Post #15

Academic Freedom (For Some)Task Force on Antisemitism — Report #4

By The Specter Editorial Staff (from nowhere near Hind’s Hall)

Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism has released its fourth report—this one boldly titled “The Classroom,” as if the prior three had merely cleared their throats and now, finally, the Task Force is ready to regulate pedagogy itself. The opening pages shimmer with declarations fit for a promotional brochure: academic freedom is the cornerstone of a great university; provocative ideas are vital; censorship has no place at Columbia. One imagines the language screen-printed onto a commemorative tote bag, handed out during orientation week.

But the pivot comes quickly, faster than a trustee checking their inbox for a Title VI update. Within a page, the alleged crisis of academic freedom turns out not to be faculty suspended for political speech, or students arrested, or entire departments dragged through OIE. No, the existential problem is that some Jewish and Israeli students have sometimes felt uncomfortable when Israel is discussed critically in class. From this revelation springs forty-five pages of recommendations, rules, clarifications, and warnings each framed as an effort to “err on the side of protecting free expression,” though the erring happens almost exclusively in the other direction.

The report is not, in fact, about academic freedom at all. It is about re-engineering academic freedom so it shields a single political ideology, Zionism, from critique while simultaneously expanding administrative oversight into faculty speech, syllabi, and scholarship. Under the velvet cover of “consistency,” it elevates discomfort into discrimination and drafts the University as arbiter of which ideas count as legitimate intellectual inquiry. It is Columbia’s boutique, Ivy-branded version of the Stop WOKE Act, except tailored exquisitely for Palestine—ornate in its citations, genteel in tone, and unmistakably designed to police anti-Zionist thought at precisely the moment when Palestinian life and scholarship demand the opposite.

The heart of the document is a maze of new conceptual categories—fraught subjects, hostile climates, unrelated political topics—all of which allow something as simple as critical discussion of a state to be reframed as discriminatory treatment of a protected class. Pedagogical disagreement quietly becomes a compliance issue. Teaching becomes an exercise in liability management. Academic freedom becomes a decorative motif, invoked ceremonially but hollowed from within.

To aid this transformation, the Task Force calls for an expanded architecture of administrative oversight: classroom-specific antidiscrimination rules, scenario-based guides reminiscent of Title IX manuals, balanced syllabi, pre-cleared controversial topics, and even the possibility that the University may choose to publicly condemn faculty scholarship it disapproves of—as though censure were a pedagogical tool. The cumulative effect is unmistakable: a classroom where faculty anxiously anticipate which sentence might next be reported, and where university officials interpret intention through the prism of a student’s momentary discomfort.

This entire framework rests on the Task Force’s liturgical invocation of “consistency”. The report insists that “protections afforded to Black, Latino, Asian, Arab, female, LGBTQ+ and disabled members of our community must apply equally to other protected classes, including Jewish and Israeli students.” It is a stirring DEI-era promise especially now, when DEI has largely fallen out of institutional fashion. Yet here its vocabulary is selectively revived, even as every other group named in that sentence vanishes from the report’s examples and concerns. Nowhere does the report consider anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab racism, acknowledge the disciplinary dragnet directed at pro-Palestine speech, or confront the surveillance, doxxing, suspension, and police presence shaping the academic lives of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students and those who support them. “Consistency,” in this context, is not a principle; it is a narrative device, deployed to justify a policy structure built around a single set of concerns.

From there, the report ventures into curricular redesign, insisting that Columbia urgently lacks pro-Zionist perspectives in Middle Eastern studies, an astonishing claim at an institution where the power of donors, trustees, political actors, and public pressure already pulls the discourse sharply toward Zionism. Yet the Task Force recommends new endowed chairs explicitly dedicated to affirming Zionism’s legitimacy, presenting this as intellectual diversification rather than political engineering. The irony is rich: at the very moment when Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and anti-Zionist scholars face heightened risk, Columbia identifies the true representational emergency as insufficient Zionist presence on a campus located in New York City.

To make this work, the report performs an elegant conceptual sleight of hand. Zionism—an ideology—is recast as a quasi-identity category, imbued with the same protections as race or religion. Critique becomes discrimination; scholarship becomes harm; Gaza becomes too delicate to broach. It is IHRA without saying IHRA, a rebranding so seamless that one could almost admire the craftsmanship if the stakes were not so high.

And while the report extols the virtues of intellectual openness, it simultaneously declares that academic boycotts, particularly the one pro-Palestinian activists have asked scholars to consider, are incompatible with academic freedom. The irony density could power Manhattanville.

A real defense of academic freedom would name the forces that actually threaten it at Columbia: the weaponization of Title VI complaints, donor interference, administrative overreach, police presence on campus, the chilling effect of federal investigations, and the asymmetrical vulnerability of students and faculty who advocate for Palestinian human rights. Instead, Report #4 offers a meticulously polished administrative dreamscape where academic freedom is preserved only for those least likely to challenge existing power.

Columbia doesn’t need another task force, it needs a memory. Because with its reputation as the “protest-Ivy”, it once knew that critique is not discrimination; ideas are not identities; and the purpose of a university is not to serve as a compliance arm of geopolitical ideology.

But Report #4 reads like an institution that has forgotten all of this.

Epilogue: And Then There’s Reality

Two weeks before Report #4 arrived draped in its ceremonial language about free inquiry, Columbia was already demonstrating what academic freedom looks like in practice: Mahmoud Khalil, the first Columbia student taken by ICE after the encampments, was barred from campus for a screening about the pro-Palestinian encampments he helped lead. But as the University later explained, this was not suppression — merely safety, logistics, and best practices in venue management. And then, two weeks later, came a Task Force report urging us to honor the “cornerstone of academic freedom.”

But the Task Force report doesn’t end with rules or policies. It ends with a plea:

In the last paragraphs, the Task Force asks faculty to “imagine how it feels to be a student from Israel” who sees an instructor publicly questioning the program that brought them to Columbia. The suggestion is that such discomfort is a matter of identity sensitivity, one that should morally govern faculty speech beyond the classroom — in public forums, on campus, on social media, anywhere our colleagues “might see us.” We are told that our institutional values should “guide” us, and that failing to prioritize this particular form of identity protection is a “disservice to the University we love.”

It is a remarkable coda:
a request that faculty modulate political convictions not because they are wrong, but because they might unsettle a student connected to a government under critique.

This same appeal is never extended to Palestinian students who watch their family homes bombed, Muslim students surveilled and reported, Black and brown students policed out of their own campus spaces, or Jewish anti-Zionist students vilified by outside groups claiming to speak for them. Their identities do not seem to trigger institutional sorrow. Their political grief does not inspire Task Force compassion. Their discomfort is not an occasion for faculty silence.

And so the moral asymmetry becomes impossible to deny: the University invites us to imagine harm in one direction only upward, toward power while erasing the very real harm borne by those whose bodies and solidarities Columbia has repeatedly displaced, disciplined, suspended, and removed from physical space.

Which brings us back to Mahmoud Khalil and to the long list of students, faculty, and community members who have stood with Palestinians this year and found themselves subject to the same spatial logic of control. Academic freedom, we are reminded, is a cornerstone but apparently one that cannot support Palestinian presence, or anti-Zionist critique, or multiracial coalitions of solidarity.

So when Report #4 implores us to be sensitive to Israeli students’ feelings, when it asks us to imagine their discomfort, to speak more softly, to discipline our politics for their sake, it inadvertently reveals the entire architecture of the document.

Academic freedom at Columbia is an ethic of care extended only upward.

A politics of protection reserved for those whose identities align with institutional power.

A sensitivity script that demands silence from the very people facing the harshest repression.

And that, not the Task Force’s sentimental flourish, not its tone of institutional love, is the real confession of this report.

Because at Columbia today:

Academic freedom is sacrosanct unless a Palestinian, or anyone standing with Palestinians, attempts to exercise it while occupying actual space.

And no appeal to empathy, however artful, can mask that truth.