Columbia University placed three administrators on leave this week while the school investigated their conduct at an alumni panel discussion on antisemitism last month, according to a university spokesman. The administrators were placed on leave after leaked images emerged last week showing the trio sharing disparaging text messages during the event.
Hmmm. This refers to a story in the Free Beacon that was based on surreptitious pictures of a text conversation between Susan Chang-Kim, a Columbia vice dean, and three other deans: Josef Sorett, Cristen Kromm and Matthew Patashnick. I read the story when it came out and came away sort of puzzled because it didn't seem like the texts were especially derisory. But now that three of the deans have been suspended it's worth taking another look. In all, the Beacon published four snippets of the conversation. Here's #1:
Chang-Kim: This is difficult to listen to but I'm trying to keep an open mind to learn about this point of view.
Sorett: Yup.
That's fine. Here's #2:
Chang-Kim: Did we really have students being kicked out of clubs for being Jewish?
Patashnick: To my knowledge no one was actively kicked out. But groups signed onto CUAD and other pledges and many Jewish students didn't feel welcome.
This also seems unobjectionable. Chang-Kim apparently hadn't heard of Jewish students being kicked out of clubs and asked if it had actually happened. Patashnick says no, but adds that some campus clubs support pro-Palestine movements that demand Columbia cut all ties to Israel and divest from all Israeli-linked companies. That made Jewish students feel unwelcome. Now here's #3. It requires a screen shot:
This is some kind of reference to an op-ed written months earlier by campus rabbi Yonah Hain called "Sounding the alarm." It's followed by a vomit emoji.
I'm not sure what this means. I suppose the inference is that the panel speakers were being even more alarmist than Hain was. Finally, here's #4:
Patashnick: 20%?!
Chang-Kim: Urgh.
Patashnick: He knows exactly what he's doing and how to take full advantage of this moment. Huge fundraising potential.
Chang-Kim: Double Urgh.
We don't know what 20% means or who these texts refer to. At a guess, it was directed at something said by Brian Cohen, head of Columbia's Kraft Center for Jewish Life. He's the only one likely to be in the business of fundraising. And a text snippet published yesterday suggests that Cohen wasn't their favorite person.
In any case, this is obviously critical of someone who Patashnick thinks is taking cynical (?) advantage of a tragedy to raise money. That's not the nicest thing to say, but hardly out of bounds. It's no big secret that people who fundraise do this all the time.
So what's the story here? I assume these four texts are the worst ones the Beacon had, and they don't seem antisemitic or even all that disparaging, especially for a private conversation. The only exception is maybe #3. It's obviously meant as a clever remark but beyond that it's unclear.
So help me out. Am I totally out to lunch and just not getting it? Or is this 95% harmless, as I suspect?
so someone is texting during a meeting, and someone else behind them is taking pictures of the texts....
That's why cell phones should be banned in schools.
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This kind of thing is getting to me.
Last night I rewatched The King of Hearts. At least the crazy people in that asylum were good natured and cheerful.
Yes - one I remember well. Better than one that filmed actual asylum residents, which should not have been presented more as entertainment than as a condemnation of mistreatment of helpless individuals.
It's so rare to find someone who's seen that wonderful little movie! I saw it in the 80s in a repertory cinema, but have never seen it available anywhere since.
You can find it on used DVD and BluRay. Amazon has some offers.
Useful site:
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/king-of-hearts
If you're an administrator at Columbia University, you're in a position of authority. With authority comes responsibility, so you better be careful what you say and do ... unless you're the Republican candidate for the highest position of authority on the planet. Then you can say or do the next thought that pops into your mind.
we all know why they were put on leave
pretending to not know is dumb and insulting.
Ohhh, I wish we all had your superior wisdom!
Anything related to Israel/Palestine is a no go area in University Administration.
I have a problem with people not understanding the difference between politics and religion. I love how religions give people comfort and despise how some of the "countries" that house such religions are so shitty.
I have several Palestinian friends. One friend's mother was arrested and is serving 17 years for tossing a rock at an Israeli cop. The rock did not hit him. I consider her a hostage. Another friend lost his dad, in an ambulance, waiting for ten hours to cross one of the "freeways" available only to Jews in the West Bank.
It is bad enough we took property from the Palestinians to create the Israeli state. Now we seem to "support" Israel to force remaining Palestinians out of the area.
Disgusting.
It is a shame they blew their chance in 2000 at Camp David and instead opted for violence instead of peace. Read Clinton's book.
...the majority of existing Palestinians weren't born yet in 2000, tho.
Contrary to you dishonorable and embarrassingly stupid lie, the 2000 deal offered to the palestinians was a complete sh_t sandwich that offered no sovereignty and no sane person would have ever considered accepting it. You want to ignore that after Rabin assignation by an Israeli terrorist, Israel had completely abandoned a 2 state solution.
"Tossing a rock". Interesting way to put it. Most of us would say "Throwing a rock" but that does not seem so innocuous, does it. After all, we all know that thrown rocks are deadly weapons - they can and do kill and maim people.
A quick Google search finds no evidence of a 17 year sentence to a Palestinian woman for rock throwing. I am pretty sure you would not get such a sentence unless it was either a repeat offender or part of an attack in which one of the victims was seriously injured or killed. I challenge you to provide an article or other evidence abot this incident.
I also wonder who "we" is - the US never took property from Palestinians.
Google has all the Israeli arrest records available to it? Even the tens of thousands in "administrative detention" who never get accused, or charged, or see a judge or even a lawyer?
There is plenty of news findable on Google about prosecutions of rock throwers.
This is clearly not administrative detention because that does not have fixed duration sentences, nor does it last 17 years.
Aww, MF, again supporting the gun-user being allowed to bully while the bullied ought to be arrested for being upset.
Do I need to find the articles about the Israelis killed by rock throwers? The babies with their skulls caved in?
There a bunch of really creepy people at Columbia. Students, teachers, administrators… good grief.
Citation not included, apparently?
What I've been getting for several years is the compelling feeling that no politically engaged person would consider a career in academia in America unless they were prepared to devote lots of time and effort to defending themselves against childish accusations of Wrong Thinking.
Well, many people at universities teach the sciences, engineering, or medicine.
Medicos aren't shy about courting political controversy, ditto many in the sciences. Engineering and architecture are about the only fields not caught up in the culture wars, and I expect it's only a matter of time. Trump already nibbled at it, demanding that all public buildings feature "classical architecture".
C'mon Kevin Drum
Not a word about this?
https://apnews.com/article/housing-home-sales-real-estate-home-prices-c728c63e2a62a3fa8b9e3f50c4eb266d
No charts
No graphs?
High Prices AND High interest rates (comparatively speaking)
And we get a piece about Deans at Columbia?
Right. He didn't even adjust for inflation.
This is the pro-Israel thought police hard at work.
I mean, this doesn't seem hard:
-The right is in the business of making their favorite people and ideas above interrogation.
-The small subset of Jewish people who are rightwing are definitely in this category. Also in this category is now the idea "antisemitism is rampant in spaces where I exist, such as this campus, AND anyone who disagrees with me on this question is themselves possibly anti-semitic."
-So questioning Patashnik's ideas is itself crossing a red line as far as wingnuts are concerned. You can't question whether his supposed suffering is sincere and based on real events!
-But if that weren't bad enough, they also criticized a Jewish person for acting untoward in a way that happened to involve money. It doesn't matter if the Jewish person in question actually was acting untoward with money; you can't mix "Jewish guy", "disingenuous behavior," and "fundraising" anymore because that is way too close to the anti-semitic Shylock trope. Even if the person you're criticizing is Bernie Madoff himself you're strictly forbidden from doing it.
95% harmless is 5% harmful. All it takes is 1%. Or drop.
Yes, if there is even a 1% chance that a thought is harmful, the thinker must be punished.
Dick Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine, applied to non-WMD threats. In no way limited to the Israel-Palestine issue, or to antisemitism or anti-Arab bigotry, it seems to be spreading to more and more issues.
Why anyone would send their kid to, or even hire a graduate of, an Ivy League school at this point is beyond me.
I'm reasonably confident that if your kid was admitted to an Ivy League school, you'd be pretty happy about that. Why? Because he/she would get great instruction at great facilities, with awesome research opportunities and an unparalleled alumni network to help them on the first steps of their career. You'd also pay almost nothing if you were a middle class parent. But I guess none of that matters to you because of . . . reasons.
Based on the Ivy League idiots, on both sides of the divide, running this country and the economy into the ground, and reading about what is going on there these days, I doubt much of what you said remains true. The Ivies now look to be filled with, and run by, dogmatic idiots. I'll stick with Big Ten graduates (sans Northwestern) at this point.
“The Ivies now look to be filled with, and run by, dogmatic idiots.”
The coordinated right-wing attacks to discredit and take scalps at elite universities, particularly on the Ivies (and especially ones run by women), look to be working, at least with you.
So far, Claudine Gay (Harvard) and Liz Magill (Penn) have lost their jobs for (perceived) lax protection against antisemitism. Now Columbia prez Minouche Shafik is under fire and the school looks like it is overreacting to trumped-up complaints about antisemitism. Let’s see what happens with the investigation.
It’s easy for me to say that Gay, Magill, and Shafik should have told the right-wingers to fuck off. But they’re in a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation. The unpublicized role of keeping the donor class happy (and donating) puts enormous pressure on university presidents. Right-wing money owns virtually all our elite institutions, higher education a rare exception. If the big-money wingnuts get their way, we may be witnessing the end of that. If so, the true idiocy is only about to begin.
“I'll stick with Big Ten graduates (sans Northwestern) at this point.”
That’s smart if you’re an NFL coach. But otherwise, not really.
NYU Abu Dhabi isn't bad.
https://nyunews.com/news/2024/06/09/nyu-abu-dhabi-free-speech/
UAE government is very concious of the fact that Hamas is a bunch of homicidal genocidal scum and they do not tolerate expressions of support for them. As fellow Muslims will laugh at anyone who calls them Islamophobic and then probably throw them in jail.
Ahh, yes, calling all people who support Palestinians right to life and self determination 'support for Hamas' kinda shows that yes, you're being bigoted.
But this is coming from the guy who supports a murderer, who professed a desire to drive his car into protestors and shoot them... drove his car into a crowded crosswalk, and shot the person who complained.
My wife and I have several good friends who have kids that graduated high school this past year. One of them (Jewish family) got into UPenn, which had been on of, if not his top, choice. But with all the anti-Semitic activity taking place there at the time he didn't feel particularly safe, let alone welcomed. He decided to go to Indiana instead.
Why anyone would send their kid to, or even hire a graduate of, an Ivy League school at this point is beyond me.
Presumably they'd do so because of the opportunities an Ivy League degree implies. Do you really think a year or two of kvetching by the extreme right is going to cancel out the advantage such a degree confers in getting job interviews, or in gaining admittance to prestigious graduate programs?
Student protests, radicals, wokeness run amok—these are hardly new things. And as much as we might wish otherwise, having a prestigious degree can be a powerful advantage in our obsessed society. That's just reality.
Too much context is missing from these particular reports to make any sense of the immediate issue-- foremost, who was at the mic when these texts were exchanged, and what were they saying? But the immediate issue probably isn't the real issue-- if the published texts look this anodyne then isn't something more going on. So for me the more relevant context appears to be the long-standing right-wing campaign to hobble and disparage universities.
A few potentially relevant points have come up in this coverage. The suspended administrators do not include the most senior of them, the Columbia College dean, who's reported by NYT to be cooperating. The suspended ones are junior under-deans (deanlings, I prefer to call them), but it isn't clear from their titles whether they're direct reports to the CC dean or to another office. I don't know this dean's position on the spring protests or the faculty non-confidence vote on the university president but am sure it will be important to this story as it develops. (And I think I can guess where he was on these, but we'll see.)
Also likely relevant context, it appears that the Manhattan prosecutors very recently dismissed charges against 2/3 of the people arrested in connection with the police clearing of the campus in the spring. NYT says that happened this week, and (shockingly!) very close in time to release of these texts by the plugged-in right-wing Washington Free Beacon. Apparently in connection with this release, a gop member of the House Education & Workforce Committee has demanded the text traffic from Columbia administration by this Wednesday. Whether to comply will ultimately be up to the president who ordered the police action and who would also have had at least a hand in suspending the deanlings.
It'll be interesting to see what Columbia's administration does now. The president clearly thought it was her role to come down hard and fast in the spring, and she was under intense pressure from donors, alums, and outside groups including the gop and Congress. OTOH her faculty seemed to think she could have been more forthright in defending the institution, which is after all private, and its academic independence.
There have been reports of significant antisemitism at and around Columbia, and I'd be very disturbed if they turn out to be accurate and if it's widespread. Singling students out in class on the basis of names, which has been reported in other sources, has no place in a university. But it's also true that reports can be exaggerated and/or incidents isolated, and I've seen reports saying that was happening too.
Also part of the context is that I don't take at face value for a nanosecond, not without other information demonstrating commitment, the claims of so many people who now noisily and publicly proclaim their worries about campus antisemitism. Especially those who have "R" after their names-- in this circumstance it's too easy a cudgel to swing against the universities, in the hands of people who in other circumstances wouldn't give a tinker's damn about antisemitism or any other kind of prejudice (except maybe to display it themselves).
It should be a cardinal rule in these times never to assume good faith on the right-- virtually never of its institutions, and only on good evidence for individuals.
Nothing remotely objectionable about those texts, except some self-important person (or group of those) somehow getting their feelings hurt by them lol.
These private texts should not really be aired anyway, just because one person in the exchange may have made them public, doesn't mean you can be disciplined for them as if they were intended to be public, unless there's something really and obviously objectionable, criminal, and/or threatening.
Got it... so if these comments were about someone talking about racism on campus during the George Floyd moral panic you would take the same position?
No, there's nothing comparable here.
But of course you call the strangulation death of someone accused of not even petty theft 'a moral panic'. You supported a guy who was convicted of murdering a pedestrian for the crime of... crossing a street in an overloaded crosswalk.
Thanks for flying your racist flag so proudly. It tells us all we need to know.
During my relatively boring career I once worked for a medical device company involved in a stock holder law suit, The company brought in a lawyer who spoke to the employees and cautioned us that emails & texts and the like could not only be leaked but were discoverable in case of legal action. He cautioned us to be careful about expressing personal views in work communications and pointed out that sarcasm and snark can be easily misinterpreted by others. The rule he gave us was not to put anything in our messages we would not be willing to see reprinted on the front page of the newspaper. I think about this every time I see someone get crucified over their leaked communications.
The other wrinkle to this is the well-known ruling that if your device or account are employer-provided, they're also employer-owned. It may differ a little in some states, but generally this means your employer can access anything on a device or in an account at any time, not just when they're being sued. Always good advice to keep these little technicalities in mind (and I'm looking at you, Strzok and Page, among countless others).
None of this may apply here, though, because it seems the texts were purloined through taking pictures of the phone screens. If they're personal phones and personal accounts, Columbia may have no legal way to provide the texts that the House committee is demanding, or even to see the texts for their own internal purposes.
Chang-Kim: "This is difficult to listen to but I'm trying to keep an open mind to learn about this point of view."
Sorett: "Yup."
Kevin says that's fine. No it's not. Trying to keep an open mind? About Israel or Palestine? Fire them now, find an excuse later. Seriously, I think that's it. It''s gone so far, one can be called antisemitic for having an open mind. At a university. Outside it, one only gets such a label if one disapproves of killing babies. It's terribly shortsighted, aimed only at letting the present Israeli govt off the hook for some months, and can only inflame (or even create) antisemitism in the long run.
You do realize they are potentially in trouble for not being sufficiently anti-antisematism?
You should be fired. No excuse.
My guess is that they were showing disdain for the vastly over-the-top complaints about antisemitism, over-the-top complaints that the Columbia administration has completely bought into for reasons of donors threatening to withhold contributions.
"So help me out. Am I totally out to lunch and just not getting it? Or is this 95% harmless, as I suspect?"
I find it helpful in these cases to simply switch the identity to a group you are partial to and ask the question again.
for example, on a campus where there are repeated complaints of anti-black discrimination, and a panel was held on discrimination of black students, and a black minister of a local church was giving a talk, how would you feel if the Dean of Admissions and the Dean of Student life where exchanging these same messages ?
Would you be ok if the Dean of Admissions said they were uncomfortable but were trying to understand the other point of view (what, I did not know that blacks were discriminated against, but I ma trying to understand ?) And the Dean of Student Life was sending vomit emoji's during this talk? Or that the pastor was simply trying raise money for their church by creating a controversy ?
I do not know if you are serious with your statement on this incident " on leave ... for something" but it sounds a lot like the "some people .. did something .. to some people .." statement by one of our elected government officials about what happened on 9/11.
I do hope you are better than that and are just simply oblivious to what has been going on at Columbia
I would think you were looking for ghosts that aren't there.
Conflating a country's government with its citizens, let alone a religion or ethnicity, os a mistake no matter if the discussion was the Saudi government, Ethiopian government, the Chinese government, etc. doing atrocities.
I really do not understand what you are trying to say here, and I do not see what this incident has to do with conflation of countries and their citizens.
There was public discussion about what some people believe is anti-semitism at a public university, and several people in charge of the operations of the university are clearly downplaying, with contempt, these concerns..
Whether or not you believe there is anti-semitism at the university, and with those running the university, there are clearly some serious issues going on, and these deans do not have the professional, emotional, or ethical abilities/sensitivities to do their job.
Would you feel the same way if the panel was about Native American rights to the land that is currently being occupied by this university, and those in charge of the university were sending vomit emojis while a Native American was speaking ? Or if there was a public panel on reparations by the university for the descendants of enslaved Americans ?
Even if you do not believe Native Americans have any rights to the land that the university is on, or even if you do not believe in reparations, I would hope that you would be appalled by the lack of sensitivity of a dean of that university and question the ability of that dean to do their job.
Why would you fire people for asking if said antisemitism in fact occurred?
Does that mean that any investigation whether anti-semitism occurred is superfluous?
Also, how does that at all match to your comment about 'swap the identity' because this is about a protest of a specific government, which you refused to disambiguate?
"discussion about what some people believe is anti-semitism at a public university"
Not a major point in this particular context, but Columbia University is in fact a private institution. Earlier on, when the president decided to call in the NYPD, that status was a central justification, ie to enforce private property rights.
Yes, you are correct, it is not a public institution, which I agree is not significant in this particular situation, however, it is is important when looking at the more general issue of first amendment speech rights.
Long ago Mike Royko said of Andrew Greeley that he'd never had an unpublished thought.
And today, we can all be that man.
Islamophobia is a much, much more pervasive problem in the US than antisemitism. Even on left-leaning comment threads such as this one, clearly bigoted comments against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, etc are common and all too often tolerated. Fox et al are filled with them, on some threads as high as 20% by my count.
In contrast, you almost never see a flagrantly antisemitic post. Instead you see lots of charges of antisemitism that deliberately conflate antisemitism and antizionism. Posts that somehow that there are is some problem with Jews or Judaism as a whole are vanishingly rare, as are calls for any Jews to suffer harm outside the bounds of being held accountable under the law.
The fact that these universities had their feathers in a ruffle over the small problem and ignored the bigger one, especially when they could easily have been coupled, overwhelmingly proved their bigotry in my mind: but in the opposite direction that Kevin is positing as an assumption.
That’s the whole point, of course. If antisemitism comes to mean anti-Zionism, even anyone who’s Jewish who criticizes Israel can be fired for being antisemitic. That’s the Republican’s goal, as much of a goal as ending access to birth control, unionization, or anything else that empowers anyone but the donor class.
Criticizing Israel is neither anti-semitic, not is it anti-zionist, and there is a lot to criticize Israel for.
The belief that Israel should not exist as a Jewish homeland is anti-zionist, by definition, as Zionism is simply the belief that there should be a Jewish homeland on some part of that ancient land.
The question is, if you are anti-zionist, are you also anti-semetic ?
I would say that the answer to that is whether or not you hold Jews to a different standard than you do others, simply because they are Jews.
You can probably make a case that 4 is Jewish money man trope.
I’m with Kevin, this is absurd.
Harvard gets up every morning and utters a prayer of thanks for the existence of Columbia.
So let’s replace panel on antisemitism with BLM and same texts. They would be fired already. This school hands out discipline for not calling someone the pronoun they choose that day. These administrators create the sick culture there and now have to be held to those sick standards.