My law firm is handling a proposed class action lawsuit against this company for allegedly using people's identities to sell subscriptions w/o consent. salahilaw.com/is-academia-.... This revision appears to be an end-run around the litigation process and we are looking into it. Thanks for flagging.

"IHRA narrows the boundaries of legitimate Jewish identity. While Palestinians have been, without a doubt, the primary targets of this effort, it also . . . restricts the freedom of Jews to define their own identity, limiting the ways in which Jewish beliefs, thought and activism can be expressed."

"When we criticize something important to someone’s identity, it doesn’t automatically mean we’re attacking their identity itself. When political positions become enshrined as essential components of personhood, substantive disagreements risk being recast as attacks on identity."

Many of the people who engineered the campaign against Columbia are also pushing for the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil and other activists. Those who supported the former but not the latter haven't yet realized that both efforts are anti-democratic.

Absent indications that such unprotected conduct actually targets students based on their identity, as opposed to just making a political statement to a broad audience, unprotected conduct shouldn't raise Title VI concerns either.

This defense also applies to protest conduct that is not itself protected speech (such as trespass, vandalism, etc.). A school's handling of such conduct can't be scrutinized more harshly just because it was associated with a particular political viewpoint.

... argue that such expressive activity is constitutionally protected and cannot lay the foundation for a Title VI violation. Such a legal ruling can insulate universities from future threat of regulation or investigation on the grounds of political protests.

University administrators at Columbia and beyond have only one way out of this before it's too late: aggressively push back, acknowledge that the vast majority of protestors are expressing their disagreement with a highly unpopular foreign policy not hatred of any people, and ...

To the extent the university is negotiating and making further concessions to the administration—including, potentially, collaborating with ICE—it is digging itself into a deeper hole by sacrificing more of its institutional autonomy. It is not normal for the government to control academic life.

Columbia didn't do that. Instead, it gave into a narrative about campus life constructed largely by off-campus partisans. In so doing, it let down the drawbridge that is now being used to dismantle the institution's independence.

That requires structural safeguards and protections to guard against improper intrusion. But it also requires university administrators with the guts to stand by those principles under sustained pressure—precisely when those principles are needed most.

A university's goal must always be to protect the academic freedom of its constituents, so that they can be entrusted to undertake their academic work without fear of undue influence by powerful economic or political actors.

Instead of protecting Columbia, this line laid the foundation for the cancellation of its funding by an administration with no genuine interest in civil rights.