A Public Message to the COO of Columbia

Reprinted from a post on X.

Mr. Cas Holloway:

Cas, you’re a really great guy. 

I know it. I saw it in your eyes today. This is why know that, deep-down, you know I’m right. You may not like my style, but I know you agree with almost everything that I have been saying. I just know it. I am still trying to understand how you could stand just stand there, look me in the eyes, and not let me on to campus. 

How could you keep a straight face when you capitulated to the pro-Hamas mob, refusing entry to the most vocal voice for the Jewish and Israeli students, staff and faculty at Columbia? I think I know how. 

You were just doing your job. You were just doing your job when you denied a Jewish professor access to campus (by the way, all I wanted to do was to read the names of the 133 hostages, thanks for asking). You were just doing your job when you sided with those that support Hamas. 

You were just doing your job when you couldn’t say for a full minute whether Hamas is a terrorist organization. (Remember that meeting? It’s all recorded. You were just doing your job.)

Look, I get it. You’re scared. You are worried about how the pro-Hamas extremists (and the brainwashed cult they’ve amassed) will react if you try to disperse them. But that’s exactly how terrorism works. It’s an ideology that forces you to act in certain ways through explicit and implicit threats.  

Look, I get it. You’re scared. You are worried about how the pro-Hamas extremists (and the brainwashed cult they’ve amassed) will react if you try to disperse them. But that’s exactly how terrorism works.

Hamas doesn’t need to bomb all the buses in Israel for me to be scared of riding a bus in Tel Aviv. It’s the same at Columbia. At this point, the pro-Hamas mob at Columbia has broken basically every possible rule of the university (and possibly multiple state and federal laws). The NYPD has stated that they are ready to act, if President Shafik lets them in. 

And you’re the person who needs to make that call. That is damn scary. But being scared is not an excuse for not doing the right thing. Being scared is not an excuse for choosing the pro-Hamas mob and their violent chants over the Jewish professor who believes in co-existence. The problem is that you are not alone. 

There are thousands of administrators like you all over U.S. campuses who are also scared. Like you, they want to stay out of it. Like you, they are just doing their jobs. And there were millions of Germans like you in the 1930s. Good Germans, upstanding Germans, who were just doing their jobs. 

Who do you think ran the universities of Berlin and Munich and Heidelberg and Frankfurt in the 1930s? Who helped the Hitler Youth check out books by Jewish authors to burn outside of campus? Administrators. Just like you. 

Cas, what I am trying to say is learn from history. Now is not the time to just “do your job.” The entire nation is looking at you. You have the opportunity to show your kids, show your family, that when the time came, you stood up for what’s right. 

Do the right thing: 1. Disperse the illegal encampment 2. Expel the radical extremists who are brainwashing this pro-Hamas mob (and start enforcing the suspension of those leaders who are miraculously back on campus) 3. Dismantle all the student organizations in CUAD (the coalition behind all the antisemitism and calls for terrorism on campus) and suspend all their leaders. 4. Deal with your pro-Hamas faculty. Do something about them. Seriously. 5. Restore my right to be Jewish in public wherever I want to be. 

I have every right to be on campus. Don’t bow to those who cheer on Hamas. Don’t just “do your job.” (By the way — If they won’t let you do this, quit. Show the world what you stand for. Be a hero. I know it’s scary, but I promise — if you do the right thing, I will have your back. It’s never personal for me. Never has been, never will be.)

Shai Davidai is an Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School.