Simkovic: Columbia Law Professor Says Columbia University Violated Federal Laws, Fostered A ‘Hostile Environment’ On Campus

Columbia Law Professor Says Columbia University Violated Federal Laws, Fostered A "Hostile Environment" On Campus ..

Professor Joshua Mitts (Columbia Law School) argues that Columbia university violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students by fostering and tolerating a hostile educational environment on campus. Mitts writes:

Since October 7, Jewish students at Columbia have been subject to appalling episodes of antisemitism both on campus and just outside the campus gates, which intensified with the establishment of the encampment. As documented in an open letter signed by hundreds of faculty and thousands of community members, these included chants like “Go back to Europe” and “You have no culture” and the display of signs like “Al Qassam Brigade’s next target” with an arrow pointing to Jewish students. The list is too long to write in its entirety but there are ample video compilations and documented evidence online.

If that is not hostile-environment harassment, I am not sure what is. If the KKK were to set up an encampment and chant that Black students should “go back to Africa,” it seems unlikely that one would “fiercely contest” whether this was “public-spirited advocacy.” Why is the conclusion any different when one substitutes “Europe” for “Africa” and “Jewish” for “Black”? Surely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no excuse—certainly no more of an excuse than the Rwandan genocide or Darfur would be.

As Columbia’s task force on antisemitism noted in its first report, “speech or conduct that would constitute harassment if directed against one protected class must also be treated as harassment if directed against another protected class.” ... [T]he university should be consistent in applying that standard to Jewish and Israeli affiliates as well. In its most recent May 7 letter, the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education (OCR) issued guidance reaffirming the importance of “different treatment analysis. ...

OCR has stated consistently that harassment qualifies if it is “so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from the recipient’s education program or activity.” There is a difference between “preventing” and “limiting” a Jewish student from participating in educational programs...."

If Mitts' analysis is correct, the consequences for Columbia for violating Title VI and Title VII could be severe. While it is likely that Columbia would take whatever remedial action the government or courts demanded to avoid severe penalties, a standoff could lead to dire consequences potentially including a loss of federal funding. Important sources of federal funding include the ability for students to finance their education using federal student loans and pell grants, as well as billions in federal research funding. Columbia could also face multimillion dollar civil judgments from private lawsuits.

Columbia's latest financial reports suggest that up to $4.4 out of $6.1 billion of its annual revenue comes from sources tied to the federal government, including tuition, research grants, and reimbursements from treating patients. Payments for healthcare come in part from Medicare and Medicaid and partly from private medical insurance and direct payments from patients. The amount actually coming from federal sources that could be at stake may be close to one third to one half of revenue.

Columbia's profit margins are razor thin—$200 million in operating income on $6.1 billion in revenue—meaning that liability or federal sanctions would likely force the university to either cut costs, borrow money, or eat into its endowment and thereby reduce its long term competitiveness.

Columbia’s President recently issued a statement saying that protests and related incidents were creating an unsafe, hostile environment, and were in fact violating Title VI. Columbia Professor David Pozen disagrees with her analysis.

A recent editorial in the Financial Times by Columbia University's president attempts to explain the long delay before Columbia took serious corrective action—roughly 7 months from early October to early May—in terms of balancing free speech concerns with compliance with mandatory federal civil rights laws. As a matter of law, free speech regulations apply to the government, not to private universities in New York state such as Columbia. Universities may have voluntary principles relating to encouraging open dialogue on campus, but if these conflict with federal law, federal law prevails.

Columbia is so CIA affiliated that they must be behind this.

FDR went to Law School at Columbia.

He appointed his Law School buddy William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan as the first head of OSS, the predecessor of the CIA.

President Eisenhower was Columbia’s President while he was also the head of NATO. He remained President of Columbia while he ran for US President and only resigned when he won. (Eisenhower signed my mother-in-laws graduate school diploma at Columbia)

Obama went to Columbia. NOBODY REMEMBERS OBAMA AT COLUMBIA !!!!!!!

Looking for evidence of Obama’s past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims to have been there, but none remembered him.

Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983. In 2008, Root says of Obama, “I don’t know a single person at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me. I don’t have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia . Ever! Nobody recalls him. I’m not exaggerating, I’m not kidding.

Bill Barr graduated from the College with a B.A. in political science, and an M.A. from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He immediately went to work for the CIA. He attended the George Washington University School of Law while working for the CIA. The CIA paid for Barr’s law degree.

Bill Barr’s father Donald Barr was an American educator, writer, and Office of Strategic Services officer. He was an administrator at Columbia University before serving as headmaster at the Dalton School in New York City where he hired Jeffery Epstein as a math teacher without the required credentials.

Columbia University and Communism
Posted on February 28, 2010

CE Ruthenberg
In 1909 CE Ruthenberg received his law degree from Columbia. This was eight years before Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution established with world’s first Communist nation, and ten years before Lenin’s government established the Communist International. (The Communist International, or “Comintern,” was the network of subordinate Communist parties the Soviet Union established in foreign countries, for purposes of subversion.)

Having no Communist party to join, Ruthenberg became active in the Socialist Party USA.

In 1919, upon the establishment of Comintern, Ruthenberg became a leader of one of the two or three different American Communist parties vying for Russian recognition and support. The Russians forced the rival parties to merge in 1922, under the name Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Ruthenberg was the first Executive Secretary of the CPUSA, a position he would hold until his death in 1927. After his death, Ruthenberg’s body was cremated, and an urn containing his ashes was placed in the Kremlin wall in Moscow.

Isaiah Oggins
Isaiah Oggins enrolled at Columbia in 1917. He worked as a Soviet agent in the US for several years, but was arrested by Soviet authorities in 1939, during one of Joseph Stalin’s paranoia-driven purges. Oggins was sent to a prison camp that year. In 1947 he was executed.

Harry Dexter White
In 1922 Harry Dexter White enrolled at Columbia. He would go on to become one of the most influential Soviet agents in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. During WWII he reported directly to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, and served as liaison between the Treasury Department and the State Department. He then went as the United States’ official representative (unofficially representing the Soviet Union) to the Bretton Woods conference where the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were founded.

Paul Robeson
In 1923 Paul Robeson received his law degree from Columbia. He turned from law to show business and was soon using his fame to promote and support Communist causes. In 1934 he went on a pilgrimage to the Soviet Union. In 1952 the Soviet government awarded him its Stalin Peace Prize. In 1954 he wrote a magazine article in praise of Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, who would soon be fighting a war against the United States.

Whittaker Chambers
In 1925 an ex-Columbia student named Whittaker Chambers joined Ruthenberg’s Communist party. Chambers had become friends with Isaiah Oggins while both of them were students. In 1932 Chambers began his career as a Soviet spy, reporting indirectly to the party’s new General Secretary, Earl Browder. Eventually he would renounce Communism and give the names of dozens of his fellow spies to the FBI.

Philip Jessup
In 1927 Philip Jessup received his PhD in law at Columbia. In the 1940’s Jessup held several high level positions in the US State Department. He played a key role in undermining American support for Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, thus facilitating Mao Zedong’s ascent to power, and all the carnage that resulted therefrom. In 1951 Joseph McCarthy forced Jessup to admit that he belonged to five different Communist front groups, and that he had a close and ongoing relationship with Soviet agent Frederick Field.1

Rex Tugwell
In that same year Columbia professors Rexford Tugwell and George Counts traveled to the Soviet Union with Columbia law student Carlos Israels, and several other left wing scholars and union leaders.2 When they made the trip, the United States was still refusing, after ten years, to officially recognize the Soviet Union. Mainstream labor leaders like John L. Lewis and William Green refused to have anything to do with the Soviets.3 The Soviet economy was moribund, and dictator Joseph Stalin needed loans and technology from the free world to keep his grip on the country.4

Tugwell and his companions toured Russia and wrote about what they saw in glowing terms. Especially impressive to Tugwell was the collectivization of agriculture, which, he believed, was the path to efficient food production. The accounts Tugwell and his fellow pilgrims wrote of their travels in the Soviet Union helped encourage the transfers of credit and technology that Stalin needed to maintain control of the country.

When Columbia law school grad Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, he made Tugwell and two other Columbia scholars his “brain trust,” with Tugwell serving as Undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture. Tugwell was never a Communist, but his fondness for centralized government control over the private sector was one of the underpinnings of Roosevelt’s left wing New Deal policies.

Roosevelt, who could never believe anything bad about Stalin, soon gave formal recognition to the Soviet Union.

Chi Chao-ting
Chi Chao-ting was born in China and came to the United States in the 1920’s to study. He joined the Communist party soon after his arrival in the US. He was already a committed Communist when he enrolled in the graduate program in economics at Columbia in the 1930’s. During WWII he infiltrated Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese government on behalf of Chiang’s Communist enemy Mao Zedong. After Mao defeated Chiang in 1949, and Chiang fled to the island of Taiwan with his supporters, Chi Chao-ting gave up all pretense of not being a Communist, and moved to Maoist China.5

Elizabeth Bentley
In 1935 Elizabeth Bentley joined the Communist party while working on her masters degree at Columbia. In 1938 she started an adulterous relationship with Soviet spy Jacob Golos. Upon Golos’ death in 1943, she took over his network of spies, reporting directly to Communist Party Secretary Earl Browder, and passing the collected information to Soviet diplomat Iskhak Akhmerov. In 1945 she left the party and started cooperating with the FBI, as fellow Columbia graduate Whittaker Chambers had done a couple years earlier.

The Foner Brothers
In 1941 the City College of New York fired over fifty faculty members who were believed to be Communists. The allegations were made by the state legislature’s Rapp-Coudert Committee, a committee formed to investigate subversive activities in the state’s educational system during the period of the Hitler-Stalin partnership that had the Communist Party USA opposing England in its war against the Nazis. Among the faculty members terminated were Columbia graduates Jack and Philip Foner, the father and uncle, respectively, of current Columbia professor of history Eric Foner.

Bernhard Stern
In 1953 Columbia professor Bernhard Stern was called before a Senate committee, and questioned by Joseph McCarthy about a book he had written praising the Soviet Union, and comparing Soviet Communism favorably to American capitalism. He took the Fifth when asked about his Communist Party membership.6

This is not by any means an exhaustive list of Soviet sympathizers at Columbia during the period before 1991. It’s just a few easy-to-find names that turn up in books like Blacklisted by History and The Venona Secrets. These examples are presented to show the larger pattern, which is that Columbia faculty and graduates have always been over-represented in the ranks of Soviet sympathizers in this country.

Cloward and Piven
Richard Cloward got his PhD in sociology from Columbia in 1958, and taught there until his death in 2001. Frances Piven, Cloward’s wife, taught there from 1966 to 1972. In 1966, inspired by a series of violent riots in Watts. Cloward and Piven wrote an article called The Weight of the Poor: a Strategy to End Poverty, which was published to great acclaim in the ultra-left-wing magazine The Nation. The article introduced the so-called “Cloward-Piven Strategy” for bringing American society to its knees. The crux of it was that leftists should encourage as many people as possible to sign up for welfare programs, to put an untenable burden on government resources and cause the welfare system to collapse, thus enraging the poor and making them want to support radical causes.

Over the next few years left wingers around the country, and particularly in New York, put the Cloward-Piven strategy into effect, often via confrontational and even violent methods. New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. Eventually the Cloward-Piven Strategy caused a backlash from the right.

It’s worth mentioning that Cloward and Piven were not the only Columbia professors to write articles for The Nation. Rashid Khalidi is a regular contributor. So were Edward Said and Howard Zinn while they were alive. Victor Navasky was the magazine’s editor from 1978 to 1995, and its publisher from 1995 to 2005, all the while working as a part time Journalism professor at Columbia. Eric Foner, whose freshman history textbook comes under scrutiny in many different HistoryHalf pages, currently sits on The Nation’s board of directors.

Howard Zinn
Columbia awarded Howard Zinn a PhD in history in 1958. Zinn is best known for his million-selling history textbook, aptly named A People’s History of the United States. The book is even more biased than Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty, and in the same direction. In describing Mao Zedong’s violent takeover of China, Zinn states exultantly that Mao’s government was “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” Zinn’s book does not mention that this “people’s government” would murder some fifty to seventy million of its people during under Mao’s enlightened leadership.

A People’s History of the United States also accuses the United States of dropping an atom bomb on Nagasaki as an act of pure murder, simply to intimidate the “people’s government” of the Soviet Union. The Soviets, of course, are portrayed in a positive light, as are Communist leaders everywhere. Fidel Castro is praised as a liberator: “In power, Castro moved to set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.”

Zinn’s book, predictably, describes Vietnamese dictator Hoh Chi Minh as a humanitarian freedom fighter, who bravely led his small and isolated country to victory over the powerful and evil United States: “From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country – and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.”

Edward Said
In 1963 Columbia hired anti-Israel crusader Edward Said. The administration at Columbia must have liked Said’s politics. They hired him as a professor of English despite some deficiencies in that area. Samples of his English skills are available, and he’s no Ernest Hemingway.

The administration has also been willing to overlook Said’s tendency to tell bald-faced lies. For many years he claimed that his resentment of the existence of Israel came from his own personal experience as a boy growing up in Jerusalem. His family had finally fled Jerusalem when he was twelve years old, he maintained. He finally had to re-invent his life story when an Israeli journalist investigated his childhood, and documented indisputably that Said had never lived in Palestine at all. His father was a wealthy businessman, and Said spent his childhood living in upper class neighborhoods in Cairo.

Said, like many other wealthy leftists, somehow came to view capitalism and freedom as immoral. Israel, which until recent years was the only nation in the Middle East that could boast a democratic government, or freedom of the press, or freedom of religion; was somehow the biggest villain in the Middle East in Said’s eyes. In 2000 Said was photographed throwing rocks over the wall that marked the Israeli border.

Manning Marable
Columbia hired Professor Manning Marable in 1991. Marable is a self-described Marxist who writes magazine articles about how Fidel Castro’s Communism has cured all the ills that the evil United States imposed on Cuba back in the bad old days. He is a member of the Communist splinter group “Committees of Correspondence,” with other radicals like Angela Davis.

Nicholas de Genova
Nicholas de Genova was a professor at Columbia from 2000 to 2009. He has been a self-described Communist since his days as an undergrad at the University of Chicago. He caused a scandal of sorts in 2003 when he announced at a “teach in” organized by fellow Columbia professor Eric Foner that wanted to see America suffer “a million Mogadishus” (a reference to the killing of eighteen American GI’s in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.) “The only true heroes,” De Genova went on to say, “are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military.” When the student newspaper at Columbia ran an editorial critical of his speech, De Genova fired back with an unapologetic letter to the editor. He taught a Columbia for six more years after making these pronouncements, then resigned to write a book about his experiences as a martyr for free speech.

William Ayers
William Ayers got his Masters of Education at Columbia in 1987, several years after he planted bombs in the Pentagon and at least one police station as a member of the terrorist group the Weather Underground. He escaped prison time when the case against him was thrown out on a technicality. After receiving his masters at Columbia he went on to earn a PhD at another university. Currently he works as a professor of Education at the University of Chicago, teaching the next generation of schoolteachers how to indoctrinate school kids with leftist ideas. Ayers remains unrepentant about his terrorist activities. When asked by a New York Times reporter in 2001 if he had any regrets about planting bombs in buildings, he replied “I wish I’d done more.”

Eric Foner
Eric Foner received his PhD in history at Columbia in 1969. His faculty adviser at Columbia was a Communist named Richard Hofstadter. Foner came back to Columbia as a professor of history in 1982. Dr. Foner has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians. He is the sole author of the history textbook Give Me Liberty, a very biased look at American history, albeit less radical than Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Rashid Khalidi
In 2003 Columbia hired Rashid Khalidi as a professor of Modern Middle Eastern Studies. His qualifications for this position included a stint of several years working as a spokesman for the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat.

President Obama
President Barack Obama, like President Franklin Roosevelt before him, studied at Columbia. He received his BA in Political Science in 1983. It would appear that he imbibed Columbia’s radical atmosphere pretty deeply. He took a class taught by Edward Said, and maintained a relationship with him until Said’s death. He later served with William Ayers on the board of a foundation that gave money to radical causes, including a group headed by Rashid Khalidi. He launched his political career at a fund raiser at Ayers’ home. In 2008 Manning Marable supported then-Senator Obama in his run for the White House, saying that Obama would make a good president because “a lot of people working with him are, indeed, socialists with backgrounds in the Communist Party.”

*****************************************************
Peter Clement, CIA Officer in Residence at Columbia
Posted Sep 08 2013

Peter Clement, who recently began a two-year term as a visiting professor, joins SIPA from the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, where he spent the last eight years as deputy director for intelligence for analytic programs. Clement previously held a number of senior analytic and management positions at the CIA, including director of the Office of Russian and Eurasian Analysis and issue manager for Russia.

The Long Island native has a PhD in Russian history from Michigan State University. He has taught for over 10 years at the college level and published some 10 journal articles and book chapters about Soviet and Russian foreign policy and other subjects.

https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/news/peter-clement-cia-officer-residence

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