Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) quietly advised Columbia University’s leaders to “keep heads down” and ignore congressional criticism of the school’s handling of campus anti-Semitism, telling former university president Minouche Shafik that the school’s “political problems are really only among Republicans,” according to a new House Committee on Education and the Workforce report.
The committee’s 300-page report stems from more than a year of interviews and over 400,000 pages of internal documents produced by elite schools like Columbia, Harvard University, Yale University, Northwestern University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. It demonstrates, by producing the private emails and text messages of university leaders, how they failed to protect Jewish students as anti-Semitic mobs seized their campuses in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree.
It also reveals that Schumer advised Shafik to tune out the criticism she was receiving from House Republicans.
Shafik, who resigned from her post in August amid a series of anti-Semitism scandals that roiled the school, texted board of trustees co-chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman in January to inform them that she had met with Schumer. The top Senate Democrat, according to text messages obtained by the committee, “advised Shafik that ‘universities political problems are really only among Republicans’” and “recommended the ‘best strategy is to keep heads down.’”
“When asked, Schumer and his staff indicated they did not believe it was necessary for the University’s leaders to meet with Republicans,” the report states. “Greenwald echoed this, writing in response, ‘If we are keeping our head down, maybe we shouldn’t meet with Republicans.’” In the texts published in the report, Shafik identifies Schumer as “very positive and supportive (and quite the storyteller).”
Days later, text messages show, Greenwald sent his predecessor, Jonathan Lavine, a New York Times article on the committee’s “aggressive and expansive investigation into institutions of higher education.”
“Let’s hope the Dems win the house back,” Lavine wrote. “Absolutely,” Greenwald responded.
Schumer’s private assessment differed from the public one he offered months later, when anti-Israel students launched the encampment that took over Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus and eventually led to the violent storming of a campus building. At that point, in late April, Schumer criticized the protesters’ “lawlessness.”
The texts from Shafik and her board co-chairs, the committee wrote in its report, show that university leaders “viewed antisemitism as a PR issue rather than a campus problem.”
Neither Columbia nor Schumer immediately responded to requests for comment.
The report underscores what has long been known about the anti-Israel protest movement on college campuses across the country: that it was permitted to operate unabated, in flagrant violation of university policies, culminating in widespread encampments and pro-Hamas demonstrations. But it also shows that university officials were afraid from the drop of offending Muslim and pro-Palestinian students on campus, tailoring their statements in the the wake of Oct. 7.
At Harvard, for example, the university’s top administrators and deans excised language from a university statement that would have condemned Hamas’s terrorist attack. A draft of the statement ultimately issued by the university and obtained by the committee shows former Harvard University president Claudine Gay’s chief of staff, Katie O’Dair, and another senior university administrator, Marc Goodheart, debating the matter. They ultimately decided against it.
In the months that followed, Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker asked the university to address anti-Semitic slogans such as “from the river to the sea,” which advocates Israel’s destruction. Then-president Claudine Gay—who resigned in disgrace amid outrage over her failure to stem campus hatred and accusations of plagiarism in her academic work—and her successor, Alan Garber, privately urged Pritzker “not to label the phrase antisemitic,” according to the report.
“Gay expressed concern that if Harvard recognized the phrase as antisemitic speech, it would raise questions about why the University was not imposing discipline for its use.”
The report also shows that alumni wrote to Gay expressing concern in the wake of a Washington Free Beacon report about the assault of an Israeli student during an anti-Israel protest, noting, “Harvard’s tolerance of violent hate speech toward Jews versus likely reaction to such behavior directed at other ethnic groups.” Harvard never took disciplinary action against the students captured on video accosting their classmate, though the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office has slapped two of them with criminal charges—an investigation the university has not cooperated with.
All of the schools investigated by the House committee likely violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which mandates protections for minorities such as Jews, according to the report.
“The Committee’s investigation has revealed a total failure by school leadership in holding students accountable for violations of school policy and the law,” it concluded. “The Committee collected disciplinary data from eleven schools—six of which failed to suspend a single student despite extensive documentary evidence of antisemitic harassment, unlawful encampments, and other acts of misconduct.”
“At every school investigated by the Committee, the overwhelming majority of students facing disciplinary action for antisemitic harassment or other violations of policy received only minimal discipline,” the report states. “At some schools, such as Columbia and Harvard, radical faculty members worked to prevent disciplinary action from being taken against students who violated official policies and even the law.”
As the pro-Hamas encampments on campus became a hotbed of anti-Semitic furor, violating university rules, the leadership at Columbia, Northwestern, Rutgers University, and others gave into the mobs.
At Columbia, for instance, “students who engaged in the criminal takeover of a university building were allowed to evade accountability.” Columbia’s leaders also “offered greater concessions to encampment organizers than they publicly acknowledged.”
At Northwestern, a cadre of “radical faculty members were put in charge of negotiating with their own ideological allies in that campus’ encampment, leading to a stunning capitulation to the encampment leaders’ demands.” At Rutgers, “protesters faced no consequences for an encampment that disrupted exams for more than 1,000 students.” And at UCLA, the “leadership was unwilling to directly confront a violent, antisemitic encampment, even when antisemitic checkpoints denied Jewish students access to areas of campus.”
