The coming school year will test leaders and try many

In Shakespeare’s ingenious play, “The Tempest,” a man takes shelter next to a sleeping sea monster. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” the jester Trinculo tells the audience.

Such is the case with the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), antisemites and Republican politicians. Peculiarly, all seem allied now in celebrating the departure of Nemat “Minouche” Shafik as president of Columbia University.

“Marked by chaos and cowardice, Minouche Shafik’s tenure was a disaster for freedom of expression,” a FIRE official tweeted on X. “Columbia University now has an opportunity to select a leader who will recommit the institution to protecting free speech and academic freedom. Students, faculty, trustees, and alumni should demand no less.”

Troublingly, the bold-faced message echoed that of Columbia’s suspended chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine. “The student intifada outlasted Minouche Shafik and will outlast every corrupt administrator until divestment, liberation, and return,” the antisemitic group posted.

And, for different reasons, FIRE’s reaction also reflected that of GOP politicians, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx. The congress members’ hearings led to resignations by the leaders of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. And Johnson last April grandstanded on the campus, where he was booed.

“Jewish students at Columbia beginning this school year should breathe a sigh of relief,” Johnson (R-La.) wrote on X. “We hope that President Shafik’s resignation serves as an example to university administrators across the country that tolerating or protecting antisemites is unacceptable and will have consequences.”

Just why Jewish students should feel relieved is hardly clear, though.

By asking police on the campus twice last April, Shafik was responding in part to the complaints of such students, even as that angered FIRE and the antisemites. The first time it was to clear an encampment that, in part, was blocking Jewish students from going to class. The second was to clear a campus building that students and outsiders had occupied.

But she infuriated the GOP officials by not moving more quickly against the camping protestors.

FIRE’s motives differ, of course, from those of its strange bedfellows. The group is committed to free speech and academic freedom, which few would argue with (aside perhaps from some GOP politicians, particularly in Indiana and Florida). FIRE would even tolerate much “hate speech,” though it draws the line at illegal threats, harassment, incitement and hate crimes.

So, why didn’t it defend Shafik, instead of being jubilant at her departure? Was she not acting against threats and harassment, against hate? FIRE’s intellectual inconsistency is certainly troubling.

Despite its condemnation of the former Columbia president, FIRE appears to adhere to the maxim that one’s right to swing his fist ends where another’s nose begins. It doesn’t support students being threatened or blocked from class, for instance.

“Hopefully policies are in place and discussions are happening with students and faculty surrounding how to respond in case encampments go up or students are being threatened or denied access to different portions of campus,” Nico Perrino, FIRE’s executive vice president, said, as quoted by VOX.

FIRE’s problem, of course, that it can’t tolerate any moves that would inhibit free expression — even if it is ignorant expression.

But, for educators, the real question isn’t a matter of free speech – it’s a matter of schooling versus ignorance. To most academics, student protestors have every right to speak their minds; the larger problem is that the demonstrations showed that there’s little real information in those young minds.

For starters, there’s the ignorance many showed by chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” without even knowing that the Jordan and the Mediterranean were being referred to. In a survey cited by The Wall Street Journal, only 47% of the chanters could name the bodies of water. Less than a quarter of the students could even identify Yasser Arafat. And they were blind to the fact that the slogan they shouted meant removal of Jews from Israel, by murder if needed (Hamas’s preferred tactic).

Would they protest if they knew more about the history of Israel, a history in which Jews long lived in the land that they reclaimed in the early 20^th Century? If they knew more about the state’s right to exist and its repeated targeting by Arabs, would they be in their encampments? Would their sympathies differ if they knew of the repeated instances of efforts to achieve peace that were rebuffed by Arabs?

Understandably, students are infuriated by the deaths of thousands of innocents in Gaza, as Israelis try to destroy terrorists who hide among them. Who could not be aggrieved by that? Such deaths, as those lost in all wars, are monstrous.

But do the protestors know that Hamas deliberately incited those deaths with its Oct. 7 assault on innocents in Israel? Are they aware that this murderous and suicidal group — lionized by some Palestinians — eagerly welcomes more such deaths for the propaganda it gets for its cause? That Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar calls such losses “necessary sacrifices”? That some Gazans deride Hamas for bringing on their misery and loathe the group that has ruled, tyranically, for decades?

As campuses ready themselves for what could be stepped up protests in the coming academic year, educating students on these issues could be a useful approach. Most schools have mandatory curricula. So why couldn’t that include education on issues in the Mideast (so long as the profs are committed to peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs there)?

Columbia’s vaunted core curriculum could include such teaching (though perhaps not by its propagandistic Middle East Institute, which is heavy on Arab studies and not so much on Israel-related ones). Perhaps students who got in hot water over their actions last spring could be required to take and pass balanced, fair and accurate coursework as a condition of being reinstated on campus.

The outlook, however, isn’t bright for knowledge to prevail in the coming year. Instead, escalation seems to be on the agenda.

“Shafik’s resignation is not the end,” Columbia’s chapter of the SJP posted, for instance. “It is not yet time to celebrate.”

That group and a related one, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, are sticking by their demand that the university divest itself of all securities that “profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.” Encouraging its own sort of apartheid, CUAD also demands that Columbia “sever academic ties with Israeli universities, including the Global Center in Tel Aviv, the Dual Degree Program with Tel Aviv University, and all study-abroad programs, fellowships, and research collaborations with Israeli academic institutions.”

Such demands are hardly a formula for coexistence, hardly a prescription for peace.

But what is worrisome is whether such demands – which such organizations are free to express, of course – will be accompanied by stepped up harassment or even violence. The outlook is troubling.

Already, some groups, such as the Young Democratic Socialists of America, are calling for a national student strike. What happens when some students, particularly Jews, try to get through the picket lines?

And at New York University a group, the Palestine Solidarity Coalition, endorsed “armed struggle” and resistance “by any means necessary,” though it sought to softpedal that when called on it. A group at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, meanwhile, is threatening Hillel, the Jewish Federation and any organization supporting Israel, saying they are unwelcome on campus and will be treated “as extremist criminals.”

Certainly, many Jewish students last year were made to feel unwelcome on many campuses. “When the encampment started, I thought it was great that people were standing up for what they believe in, speaking their minds and all that,” Ellie Rapoport, a 20-year-old senior at Metropolitan State University of Denver, told The New York Times. “But once people started carrying around antisemitic signs and saying antisemitic things, it got a little out of hand, and it got a little scary to be on campus.”

Now those demonstrators plan to exercise their discontent, as one put it, at the Democratic National Convention. Surely, they won’t stop there.

For many campuses, the coming semester will be challenging. Will the misery that Shakespeare wrote of in “The Tempest” pale beside the experiences some students will endure?

Some administrators, such as Shafik and her colleagues at Harvard and Penn, were set back on their heels by the experiences of last spring — knocked hard enough that they left the jobs to successors. Will the new leaders protect students, as well as free speech? Will they push their institutions to remove the cant and strip away the blinders that shroud the eyes of so many students?