Joe Biden’s former antisemitism envoy withdrew her name from consideration for a teaching post at Columbia University due to the school’s handling of antisemitism, according to an op-ed penned on Monday.
In The Free Press article, titled Why I Won’t Teach at Columbia, Deborah Lipstadt, who was the US special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism from 2022-2025 and teaches at Emory University as a university distinguished professor, explained that taking the post as a visiting professor would “be folly – to serve as a prop or a fig leaf.
Moreover, I feel doing so would mean putting myself and my students at risk.”
Lipstadt said her decision to withdraw was based on “three calculations.”
Firstly, she was unconvinced that “the university is serious about taking the necessary and difficult measures that would create an atmosphere that allows for true inquiry.”
She also feared that her presence “would be used as a sop to convince the outside world that ‘Yes, we in the Columbia/Barnard [College] orbit are fighting antisemitism. We even brought in the former special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.’”
Lipstadt said she refused to “provide cover for a completely unacceptable situation.”
Thirdly, she was unsure that she would be safe or even able to teach without being harassed.
“I do not flinch in the face of threats. But this is not a healthy or acceptable learning environment.”
Lipstadt also wrote that “we are at a crisis point” and “the inmates are running the asylum,” referring to “administrators, student disruptors, and off-campus agitators as well as faculty members” who are “turning universities into parodies of true academic inquiry.”
She discussed how these antisemitic campus disruptions have wider ramifications for higher education as a whole.“Unless this situation is addressed forcefully and unequivocally, one of America’s great institutions, its system of higher education, could well collapse.”
“There are many in this country – including those in significant positions of power – who would delight in seeing that happen. The failure to stand up to disruptors who are preventing other students from learning gives the opponents of higher education the very tools they need,” she said.
“Absent direct and comprehensive action to protect Jewish students and the campus environment, I will not be teaching on Columbia’s campus,” she said.
Context of her op-ed
Lipstadt was writing in the aftermath of Barnard, Columbia University’s women’s college, expelling two students for allegedly disrupting and protesting during a Columbia Israel history class.
The alleged expulsions for the January 21 incident, according to the anti-Israel student activist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, would represent the first official expulsions of Columbia affiliate students for pro-Palestinian campus protests.
The group took responsibility for disrupting the History of Modern Israel course taught by Israeli historian Avi Shilon but called for further class disruptions, stating, “We disrupted a Zionist class, and you should too.”
Lipstadt wrote that while Columbia acted swiftly in expelling the two students, a group of protesters took over Milbank Hall on February 26, which houses “both the dean’s office and classrooms, and demanded the reversal of the expulsion and amnesty for all those involved in the protest. They entered the building – masked and screaming – with such ferocity that an employee who confronted them was physically abused and had to be taken to the hospital. Students trying to go to class were locked out by university officials.”
Lipstadt added that “it’s unclear how many [of those storming the building] were Barnard students.”
This led to the administration negotiating with the activists “on equal ground” with no consequences for those who caused classes in the building to be canceled, while the protesters were also told that if they left by 10:30 p.m., there would not be any consequences, Lipstadt said.
Michael Starr contributed to this report.