—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.[1]
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.
