Columbia University is still acting as if rampant antisemitism on its campus is nothing to be concerned about.
While the university continues looking for a permanent leader, it made Claire Shipman, a co-chair of its board of trustees, its new interim president. Shipman is the university’s third leader in two years. Columbia continues to deal with the consequences of antisemitic students and faculty creating a toxic university environment, which included a mob taking over a university building and trapping multiple janitors in the process.
However, Shipman is a product of the liberal media bubble, having worked for ABC, CNN, and NBC. She is also part of the permissive leadership team at Columbia that allowed pro-terrorist, antisemitic students and faculty to flex their power on campus. Shipman referred to the congressional hearings on antisemitism at “elite” universities as “capital hill nonsense” in a text to then-Columbia President Minouche Shafik. She also said the university should “think about unsuspending” two pro-terrorist student groups for the start of the new school year.
While Shipman testified publicly that she thinks there is a “moral crisis on our campus,” her private views have made it clear that, at best, she views this as nothing more than a public relations crisis.
TRUMP SAVES COLUMBIA FROM ITSELF
Columbia has evidently not learned anything from the terrible episode of the past two years. The university has backed down from suspending students involved in creating the university’s current antisemitic environment repeatedly and only recently started handing out (an undisclosed number of) expulsions to students who illegally occupied university buildings.
If Columbia actually cared about antisemitism, these actions would have been taken immediately and not after months of pressure. People such as Shipman, who downplayed the crisis, wouldn’t be making leadership decisions. Columbia still isn’t taking the situation seriously because it is more concerned with salvaging its reputation among radical students than it is with actually dealing with lawless, hateful ones.