s fundamental values, but those of democracy itself. Yet President Shafik made little effort to defend them.

The role of a university is to teach students how to think critically and courageously. This means that students might feel unsettled when their world views differ from their peers’ or when what they discuss in class – or hear on campus – challenges their beliefs. University education involves learning to engage disagreement and even confrontation, and to contest ideas rather than seek to suppress them.

While it is probably impossible to come out entirely unscathed from hearings that are largely designed to produce gotcha social media moments for the Maga base, President Shafik did not have to align herself with the anti-intellectual and anti-democratic bigotry of the questioners or accede to their cynical weaponization of antisemitism, a move that dangerously makes Jews the face of repression.

Having watched other university leaders driven from their positions after the December hearings, President Shafik seems to have developed the tactic of harshly punishing students protesting the war on Gaza (with the heaviest brunt borne by students of color) precisely so she could point to those measures when facing her interrogators in April. When committee members were not satisfied, she promised to intensify the draconian crackdown.

Early yesterday morning, student activists, harking back to demonstrations at Columbia against the Vietnam war and against South African apartheid, pitched tents on campus to create a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”. As we write, the flashing lights of police cars are cutting across the campus. President Shafik is already carrying out her promise to the committee, risking the very foundations of our university.

• Alisa Solomon is a writer, professor of journalism, and the director of the arts and culture concentration at the Columbia Journalism School. Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Sarah Haley is associate professor of history at Columbia University. Helen Benedict is a novelist and professor at Columbia Journalism School.