Columbia University has launched an antisemitism task force to address the “terribly resilient” hatred that has swept across its campus in the weeks since Hamas launched its surprise attack against Israel, the school said Wednesday.
The Ivy League university announced the formation of the task force the same day it activated a doxxing resource group to protect pro-Palestinian students.
The school said it was pushed to establish the task force after a notable increase in the amount of reported antisemitic attacks — both physical and ideological — on its Manhattan campus in the last three weeks.
“One would hope that by the twenty-first century, antisemitism would have been relegated to the dustbin of history. But it has been rising here in New York City, across the country, and around the world in recent years,” Columbia University President Minouche Shafik wrote in a message to the school community.
The five-person panel — headed by campus professors — will be tasked with recommending changes that foster an inclusive environment at Columbia, as well as its affiliated schools Barnard and Teachers College.
The recommendations could also come in the form of academic changes, as well as inclusionary training offered to its students, faculty, and staff.
The task force will “enhance our ability to address this ancient, but terribly resilient, form of hatred,” Columbia said in the announcement.
“We want to reiterate that we will not tolerate such actions and are moving forcefully against antisemitic threats, images, and other violations as they are reported, and we will continue to provide additional resources to protect our campuses.”
The reported incidents ranged from physical assaults — including the attack of an Israeli student outside the library of the Morningside Campus — to ideological rumblings that left Jewish students slamming the university for leaving them to feel “unsafe.”
Earlier this week, more than 100 professors penned a letter defending students who supported Hamas’ “military action” in Israel as a breaking point following decades-long oppression.
The faculty called on the administration to protect those students from “disturbing reverberations” on campus, namely the “doxxing trucks” that appeared outside the campus and plastered images of pro-Palestinian students under the banner “leading antisemites.”
In response, Columbia launched a “Doxing Resource Group” to provide exposed students with avenues to report the harassment and access to digital threat investigation and privacy scrubbing experts.
“The deliberate harassment and targeting of members of our community by doxxing, a dangerous form of intimidation, is unacceptable,” Shafik wrote in the second announcement released Tuesday.
“This includes disturbing incidents in which trucks have circled the Columbia campus displaying and publicizing the names and photos of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students.”
While the antisemitism task force is anticipated to be a permanent fixture of Columbia’s campus, the doxxing resource group is slated to operate only through November unless the need proves too great.
