Can Columbia University president Shafik survive?
At the moment she has accomplished what many considered to be impossible; she has brought both sides together in calling for her resignation.
Now that Yale has also moved (far from fully successfully) to disperse pro-Hamas protesting students from their encampment on campus (including arresting some students), attention has returned to Columbia, where there are calls from all sides for president Shafik to resign.
Ironically, she has tried to mollify both sides — so both sides are now criticizing her. Basically, one side (the pro-Hamas side) is unhappy with her for calling the police to break up the student protest on campus that had been in violation of Columbia’s policies, while the other side is unhappy because she has still failed to bring the situation under control. When the progressive members of your faculty are calling for your resignation AND pro-Israel Republican congressional representative Elise Stefanik is also calling for your resignation – you had better have a lot of support by members of the Board of Trustees if you want to keep your job.
Shafik had appeared before congress last Wednesday, and following that 3-hour grilling, the consensus was that she had managed to avoid the kind of disastrous answers that had lead to the resignations last fall of Harvard’s and Penn’s presidents (after their own cartoonishly bad congressional appearance). There were some immediate criticisms of Shafik’s testimony by those who noted her failure to even mention, much less adhere to, the principles of academic freedom for professors, but overall, there was little reason to think she would be undone by her testimony.
But now I will add my tiny voice to the calls for her to resign – but for the most part, not for the reasons cited by most others. I’m fine with her having called the police to disperse protesters who were making life on campus intolerable for openly Jewish Israel-supporting students. But ...
1. I think she lied to congress.
OK. If one takes a very strict definition of lying — one that focuses solely on the surface level literal meaning of an utterance — maybe she didn’t. But she very strongly implied what isn’t true. I’ll mention two examples.
(i) Representative Stefanik asked Shafik about professor Mohamed Abdou – one of the Columbia professors identified as having a history of fomenting hatred for Israel. He had been hired after Oct. 7 and after stating that he stands “with Hamas”. Stefanik asked Shafik if Abdou had now been terminated. Shafik said yes, and said he would never work at Columbia again. But she also added that he was still completing his work at Columbia by grading papers.
Anyone who knows anything about how universities function understands that Abdou was on a one-semester contract (his position was as a visiting scholar), and that being “terminated” meant not that he was actually “fired” in the normal way that people understand the meaning of that word, but rather that he had been informed that his contract would simply not be extended. Shafik surely knew what most people would think she meant when she said that he had been “terminated”. She could have easily, and quickly, explained the reality of that situation to Stefanik, but Shafik chose not to. To make matters worse, at the very moment when Shafik was telling Stefanik that Abdou was simply now still employed by Columbia because he had not yet completed grading papers, he was on campus participating in a protest that was in clear violation of Columbia’s policies.
(ii) Congresswoman Kathy Manning asked Shafik if there were any members of Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies department (which has a long and well-deserved reputation for anti-Israel sentiments) who supported the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Shafik’s first response to that question was to simply state that: “In fact, the head of that department is an Israeli.” Given the context, there can be only one possible interpretation of that answer; yes, there IS at least one member of that department who supports the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and that faculty member is actually the head of the department. But that is not true! The head of the department IS an Israeli, but she is strongly pro-Palestinian and does not support the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Shafik must have known that, but still she answered Manning in that way. When what is implied by a statement is that direct and that clear – and when what is implied is not true – the statement is a lie. I can’t imagine how furious Manning must be about having been lied to in that disingenuously duplicitous way.
2. Shafik has lost control of the situation on campus and is now treating faculty and students in a grossly unfair manner. It appears that she is basically flailing now, trying desperately to keep a lid on the potential for real conflicts to occur, while hoping nothing really terrible happens before the end of the semester (I can’t even imagine how the school is going to hold graduation).
After calling the police on one set of protesters, Shafik has now caved completely and has done nothing about students who have currently re-established a protest encampment on campus in direct violation of Columbia’s policies. Far be it from me to defend the students who had been arrested, but I don’t understand how Columbia can follow through with the disciplining of those students while others are now violating the same policies with impunity. Having made the (I believe correct) decision to begin enforcing existing Columbia policies, Shafik must continue to do so. The fact that she has now caved and decided to stop enforcing policies shows her to be incapable of controlling the situation AND has resulted in some students being treated very differently from others for the same rules-violating actions.
What makes the situation rather ludicrous is that, at this moment, professor Abdou himself is on campus and is one of the leaders of the on-campus protest. Meanwhile, Columbia deactivated the university key card of Jewish professor Shai Davidai (who has been a public and very vocal critic of the pro-Hamas protests on campus) and told him he was “not permitted to enter the West Lawn” on grounds that his plan for a counterprotest was a safety risk. How can that be considered acceptable? Shafik needs to go.