A group of Columbia University professors is being slammed for their “grotesque” decision to hold a rally Monday that publicly backed the antisemitic protests roiling the Manhattan Ivy League school’s campus.
Scores of professors and staff — including President Emeritus Lee Bollinger — appeared on the school’s steps to support the right of the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” to take over campus space and denounce the administration’s decision to have protesters arrested.
“[It] will be remembered as a shameful day in Columbia’s history,” Asian Humanities professor David Lurie told the crowd, according to the Bwog campus blog.
The faculty members decision to back the protestors outraged Jewish groups, who said that “Encampment” is really a den of antisemities who have been abusing Jewish students.
“Professors are supposed to be teaching subjects – not misbehavior,” Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, told The Post.
“It’s a sad commentary on the kind of professors that Columbia is hiring. They’ve lowered the bar.”
It wasn’t clear exactly how many professors appeared at Monday’s walkout, though The Guardian reported there were “hundreds of faculty members” demonstrating.
Among those there were Christopher Brown, a history professor at Columbia, Hilary Callahan, a professor of biology at Barnard, Julie Crawford, an English and literature professor at Columbia and Elizabeth Bernstein, a Women’s Studies professor at Bernard.
María Rivera Maulucci, a professor of Urban Studies at Barnard, spoke out against the arrests.
“The root of word education means to lead out, but how are we leading our students out? In zip ties. Where are we leading students out? To buses? To police stations?” she told the crowd, according to the blog.
Comments such as that — and the general support for the anti-Israel students — left Rory Lancman, the senior counsel of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, lamenting his alma mater.
“It’s grotesque that we have professors who can’t discern the difference between hateful, discriminatory and violent rhetoric that violates the university’s anti-discrimination policies and terrorizes a segment of the university community and reasoned free speech and debate,” said Lancman, whose legal advocacy groups works to battle antisemitism.
“What you’re witnessing at Columbia is the anti-Zionist, antisemitic movement at its core.”
Lancman described the protesters as wannabe “fascists” who were trying to get their way “through harassment, intimidation and violence.”
Several Columbia graduate students, who only gave their first names, also questioned the professors’ support for the student protesters.
“I don’t think it was a smart thing for them to do,” Dana, 34, told the Post.
“The professors siding with them, basically that tells me, ‘OK Columbia is not a place of discourse, it is not [a] place where you can peacefully argue. It’s a place that sides with a very specific student body.’”
Ali, 26, a transfer student from Tel Aviv University, said the faculty walkout made it clear that the professors were not just endorsing the protest at Columbia, but were actively taking part as well.
“There was no reason to believe that they weren’t part of the protest. They joined the movement because they came out and joined the protest,” Ali said.
He added that the protesters at Columbia have “made no effort to distance themselves from pro-terrorism positions,” calling the demonstrations “disturbing.”
Omer, another graduate student who was putting up pictures of the remaining hostages kidnapped by Hamas, said he was also troubled by the professors’ walkout.
“I do appreciate when the professors are standing for freedom of speech but if they are standing for this kind of freedom of speech, they’re basically supporting things I’m not sure they want to support or at least I hope they don’t want to support,” he said.
On Tuesday, however, Munir Atalla, an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Arts, was seen speaking with students inside the encampment.
While Columbia professors held their own demonstration and avoided protesting alongside students, faculty members at NYU had joined their own school’s rally and were among the 120 people arrested on Monday.
The backlash comes as New England Patriots team owner Robert Kraft called on the university to hold its tenured professors accountable for their role in the protest.
“We have professors who, instead of teaching how to think, are trying to tell our young people what they should think,” the billionaire former Columbia University donor told Fox News host Sean Hannity, as he called tenure professors one of the school’s biggest problems.”
Academic tenure refers to an employment status that allows professors to avoid termination unless extreme circumstances are available.
Among the professors Kraft referenced was Joseph Massad, a tenured professor who celebrated the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state as “awesome” and a “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.”
