Do Columbia University administrators actually want a governable university where students can learn free of disruption and harassment from their own classmates?
Former university president Minouche Shafik threw in the towel last week rather than return to campus. She presided over a period last spring in which Columbia became ground zero for student radicals. Shafik coddled them for weeks, beseeching them to get off her lawn, please, if it wouldn't inconvenience them too much, until they stormed a university building.
On Monday, we learned how the university has dealt with the criminals in its midst. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce released information obtained from Columbia indicating how the university has meted out discipline in an array of cases. They range from protesters who participated in the unlawful encampment to those who broke into Hamilton Hall to students who disrupted the school's alumni weekend in late May, plastering cardboard rockets with the photographs of Columbia trustees and other university leaders.
Twenty-two students occupied Hamilton Hall in April. Eighteen of them remain in good standing with the university and will return to campus in a few weeks—this after a spokesman for the university said in April that they would face expulsion. Thirty-one of 35 students who participated in the unlawful encampment last spring remain in good standing. So does every student who disrupted the school's alumni weekend.
What about the most famous Columbia University malefactor, Khymani James, who told administrators that "Zionists don't deserve to live"? Columbia won't say, but all signs suggest he'll be back this fall. Three anti-Semitic deans may have resigned, but their boss, Columbia College dean Josef Sorett, remains.
This is a school without accountability anywhere in the system, and one need not be an expert in human psychology to see the incentives Columbia has established. If the school's new president, Katrina Armstrong, hopes to survive more than a year (Shafik made it 13 months), she will get serious about enforcing the policies on the books and reforming a deeply problematic disciplinary process.
The donors and the taxpayers won't fund this circus indefinitely.