Anti-Semitism permeates not just Middle Eastern Studies, but the “Student Affairs” Bureaucracy
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
Columbia University has fallen miserably short in governing itself academically, administratively, morally, culturally, and politically. That much is clear from the first six months of 2024.
As the strings are tugged on the tapestry masking this once respectable university, with its storied history and increasingly undeserved reputation as a top-flight Ivy League school, we discover just how much hateful pseudoscience and fantasy has permeated the institution.
Not just in the faculty, but more importantly in the bureaucracy of “student affairs” with its access to students 24-7 and its commitment to the hateful doctrines of “anti-racism,” “decolonization,” critical racialist “DEI,” and its overarching, fraudulent label of “social justice.”
Part of the problem — a very large part — is the presence on the campus of the heinous Teacher’s College of Columbia University. This wretched repository exemplifies the ghettoization of America’s university-affiliated schools of education, plagued by their obsessive infatuation with neo-Marxist critical theory laundered through the unoriginal Brazilian hack Paulo Freire and his “critical consciousness.”
As Robert Asher notes in the above-linked article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, in producing mediocre EdDs armed with chit degrees and a groupmind ethos, Teachers College of Columbia is akin to factories in China manufacturing cheap knockoffs of quality branded merchandise. The Naugahyde of higher education. Only not nearly as good.
It is in the schools of education where “student affairs” bureaucrat activists are produced.
The Blight of Student Affairs
The problem is not solely that these powerful student affairs apparatchiks hold these noxious anti-Semitic views. The larger problem is that these types of persons are recruited precisely because they hold these noxious views.
Moreover, if those views are not focused or ideologically substantiated enough, these apparatchiks can attend “institutes” and “workshops” sponsored by their hooligan clubs ACPA and NASPA that deepen their commitment to “decolonization” and faux social justice projects such as the “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” movement on college campuses. Have a look at their agendas in a publication called Campus Racial Justice and Decolonization Project.
You would be foolish, indeed, to believe that the BDS “movement” and its risible spin-off “Free Palestine” offered by Students for Justice in Palestine and Faculty for Justice in Palestine is some kind of student-led grassroots effort. This movement and these groups are lavishly funded from problematic off-campus sources.
For detailed data on the funding of these Anti-Israel and Anti-American entities, consult the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). Especially their report on Columbia.
How is this anti-Enlightenment and anti-Semitic “decolonization” project manifested on the campuses? As you might expect.
Have a look at the revelations of the private texts of the “student affairs” apparatchiks as related by recent Columbia graduate Maya Selkin. A snotty group of Columbia administrators yukked it up via text during a panel on Jewish life on May 31:
The text exchanges of these senior deans reveal the reflexive anti-Semitic mindset of Columbia administrators. All of these persons either oversee “student life” at Columbia or are direct employed by this “student life,” as is Cristen Kromm, herself the Dean of Undergraduate Student Life. Another culprit is Matthew Patashnick, an associate dean for student and family support.
The chief honcho of this sleazy outfit is none other than Susan Chang-Kim, the Vice Dean and Chief Administrative Officer, who reports directly to Columbia President Minouche Shafik. It comes as no surprise that Chang-Kim is herself a graduate of Teacher’s College of Columbia University.
Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that Dean Joseph Sorett has put these three employees on administrative leave pending an investigation, but he himself was part of the texting and remains on-duty in his capacity of Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education. He continues unmolested in his position.
According to the New York Times, Sorett posted this: “LMAO,” for “laughing my ass off,” in response to a sarcastic message Ms. Chang-Kim had written about Brian Cohen, the executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel.
It seems that the rot extends up and down Columbia’s administration and bureaucracy, and the New York Post is having none of it.
The text exchange among this crew is posted below (click the rotate button several times to position the text thread for readability):
An informative piece in the Columbia Spectator reveals even more of the sordid details of these administrative louts.
The only encouraging aspect of this is that this gross and quite public malfeasance has led to a groundswell of backlash. A petition for the quartet’s removal is circulating here. It says, in part:
We believe Josef Sorett, Dean, Susan Chang-Kim, Vice Dean and Chief Administrative Officer, Cristen Kromm, Dean of Undergraduate Student Life, and Matthew Patashnick, Associate Dean for Student and Family Support are not fit to serve as deans of Columbia College and should be removed from their positions immediately.
The upshot is that right under the noses of the Columbia Board of Trustees, which supposedly provides oversight to the university, an anti-Semitic cadre has assumed control at the school. While the board has been both ignorant and missing in action, it is little wonder that the university was sluggish enforcing its own regulations and rules against the pro-Hamas encampment on its campus in the spring.
Administrators simply did not want to, because — as is clear today — their rank anti-Semitism put them in the ranks of Hamas fellow-travelers.
Columbia’s problems exemplify to greater and lesser degree the problems on almost all American college campuses. An ideological commissariat of near-fanatics under the rubric of “student affairs” has metastasized in the universities. It is firmly rooted. It will require honesty to recognize this and it will require steely determination to root it out and return the university to its Enlightenment ideals.
But if you’re caught up in this morass of immorality right now — as student or parent — you have options to fight back, without waiting for sluggish and sleepy boards of trustees to act.
The solution, as I have elaborated upon in BRUTAL MINDS, is twofold, one long-term effort and the other an immediate resolution, especially for students and their parents who pay large sums of money to places like Columbia. In fact, I talk extensively about this on network television here and at my book discussion at the Martin Center for Academic Renewal here.
You can do this right now and begin to restore American higher education one student and one program at a time.