What the co-chair of Columbia University’s antisemitism task force says people get wrong about the campus protests

In October of 2023, weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel, Columbia University’s brand-new president, Minouche Shafik, asked Nicholas Lemann, dean emeritus of the journalism school, to co-chair a Task Force on Antisemitism. Like elite campuses around the country, Columbia was roiled by campus protests; students and faculty were trading letters about Israel and many pro-Israel students began raising concerns about antisemitism.

Lemann said he felt obligated to say yes as a faculty member and as a Jew who had been engaged in previous campus debates over Israel, countering colleagues who supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

“I believe you have an obligation to stand up for what you believe in, even if it’s unpleasant,” Lemann told me in a recent interview. 

In the year that followed, the campus environment only got more heated, with a spreading pro-Palestinian encampment movement, anti-Israel protests on or near the campus and, in late April, a student takeover of the school’s Hamilton Hall that was broken up by the NYPD. Shafik stepped down in August, citing “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”

The task force (whose other co-chairs are Ester Fuchs, director of the Urban and Social Policy Program at the School of International and Public Affairs, and David Schizer, the Law School dean emeritus) released its first report in March. It detailed the “isolation and pain” experienced by Jewish students and the “particularly terrible treatment” meted out to Israeli students. The report concluded that the university was not doing enough to discipline unauthorized protests. 

A second report in September, issued after listening sessions with close to 500 students, said pervasive antisemitism on campus “affected the entire university community.”

“We heard about crushing encounters that have crippled students’ academic achievement,” read the report. “We heard about students being avoided and avoiding others, about exclusion from clubs and activities, isolation and even intimidation.”

Aggrieved members of the Jewish community welcomed the task force’s conclusions; critics said its report’s definition of antisemitism would stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

Two more reports are due, including one this month.

While other Ivy League campuses have been convulsed by the protests, Columbia — located in the heart of the country’s largest Jewish community — has become the epicenter of a range of debates surrounding Oct. 7 and the war that followed: how to define and combat antisemitism; whether and how to cap free speech, campus protest and academic freedom; the discourse around political diversity and charges that elite universities have become hotbeds of “wokeness.”

Lemann and I discussed these and other issues after his recent appearance at Limmud New York, an all-day festival of Jewish learning held at Manhattan’s JCC on the Upper West Side, where he lives. There he attends Minyan M’at, an egalitarian service that meets at Ansche Chesed, a Conservative synagogue. 

 Before serving as the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism from 2003 to 2013, Lemann worked variously as a writer and editor at Texas Monthly, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer. He graduated Harvard College in 1976, and wrote about higher education and standardized testing in “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy” (1999), among other books.   

Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

How are things on campus these days? What’s the mood and how heavy are the protests?

 It’s been fairly quiet, as it has been at other campuses. Most protest in the center of the campus is much smaller, much less visible than it was last year. However, the campus is locked, you have to have a valid ID to get into the campus. And when you enter the campus, there’s a lot of private security people all over the place. So the big question is, if you didn’t have the campus locked and you didn’t have the private security people, what would happen? 

Behind the scenes, or less visibly, there’s a pretty intense disagreement about what the rules for protest are and what body within the university owns them and enforces them. 

How do you respond to readers who are inclined to condemn the pro-Palestinian protests on campus, and to condemn the institutions for not doing more to clamp down on threatening rhetoric, or to chalk up the anti-Israel sentiment to a sort of far-left takeover of the liberal arts. What might they be missing?

I have a lot of conversations about this, and I often get some kind of theory about why this issue is playing out in the way it is at Columbia and other elite universities. One that I hear a lot is it’s all about funding from Qatar. Another theory is that it’s all about DEI offices, or post-colonial theory. I don’t want to discount any of those completely, but I want to give a somewhat different big picture. 

It’s what I call the blind man and the elephant theory of major private universities [in which key players only perceive their own small part of a larger truth]. Universities like Columbia are blessed with a whole bunch of different stakeholders, all of whom do things that help make the university work and are really essential. So the one you hear about from the left is the fabled “Zionist donors.” But that’s only one group, and it’s not that big of a group. Much bigger groups include alumni, parents, staff, students and government officials at all levels. All these folks are crucial players at the university, but they rarely encounter each other directly, and each has quite a different vision of what the university is and what its core mission and values are. This particular conflict really brings that into the sunlight, and that’s one reason why it’s been so divisive.

Why is that? Why did that kind of confluence — and divergence — of all these stakeholders exacerbate what happened after Oct. 7?

Protest is constant at Columbia, but the level of protest we were seeing last year was by far the highest I’ve ever seen in my 21 years at Columbia. Most of the causes that sweep through the university are on the left, and this one is too. But in most cases, these stakeholder groups that I mentioned are pretty much on the same side of the issue — everybody’s against climate change, or supported the post-George Floyd wave, and things like that. In the case of [Israel and Palestine], significant stakeholders or subgroups within the stakeholder groups 100% passionately disagree about the question at hand. That’s uncharacteristic of most of these university protest waves.

That sounds like a liberal consensus on the part of students, faculty, administration and donors broke down over Israel. Does that support or contradict the conservative critique that the Ivies are hotbeds of “wokeness?” At Limmud I heard you say that colleges have become undergraduate business schools.

At the Ivies, the percent of students majoring in the humanities and the softer social sciences is, in almost all cases, the smallest it’s ever been in the history of these universities. You’ve seen a massive switch in undergraduate interest into predominantly two fields: economics and computer science. I don’t know what the number is. My joke is that if you stop a student on the campus and say, “Can you tell me the starting pay at Google, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey,” they’re going to be able to tell you. 

And paradoxically, or maybe naturally, the more diverse these universities get, the more this is going to be true. If mom and dad are multi-millionaires, it’s okay to major in English or history or classics. But if you’re the first person in the family to go to college or your parents are in debt, they want you to do something that’s going to get you a well-paying job right after you graduate. 

As a result, the humanities and the less quantitative social sciences feel beleaguered and abandoned and marginalized within the university. They don’t have as many faculty slots as they’d like to have. They can’t accept as many PhD students as they’d like to. They have trouble placing their PhD students after they get their degree. And as a result of that, the faculty in these departments, feeling isolated, tend to move further to the left. 

That’s an explanation for the humanities faculty moving left: because they are not the heart and soul of the university anymore, they feel abandoned and ideologically in opposition to the rest of the campus. But what about student activists? Is their activism spurred by this sense of marginalization? 

It might be that many of the [pro-Palestinian] protesters are themselves pre-business majors. The way I put it is, it’s a long running part of the culture of elite universities, going back to their religious roots, that they see themselves as sort of moral beacons unto the world. You’re trained to think of yourself as an unusually talented person who has a right or an obligation to stand up against injustice and make their voice loud and proud, even though, on many of these issues, they haven’t really studied that particular issue. Some of what happened last year is that many students see this as a morally urgent moment in which Israel is clearly in the wrong, but they couldn’t pass a detailed test on the history of Israel or the conflict.

I hear complaints from parents of Jewish students that the university classroom has become a place of indoctrination. There are calls from donors like Bill Ackman at Harvard or anti-antisemitism groups to punish or remove faculty for participating in the pro-Palestinian protests, or for expressing views that were construed as antisemitic or incendiary. On the other side, it’s a bedrock principle among faculty that they should be able to investigate, discuss and teach issues in their field without interference from administrators, boards of trustees, donors or anyone else. Do you see a shift in how universities view academic freedom, and is it even possible?

If you ask the average Columbia parent, “Have you ever heard the term academic freedom?” — I think a lot of them would say no. And a lot who have heard of it couldn’t define it. Meanwhile, and paradoxically, faculty members believe that academic freedom is the core inviolable principle of the university.

Academic freedom and free speech are not the exact same thing. Generally, freedom of speech is uncurated and academic freedom is curated. Freedom of speech means anybody can get up in the public square and say whatever they want. Academic freedom means something different: If you do a tremendous amount of work and cross a lot of bars in your academic field, you’re given the right to teach what you want in the classroom. But that’s not the same as saying any professor can do anything and it’s protected by academic freedom. Academic freedom is about classroom teaching and research. You can’t propagandize in class, or you shouldn’t. There’s a power imbalance. The job of the professor is to get the student thinking, not tell the student what to think. It’s quite possible to articulate that set of values around classroom teaching, but within the university that is quite difficult, because there’s a very, very strong tradition of faculty autonomy in teaching and research. 

Has your antisemitism task force addressed the distinction between free speech protection and academic freedom protection?

We said in our last report that was published right before Labor Day that we were going to address what goes on in classrooms in a subsequent report. 

Do you worry that Jewish donors and Jewish parents and stakeholders are representing a set of illiberal values that the Jewish community is not usually associated with? Going back to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Jews have rallied around the idea that their own safety is tied into the democratic idea of free speech and that the cure for bad speech is more speech, or, as Brandeis put it, “the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.” Is putting limits on speech or academic freedom a place Jews want to find themselves in?

I get letters all day from parents and alums who say Professor So-and-So gave a speech, you know, 1,500 miles away from the Columbia campus. And here’s the text, and why aren’t they fired? And my position would be that’s not part of their academic life as a Columbia professor, so they should have some protection. 

The best you can hope for is to have very clear rules for how the university works, and to try to create a greater degree of shared understanding than there is now around what are the values of the university. Even if you say “Jewish parents and stakeholders and others should not think these things,” you can’t just turn that off. There’s an educational process that is needed that would take a while and has to be conducted by very senior leadership figures in higher ed. 

And does that go both ways — persuading outsiders of the value of academic freedom and telling insiders that it has limits?

Yes, defining it precisely, and telling people the history, and making the case that this institution they want to be part of is based on academic freedom, so you know you should be careful if you’re against it, and then, on the other hand, the term shouldn’t be used sloppily to mean faculty members have an absolute grant of autonomy in all senses.

One criticism of the second report has to do with how you define antisemitism, and the objection that anti-Israel criticism can be too easily construed as antisemitism. The report says that antisemitism could manifest as “targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them” and “exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel.” How did you try to separate antisemitism from anti-Zionism? Are you satisfied with the definition that you came up with? 

Our co-chair, David Schizer, is a lawyer, and he’s been the owner of the definition question. What we get from the other side is the charge that any definition that imagines there can be any relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism will be used as a pretext to shut down all criticism of the state of Israel on campus. We’ve never been associated with trying to do that. And in my own Jewish life, everybody I know does nothing but criticize the state of Israel, 24/7. So I do think it’s a red herring to say that our real goal is to prevent anybody from being allowed to criticize the state of Israel and its policies.

But at what point do they cross the line? 

First of all, our task force’s job is not to solve the Middle East and to come up with Middle East policies. Our job is to think about the campus climate generally, and the comfort level of Jewish students in particular. The university has an existing toolkit for this kind of thing, which is built around the vocabulary of impact and intent. The standard in that case is that it’s not just what you meant by a comment — it’s how the person received it. That’s not the same as saying in all cases that a remark that has a negative impact is absolutely banned. Rather, it is a consideration of the impact that things have on identity-based groups. If a critical mass of people are experiencing something that makes them feel intensely uncomfortable, then we need to talk about it.

Your second report included testimonies from many Jewish students about their experiences of feeling threatened or excluded or discriminated against for their support or perceived support for Israel and Israelis. I am assuming you included that in order to describe and explain that discomfort, and how identification with Israel is a normative aspect of being an American Jew.

It’s a very difficult issue to explain to people. I don’t need to explain to people in my congregation that being Jewish and the state of Israel are not two completely unrelated topics. But a lot of people at Columbia are completely mystified, or pretend to be, by why so many Jewish people think there’s a connection. They don’t know much about Jewish life or Jewish history, or what it means to be Jewish. 

Are you still bullish on the idea of the Ivies? I ask this because we’re hearing anecdotally that there’s some erosion within the Jewish community, some of whose members feel the elite schools may not be a home for Jews anymore. 

I would say it depends on who you are, what kind of experience you have, and what you expect. Jewish kids come in a lot of different flavors. For some of them, it’s a very, very lightly worn identity. People like that I don’t think would feel uncomfortable at Columbia. 

But if you are in another part of the Jewish world where you come from a more observant family, you went to a day school, you had a gap year in Israel, you might say, “I just really don’t want to be around people constantly professing anti-Zionist sentiments.” Maybe you wouldn’t be that comfortable.

On the other hand, [that same kind of person might say], “I love being in an environment where there are a lot of loud and proud anti-Zionists, because I want to fight, not with my fists, but engage with those people and really be part of a big political debate on campus.” 

Let me ask you to put your journalist hat on: Is there any story that hasn’t come out that you wish people would know — that, amid all the sound and fury, there’s something on campus that’s just not being reported? It could be good news. It could be bad news. 

You know the journalistic maxim: When a plane lands safely, that’s not news. So there’s all sorts of wonderful things happening at Columbia, but they’re what you’d expect. So I’m not advocating that they be news. What I see missing the most goes back to our conversation about the nature of universities. Daily news coverage tends to focus on incidents, and it’s hard to understand incidents if they’re disconnected from each other. So one day, the protesters dump red paint on the Alma Mater statue, so they look bad, and then another day, the police come and haul away the encampments, so maybe the protesters look like innocent victims. It seesaws back and forth, and it’s hard to see how this fits into the context of what a university is. That’s what I see missing the most.