The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Downplaying Antisemitism at Columbia
The Trump Administration has announced that it's suspending $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University in response to Columbia's failure to protect Jewish students from harassment and discrimination as required by federal law. I think Columbia richly deserves this, but I don't know whether this is lawful, or whether federal law requires hoops to be jumped through before such sanctions can be levied.
In this post, though, I want to respond to some of the left who have seen denying that Columbia has an antisemitism problem to begin with, despite my pointing to a report from the antisemitism task force at Columbia which, after it authors interviewed hundreds of Jewish Columbia students, found that antisemitism was "severe and pervasive."
It's remarkable the extent to which people on the left will wax eloquent about the lived experiences of this or that group, and how we should never question their interpretation of such experiences, but somehow when hundreds of Jewish students at Columbia report experiencing an intensely hostile environment, so much so that some left the dorms to live at home, some transferred, etc., suddenly the same folks will be not just skeptical, but entirely dismissive.
It's also remarkable the extent to which some folks on the left will insist that we understand current controversies over racism, sexism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, and so forth in light of the history of those isms and phobias, and be sensitive to the fact that we aren't starting afresh as if these isms and phobias were not strongly embedded in societal consciousness.
Meanwhile, we are supposed to interpret students openly supporting a genocidal antisemitic terrorist group on college campuses as if it's a natural reaction to Israel's (nonexistent) "genocide" in Gaza, without noting the long history of state-sponsored and popular antisemitism in countries from which many of the protestors originate, without noting the fact that the far left was successfully propagandized with Soviet antisemitism for decades, and without noticing the long tail of Nazi-style conspiratorial antisemitism that is reflected in much of the rhetoric one sees on campus.
In short, when it comes to Jews and Western Christian and Islamic civilization we are apparently supposed to be assuming we are working from an entirely blank slate, whereas with every other minority group we must be exquisitely sensitive to the burdens of history.
