—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative
How should American universities foster enlightening and challenging debates on matters of public, faculty, and student concern while maintaining a university community that is as politically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse as the country in which they sit? In the century or so that the leading American universities have wandered, unguided by their previous Christian mission, this problem—balancing academic freedom and diversity—has become the principal challenge for their administrators, from presidents and trustees down to dorm counselors.
Columbia’s new president, Nemat “Minouche” Talaat Shafik, Baroness Shafik of Camden in the London Borough of Camden and of Alexandria in the Arab Republic of Egypt, was plucked from the London School of Economics by the Columbia trustees to address that challenge, and she has had to brave it amid harsher circumstances in her first year than those faced by her predecessors for decades.
The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel had as its objective the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of as many Israeli men, women, and children as it could sadistically brutalize. The success of Hamas at achieving that objective has stimulated enthusiastic and even violent demonstrations of support—not only at Columbia but especially at Columbia, the academic home of some of the West’s most effective and most uncompromising Palestinian nationalists, such as the late Edward Said, as well as current professors in that same mold, Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad.
At the April 17 congressional hearing on “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism,” President Shafik and other Columbia officials were interrogated on the university’s official response to Professor Massad’s praising of the slaughter and kidnapping as “awesome, astonishing, astounding, and incredible,” as Congressman Tim Walberg (R-Michigan) quoted Professor Massad.
“President Shafik,” asked Representative Walberg, “do you condemn Professor Massad’s statement, and has he faced any consequences for it?”
President Shafik: “I do condemn his statement. I am appalled by what he said.”
“Any consequences?” pressed Representative Walberg.
President Shafik: “He has been spoken to.”[2]
Outside the protections of academic tenure, vocal support for genocidal atrocities would probably get an employee more than a “talking to.” But Massad is not just a professor; he was, as of April 17, the hearing revealed, chair of the School of Arts and Sciences Academic Review Committee, charged with overseeing “the periodic review of all departments, centers, and institutes in the School.”[3] Professor Massad will be, or most likely already has been, removed as Review Committee chair in the 48 hours since that hearing. But whatever Columbia does now under congressional pressure should not obscure the revelation that despite being known throughout academia for, as Rep. Walberg put it, “saying these types of things for 20 years at Columbia,” Professor Massad was vested by the university with task of “reviewing the reviewers,” making sure that all parts of the diverse and, in many fields, globally prestigious Columbia University School of Arts and Sciences were achieving the teaching, research, and public outreach goals that the university sets for them, or ought to set for them.
Mighty patriots, warriors, sages,
Thou hast borne, a shining band;
Teach thy sons in future ages
Still to love their native land.
Thron’d upon the hill where heroes
Fought for liberty, and died,
Stand Columbia! Alma Mater
Through the storms of Time abide!
—Gilbert Oakley Ward, Stand Columbia (1902), second stanza
What now calls herself “Columbia University in the City of New York” opened in 1754 in Lower Manhattan as “King’s College,” an outpost of the Anglican faith amid a wilderness of Presbyterians. King’s most famous alumnus was Alexander Hamilton, who first waged pamphlet war against the Anglican clergyman Samuel Seabury for American rights and eventually actual war on the King’s soldiers, including at the Battle of Harlem Heights, fought on the site of Columbia’s present Morningside Heights campus. When the college reopened its doors after the Revolutionary War in 1784, it did so as “Columbia College in the City of New York,” a new and auspicious name for a new political world.
Like President Shafik, who went from UMass Amherst to Oxford, the World Bank, the UK government, and the London School of Economics before answering the call to the presidency of Columbia in 2023, I have spent most of my career outside of American institutions. Yet as a scholar of America and American political thought, I would recommend to President Shafik that Columbia’s polestar in navigating the university’s present troubles should not be avoiding the fate of those cursed people who curse the Jews, as Representative Rick Allen (R-Georgia) suggested in this very hearing.[4] Rather, President Shafik and her trustees and subordinates should run their university to further the flourishing and principles of God’s “almost-chosen” people, the Americans.
How should Columbia University foster academic debate while nourishing academic community? That positive task will not be accomplished merely by policing faculty work and student expression to prevent antisemitism—including the sadly fashionable version of contemporary Jew-hatred, anti-Zionism—pressing as that need may be. Every department, center, and institute needs helmsmen and helmswomen who want Columbia to advance, to use an old-fashioned phrase, “the cause of America.”
How should a university advance the cause of America? Small or sectarian private universities, such as the Catholic University of America and Hillsdale College, with which I am currently affiliated in Washington, DC, can and should be run according to their proclaimed principles and dogmas: at Catholic University every tenured appointment in the canonical faculties of theology, philosophy, and canon law must be personally approved by the Pope, while at Hillsdale all that is done reflects the vision of its current president and the school’s effective re-founder, the Harry Jaffa student and Winston Churchill scholar Larry Arnn.[5]
Public universities should be guided in pursuing the cause of America by the will of the public as reflected by elected officials and politically appointed or elected trustees. Such guidance should be made more directly available on campus, as I have suggested elsewhere, by the political appointment of professors in key fields.[6]
Columbia, however, is neither public nor sectarian, and it is too large to be administered successfully according to the personal vision of its president. In my view, it is neither necessary nor desirable that a large and secular private university promulgate an official doctrine of how it is to further the cause of America. Rather, furthering the cause of America requires that Americans and the Columbia alumni among them know the case for America and the case against America, recognize the friends of America in their sorrows and deficiencies, and recognize the enemies of America in all their wiles and virulence. To that end it may be useful to keep some of those enemies caged on campus, chained by the faculty handbook and fed by tenure, for the edification of their students and colleagues.[7]
It is the job of the president and trustees to ensure that, as far as humanly possible, every other position in the university (or at least every supervisory or administrative position) is filled by somebody who honestly and ably tries to further the cause of America within his or her own field and according to his or her own lights. Such a Columbia, and only such a Columbia, will deserve and maintain her throne.
1. On the vagaries of the modern, godless university see also Michael S. Kochin, “Wisdom, Unwisdom, and Jordan Peterson,” American Greatness, June 1, 2018.
2. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Antisemitism,” YouTube video, 3:43:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Eu-xEZKzQ, at 1:11:35 to 1:13:01.
3. Ibid., 1:14:53 to 1:15:01.
4. Ibid., 1:42:00 to 1:47:08. For the place of the Jews in America’s civic religion prior to the era of Barack Obama (Columbia College’s most celebrated graduate), see Michael S. Kochin, “The Chosen and the Almost-Chosen,” Claremont Institute, August 21, 2008.
5. “Dr. Arnn,” as he is known at Hillsdale, presents his vision of America most fully in his book The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012). Dr. Arnn chaired the “President’s Advisory 1776 Commission” that formulated an official understanding of the American Founding on behalf of the Trump administration and produced The 1776 Report, archived here.
6. Michael S. Kochin, “Politics and Merit in the Academy,” American Greatness, February 3, 2024.
7. See Plato, Apology of Socrates 36e–37b; Michael S. Kochin, “Death or Tenure,” VoegelinView, February 15, 2020.
Michael S. Kochin is Professor Extraordinarius in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University as well as Visiting Scholar (2024–25) at Hillsdale College Kirby Center and The Catholic University of America.
