Campus Watch August 15, 2024

Columbia Student Who Said “Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live” Might Return to Campus

Columbia University student Khymani James, who made headlines after a livestream was unearthed of him saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” might be returning to campus this fall.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the university will not say if James will be allowed on campus in the fall, citing “privacy concerns.” The conservative news outlet noted that James, despite being banned from campus by the university, is still listed as a student in the university’s directory; three deans who recently resigned from the university are no longer in the directory. Daily Wire journalist Kassy Akiva noted on X that James’s April 26 statement apologizing for his remark has been deleted from his X account. His April 26 statement had said that that “what I said was wrong” and that he “misspoke in the heat of the moment, for which I apologize.”

Three Columbia Deans Resign Over Text Messages About Antisemitism Panel

Three deans at Columbia University have resigned after text messages came to light in which they denigrated a panel on antisemitism.

Among the texts in question included that it “comes from such a place of privilege… hard to hear the woe is me” and “huge fundraising potential,” according to NPR. President Minouche Shafik had denounced the deans’ text messages as being “not only unprofessional, but also, disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes.” University spokeswoman Samantha Slater told NPR that the three deans had in fact resigned but did not comment further.

Young Democratic Socialists Plan “Student Strike for Palestine”

The Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) are planning to hold a nationwide “Student Strike for Palestine” to “disrupt campus life” as a means to work toward “Palestinian liberation.”

The Free Press reported that YDSA organizer Erin Lawson wrote in a July op-ed for The Activist that a strike “shakes the very foundation of the university to its core” because “no one can ignore large swathes of empty classrooms… as students who live in the belly of the beast, we have the responsibility to demand that our institutions take our tuition money out of Israel.”

Columbia Business School Professor Ran Kivetz, who is Israeli, told The Free Press that university administrators need to enforce their policies to shut down the strike, but he doesn’t “have the confidence that they’ll do that.” He pointed to the fact that after anti-Israel protesters occupied and vandalized a university building and held three janitors hostage, the university reinstated 12 suspended students and most of the arrested protesters had the charges against them dropped.

Former Columbia Student Sentenced to Nearly Two Years in Jail Over Threats Against Jews

Former Columbia University student Patrick Dai, 22, was sentenced to 21 months in jail after pleading guilty to making anonymous threats online in Oct. 2023 to murder and rape Jewish students.

The Justice Department announced in a press release on Aug. 12 that, as part of his April guilty plea, Dai admitted to posting that he was “gonna shoot up” a kosher dining hall, “bomb a Jewish house,” “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews,” “slit the throat” of Jewish men he sees on campus, cut off the heads of Jewish babies and rape Jewish women he saw and toss them from a cliff. After Dai serves the prison sentence, he will get three years of supervised release and a $100 special assessment.

AAUP No Longer Opposes Academic Boycotts

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have adopted a statement supporting academic boycotts in certain circumstances––a reversal of their decades-long anti-boycott stance.

InsiderHigherEd reported on that the AAUP’s national council voted to approve their new position on Aug. 9. The AAUP, which InsideHigherEd described as “a union and a national faculty group that establishes widely adopted policies defining and safeguarding academic freedom and tenure,” announced in a statement that their Committee A on Academic Freedom has officially opposed academic boycotts since 2006, but now the AAUP’s stance is “that individual faculty members and students should be free to weigh, assess, and debate the specific circumstances giving rise to calls for systematic academic boycotts and to make their own choices regarding their participation in them. To do otherwise contravenes academic freedom.” The statement added “that academic boycotts should neither involve any political or religious litmus tests nor target individual scholars and teachers engaged in ordinary academic practices… Academic boycotts should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.”

The AAUP has yet to endorse an academic boycott against Israel, though they have called for a ceasefire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, per InsideHigherEd.