Hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students at Columbia think that the Ivy League school “has not treated them with the standards of civility, respect and fairness it promises to all its students,” according to a report from Columbia’s task force on antisemitism released on Friday.
The 91-page report, which draws on interviews with almost 500 students, found that Jew-hatred on campus is “serious and pervasive.”
“These student stories are heartbreaking, and make clear that the university has an obligation to act,” the task force’s report states. (It wasn’t clear from the report how many of the 500 students were Jewish or Israeli.)
“Unfortunately, some members of the Columbia community have been unwilling to acknowledge the antisemitism many students have experienced—the way repeated violations of university policy and norms have affected them and the compliance issues this climate has created with respect to federal, state and local anti-discrimination law,” the report states.
“Many of the events reported in the testimonials took place well before the establishment of the encampments and the takeover of Hamilton Hall,” it adds. “The experiences reported during that period were even more extreme.”
Students, who often didn’t know how to report Jew-hatred to Columbia, found that “some faculty and staff responded with compassion and determination,” but “others minimized the concerns of these students, reacting sluggishly and ineffectively even to the most clear-cut violations,” the report states. “Even students who had successfully reported an incident spoke of a recurring lack of enforcement of existing university rules and policies.”
The task force suggested its own working definition of Jew-hatred for Columbia to use and recommended “in-person workshops about antisemitism and Islamophobia, as well as a range of optional training and workshops for others in our community, including on implicit bias and stereotypes, bystander interventions and having difficult conversations.”
“Many Jewish students said they now avoid walking alone on campus,” the report states. It quotes a student who said that crossing campus with a visible Star of David or wearing a kippah “could start World War III.”
“The experiences of these students demonstrated that there is an urgent need to reshape everyday social norms across the campuses of Columbia University,” per the report. “We need to promote a richer ethic of pluralism, which would encourage greater tolerance of and respect for differences in religion, culture and national origin.”
“If we were really to succeed in promoting tolerance, students would come to understand and value these differences,” it added.
