As Trump Vows to Restore Free Speech, Harvard Just Assaulted It; Columbia Professor Forced Out Over Israel Criticisms
Over the last 15 months, blatant censorship of Pro-Palestine voices has rapidly and aggressively intensified on college campuses, threatening academic freedom and stifling free speech. Tenured Columbia Law professor Katherine Franke discusses being pushed out of her job after criticizing Israel.
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
For at least the last decade, one of the main grievances of the American conservative movement, one could argue one of their few unifying causes, has been the growing censorship regime of both state and corporate power that has been designed to restrict political discourse, particularly discourse online.
Now, Now, there is no denying the validity of that general complaint we have endlessly reported on and denounced the systemic attempts by Big Tech and various newly funded organizations and their partners in various Western governments to suppress and even outlaw anti-establishment speech, which often, though there is no denying the validity of that general complaint we have endlessly reported on and denounced the systemic attempts by Big Tech and various newly funded organizations and their partners in various
In his inaugural debate address on Monday, Donald Trump, obviously referring to all of that, devoted a lengthy passage to his vow to restore free speech in the United States.
Yet over the last 15 months, this blatant censorship, the punishment of dissent in almost every sector of American life, has rapidly and aggressively intensified.
This time, though, its targets are not primarily conservative voices.
Instead, they have been overwhelmingly those people who have either criticized aggressively Israel and its destruction of Gaza and or those who support the Palestinian cause, both of which, as I understand it, fall squarely within the protection of the First Amendment's guarantee and right of free speech.
There is no Israel exception in the First Amendment, nor is there any other amendment.
Since October 7, dozens of people, dozens, if not hundreds, in media and journalism and politics and academia and entertainment and other professions have been fired since October 7 for statements deemed too critical of Israel.
Governors have ordered pro-Palestinian groups banned from campus.
And today, Harvard announced its adoption of a radically expanded definition of anti-Semitism as hate speech.
The same definition approved by a bipartisan vote of Congress last year that would make it prohibited, even illegal in some cases, for anyone to express a wide range of commonly held views about the state of Israel and its supporters.
You're allowed to make exactly the same arguments and express exactly the same views about every other country on this planet?
Even your own government in the United States?
Just not about Israel.
We'll tell you about this latest abridgment of Americans' free speech rights in one of its most influential academic institutions in Harvard, all in the name of protecting this one foreign country on the other side of the world, often with protections that not even our own citizens or our own government on American soil enjoy.
Then, Catherine Franke is, or at least until last month was, a long-time prominent faculty member at Columbia University of New York.
Like millions, if not tens of millions of people in the United States, and far more than that around the world, she became highly critical of the U.S.-funded Israeli destruction of Gaza.
In January of last year, she appeared on the long-time left-wing program Democracy Now!, where she harshly criticized the Israeli attack on Gaza.
Supported the student protesters at her college who had been organizing against that war.
And then she also expressed concerns that some IDF soldiers who come to Colombia have been prone to violence, especially against pro-Palestinian protesters, because the transition from military life to civilian life is not always easy, something we often observe about American soldiers as well.
But for those speech and thought crimes that she expressed, Professor Frankie was inundated.
With multiple formal complaints and investigations, several filed by fellow faculty members, the kind of free speech witch hunts on campus that conservatives in the United States have been vocally for years been condemning and pretending to oppose, though not notably in this case, where many of them are silent and some are outright supportive.
Her university professor, president rather, denounced Professor Franke when testifying before Congress as that body investigated political speech about Israel on college campuses, something that many people found creepy, yet a lot of people thought was a perfectly appropriate thing for the U.S. Congress to do to investigate and hold inquisitions about the scope of political speech allowed on our private college campuses.
When the writing began to appear on the wall for her, including an original finding of guilt in the first investigatory stage at Columbia, and when Professor Franke and her partner and family became inundated with credible and relentless and often violent threats, she made the decision to leave the academic institution to which she had devoted much of her adult life for no reason other than the offense that many people took to her constitutionally protected views.
This latest casualty of the free speech attacks in the United States all to shield Israel, and when I say the latest, I mean one of many over the last 15 months, she will be here tonight to talk to us about her experiences having gone through this, how she sees the investigations and inquisitions and threats to which she was subjected, and what all this means not just about academic freedom in the United States, but especially free speech when it comes to our ever-shrinking right to question U.S. support for this foreign state.
and the actions of that foreign government itself.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few quick program notes.
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That after show is designed to take your questions and respond to your feedback and critiques, and most importantly of all sometimes, hear your suggestions for future shows and future reporting and future guests.
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I think this is the first time we're giving an example of the kind of extremely valuable and helpful suggestion that we also often get from our viewers that really does help shape the decisions editorial that we make about what we want to do in the future with our show.
And let me just show you this extremely helpful comment that came in last night.
The name of the person is Daniel McMinnis.
And if I'm reading that wrong, McInnis.
Daniel McInnis.
I apologize given how important this.
Recommendation is that I mispronounce his name.
We want to honor him.
Here is what he suggested we do on System Update.
He said, quote, I just read that International Falls, Minnesota is 60 below degrees, and I'm deeply interested in what the residents there think of the inauguration.
Please send Michael Tracy there ASAP. And I'm also really interested in understanding what the people in the northernmost part of the country during winter think about Trump's inaugural address and other issues as well.
I think it would be a perfect place for Michael to go to.
We'll send him on some kind of a bus or get his crappy car and he can go from New Jersey, drive all the way up to northern North Dakota.
Or Minnesota.
There's a lot of people there who are suffering from extremely cold weather.
I'm sure they'd be delighted to share with him their opinions on the inaugural address, on some of the appointments.
And we're very excited to...
Work on sending Michael there so we can get those important on-the-street interviews from neighborhoods that are too often neglected and forgotten by our national media.
And that, of course, is part of the objective of the show, is to rectify that.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There is a very bizarre dynamic when it comes to Israel and the United States that no matter how many times I see it, it never seeks to amaze me.
Joe Biden has prided himself for the 60 years that he has been in public life as a senator, a vice president, and as a president over the last four years in being one of the most stalwart, vocal, and unyielding supporters of Israel, of the Israeli government.
And not only a supporter of everything it does, but also a unrelenting defender of the need and justification of the United States subsidizing the Israeli state, of paying for their military, of paying for their wars.
There's dozens, if not hundreds, of speeches where he gave in the Senate saying things like, Israel is the most important ally to us.
If there was no Israel, we would have to invent an Israel.
The billions of dollars we give to them each year are the greatest investment we've ever made.
You cannot find a more pro-Israel stalwart in Washington than Joe Biden over the course of his career.
And the minute January, October 7th happened, Biden immediately got on a plane, the first foreign leader to go to Israel and stand by Netanyahu's side, and he made a commitment to Netanyahu that the United States would pay for their entire war that they now had to undertake in Gaza, and not only pay for it, but give them all the arms they asked for and needed and wanted.
That our government and our taxpayers and workers would pay for as well.
On top of the $4 billion we give to them every year by virtue of an agreement negotiated by Barack Obama with Benjamin Netanyahu on Obama's way out the door in 2016. And that he would have the United States diplomatically impede any attempt at the UN to bring a halt to or impose limits on the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
And Biden made good on every single one of those promises.
He paid for the entire war.
He gave them all the arms and bombs they used to destroy Gaza.
And every time the world, and I mean the world, the entire world, was in consensus about some effort to try and limit or stop or reel in this unprecedented level of violence and destruction against the helpless population, Joe Biden dispatched his diplomats to the UN to stand against the entire world, isolate the United States.
No matter how much power and standing in the world the United States had to sacrifice to do it.
It's hard to imagine, short of literally transferring the control of the United States Treasury formally to Benjamin Netanyahu or just making him Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, what possibly Biden could have done more for the state of Israel other than And
yet the Republican critique of Joe Biden...
It's not that he forced American workers to subsidize the state of Israel, even though Israeli citizens have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans, or that he involved the United States in a war that isn't ours to fight.
Instead, it was that somehow he was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas, that he didn't do enough for Israel.
Very similar to how the Republican critique, not the populist right critique, but the establishment Republican critique of President Obama is not that he spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a failed war in Ukraine that brought with it great risk of escalation and ultimately achieved nothing but the eradication of two generations of Ukrainian men, hundreds of thousands of deaths of people who involuntarily were forced to fight just to have to give Russia what it wanted.
At the start of the war, in fact, probably having to give them more now that they've lost so much and paid for so much in the war than could have been done at the start.
And yet the Republican critique of him, too, as we've shown before, we've done interviews with Republicans saying this, that, oh, Joe Biden should have given even more to Ukraine.
He shouldn't have imposed as many restraints on him.
It's this really warped dynamic where...
Republicans know they have to criticize Joe Biden even in the areas where they vehemently agree with him, like Israel, like Ukraine, like bombing Yemen.
And so they have to concoct some reason why they disagree even though Biden's doing exactly what they would hope he would do.
And now here we have the cause of free speech, which...
In so many ways has been the principal defining cause of the conservative movement in the United States over the last 10 years.
It's certainly something that I spent a lot of time defending them for because I believe they were on the right side of that view when it came to the grievances they expressed.
And we gained a lot of conservative audience because of the free speech banner that I've been waving my entire adult life versus a lawyer and now as a journalist.
There are a lot of people who wave that banner Who only believe in that quote-unquote principle insofar as it defends the people with whom they disagree.
And the minute they see that the people with whom they most disagree are being silenced or declared guilty of hate speech or otherwise being sanctioned or punished, they drop that flag and burn a hole in it.
And they start invoking the exact rationale of left liberal censors to justify why, oh, this isn't really speech, this is...
Words are violence or it's incitement to violence.
And we've seen so much of that, the people who have gotten so rich branding themselves as free speech advocates, the Barry Weisses and Ben Spears of the world and Dave Rubens, who, to the extent they care at all about free speech, care infinitely more than the state of Israel and are far more willing to renounce free speech in order to shield that foreign country that they love than they are willing to do almost anything else.
For so long we heard that Harvard was this bastion of left-wing thought, that the only thing they censored is conservative speech, and yet because of all the pressure put on Harvard by Congress, led by people like Elise Stefanik, who Trump then, as a reward, named to be the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., think about that.
The Congress had an inquisition to determine whether or not there was too much criticism of Israel being allowed on college campuses.
These colleges, because they have so many major donors as well who are fanatical supporters of Israel, have felt pressure both from the government and from the billionaire class to start curbing the right of faculty members and students to criticize the state of Israel.
A direct blow, not just to the values of free speech, but to the core concept of academic freedom on which academia depends to be valuable.
Once you're an academic, you can explore any taboo, you can play with any idea, and you're not supposed to be fired.
Like so many principles conservatives claim to have, not all, but many, there's a gigantic Israel exception right in the middle of it that basically makes it all a farce and an illusion and crumbling down upon the slightest scrutiny or the most minimal test.
And somehow...
Harvard today was pressured and forced to launch one of the most direct assaults on free speech on a college campus and one of the most subversive assaults on academic freedom in the name of protecting the state of Israel, this college that we're always told is some aggressively left-wing, communist, anti-Semitic.
This institution now has just adopted a definition of anti-Semitism and hate speech designed to outlaw and punish and criminalize students at Harvard or faculty at Harvard who are critical of the State of Israel and support the cause of Palestine.
Hear from the Harvard Crimson, the college's newspaper.
From today, there you see the date, Jewish students sue, I'm sorry, this is from January of 2024. This is the event that got the ball rolling.
Jewish students sue Harvard University, alleged, quote, severe anti-Semitism on campus.
One of the other conservative grievances over the last decade, almost as unifying and central as the complaint about censorship, has been the constant mockery of every minority group.
For claiming that they're not safe on college campuses, that there's systemic discrimination against them.
Black students say it.
Latino groups say it.
Muslim groups say it.
Women groups say it.
Trans people or LGBTs say it.
And to be a conservative basically means to mock it.
Oh, you're just trying to self-victimize.
You're constantly dividing yourself up and segregating yourself into these little categories.
And then you want censorship to prevent ideas that make you uncomfortable because you've been learned and trained to be little babies.
And that's all we've seen since October 7th on college campuses.
Jewish students using exactly those tactics and those narratives to claim that they're uniquely persecuted and besieged.
These poor students at Harvard and Penn and Yale who come from the wealthiest families whose parents are Goldman Sachs partners and tycoons and billionaires.
That they're uniquely persecuted.
They don't feel safe because they see Palestinian flags being waved.
And six of them sued Harvard.
One of them was invited to speak at the RNC about how he stood up to Harvard for allowing anti-Semitism and was given a hero's welcome at the Republican National Committee.
The people who hate victimhood narratives and identity politics and attempts to censor could not have been more enthusiastic for someone doing exactly that, but in the name of Israel and Jewish students rather than any of the other minority groups they typically scorn.
Hear from the Harvard newspaper reporting on that lawsuit.
Quote, six Jewish students filed a federal lawsuit against Harvard on Wednesday, alleging that the university has failed to address, quote, severe and pervasive anti-Semitism on campus.
I mean, if you know anything about Harvard, who runs it, who funds it, who's on the faculty there, Alan Dershowitz is a...
Perfectly representative example.
Who goes there, who has been disproportionately represented there for decades?
The idea that Harvard is a cesspool of anti-Semitism to the point where Jewish students or Israel supporters are physically endangered is too laughable to even say with a straight face.
I barely got through that sentence with that.
It goes on, quote, Who you might recall we interviewed on this show,
he was also a primetime speaker at the Republican National Committee, is named while the other five students are identified as members of the nonprofit organization Students Against Anti-Semitism.
Quote, it's become so unbearable, so unbearable at college campuses, this was our only option, said Kastenbaum.
The suit documents numerous allegations of anti-Semitism at Harvard's campus, specifically naming several student groups, including Harvard BDS, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, the Harvard Islamic Society, and the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Student Solidarity Committee, which penned the original statement calling Israel, quote, entirely responsible for the October 7th attacks.
You don't have to like that.
It's a view that Israel is responsible for the October 7th attacks.
It's obviously a perfectly protected view to have, just like people can argue that the U.S. provoked the Russian war in Ukraine.
People can argue that the United States provoked the war in Vietnam through the Gulf of Tonkin lies.
These are all historical, valid opinions that people debate all the time, but not on Harvard.
And by the way, I had that student on my show, Kastenbaum, who brought this lawsuit, and I asked him multiple times, Physically attacked by anybody?
Were you physically menaced by anybody?
Were you physically threatened by anybody?
The answer to all those questions was no.
It took a lot of prying to get that clear answer, but that was the answer.
Because all of this alleged discomfort and being unsafe comes from hearing ideas that they dislike.
And the whole conservative mockery was based on this phrase, words are not violent.
And yet...
All of this, this whole moral panic over the supposed extreme marginalization and persecution of American Jews.
I have a guest on my show saying I know Jews in New York that can't even safely walk on the street.
Has all been based on the idea that having to see a flag that you disagree with, having to hear a political chant you find upsetting, is something that institutions need to protect you from by putting a stop to those ideas.
Exactly what the conservative movement has been.
Viciously ridiculing and depicting as repressive for over a decade with my support.
It's just that I believe in that principle in all cases, not just some.
The Harvard Crimson in May.
Reported this, quote, the Brandeis Center accuses Harvard of, quote, deliberately ignoring anti-Semitism in lawsuit.
Here's another lawsuit brought by Harvard.
Quote, in a 72-page complaint, the plaintiff said the university, quote, allowed anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment to fester.
How can you not allow anti-Israel sentiment to fester at a college that guarantees free speech and academic freedom?
Are you supposed to ban anti-Israel sentiment?
Only permit pro-Israel adoration?
That's the foundation, the premise of all of this.
The lawsuit alleged they allowed anti-Israeli sentiment to fester following October 7th and criticized its decision not to condemn a statement published by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee in October 23, calling Israel's, quote, entirely responsible for the attack.
Do you agree or not with that position?
It's a perfectly protected form of free speech, and if you think that ought to be punished, just please don't ever pretend to be an opponent of censorship again.
So much of the hysteria over the most privileged people on the planet, Ivy League students, being unsafe suddenly.
Never black students, Latino students, women, trans people, immigrants, Muslims, they're never unsafe.
If they talk about being unsafe, they're just whiny.
They just don't, they're little snowflakes who can't handle disagreement.
Jewish students at Yale and Harvard coming from Greenwich, Connecticut.
Talk about being unsafe.
This is the real crisis.
That's when we need to reevaluate free speech.
And this was all accomplished by a series of claims about things that happened that were either completely fictitious or totally laughable to support the claim that Jewish students were widely unsafe on American college campuses.
Hear from Fox News in April of 2024. Now, obviously, that's a very disturbing image.
I mean, this woman, was that a protest?
This Jewish woman?
Someone walked up to her and stabbed her in the eye with a Palestinian flag, like the pointed part of the flag.
You stabbed her in the eye, like right, you know, the eye is so sensitive.
You have like a very sharp flagpole repeatedly and violently entering your eye.
As my third grade teachers used to say about spitballs, you can really lose an eye, only in that case it's really true.
The problem was the story was completely invented.
It was a...
Jesse Smollett-level hoax spread by, obviously, the Free Press and Barry Weiss and that whole crowd.
The next day, Shahar Tartak, the poor man who was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, went on Piers Morgan, and her eyes were looking suspiciously vibrant and healthy and unwounded.
And you couldn't help notice, so here's that conversation.
I've made a serious effort to receive direct protection from the university and have an escort on a regular basis, but the university...
has in the past failed and is continuing to not provide me with that direct protection and so to be really quite honest with you I don't know what I will do because I have seen hundreds of students organize to call for the genocide of me and my people and I have seen hundreds of students taunt visibly Jewish students live and in person at these rallies my peers are I'm frightened by them,
to be frank.
What about the thing where you were stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag?
That's why you're on these shows?
Like, trans people claim their censorship needed because people call for their eradication and genocide.
The whole reason you're on these shows and we're talking about you is because you claimed you were stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag.
It was supposed to be an example.
Finally, a concrete example of actual physical assault of a Jewish student.
A violent, vicious one.
I mean, who stabs people in the eye with a pointed end of a flag?
And yet here she is with her two lovely little eyes, and I wouldn't say lovely, they're kind of spaced apart a little oddly, but, I mean, they're unharmed.
And here's the rest of what she said.
And I should be, because I've been assaulted once, and I don't see why it shouldn't happen again, because it's being organized and encouraged and...
Protected by the rallies themselves and by the rally organizers themselves.
Again, when a student assaulted me by jabbing me in the eye, what happened afterwards was that the human blockade of protest organizers, of student leaders in these anti-Semitic rallies.
So she went on other shows as well and they were like, hey, you know, your eye seems like pretty good.
And she would say, yeah.
Just ended up kind of, like, brushing against it when we saw the video finally.
That's exactly what it was.
Somebody was waving a flag like they do when you're in a march.
She was standing over here, and it's kind of, like, swept against her.
And that turned into the Jessie Small-level hoax, and she was stabbed in the eye.
Unfortunately for her, she didn't even bother to wear an eye patch to get her some sympathy.
She just, like, I guess was too vain to do that, wanted to go on and show her and her vibrant self, and yet...
It wasn't very consistent with the story that much of the very wise type press had been spreading to try and finally justify this claim that Jewish students were unsafe for reasons other than hearing ideas.
Here was a protest at the University of Washington in which students were exercising their First Amendment right, their free speech right, to march in defense of the Palestinian cause and opposed to the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
And here's how one Jewish student reacted when seeing this completely non-violent protest.
You'll see it in the background.
It's just people walking around with signs like every protest does.
But she had been fed on this paranoia, this narrative of paranoia that Jews were so unsafe they can't even walk out on the street.
Like, look at the neurosis and hysteria this caused in this poor woman at the mere fact that a protest against Israel was permitted on her campus.
They want our people dead!
They want a skill!
How is it allowed?
Why are you allowing me?
Please, please end it.
Please, please.
They're just like walking in circles of signs.
Now, she became a folk hero on pro-Israel social media.
Imagine if that had been a trans woman begging and weeping and sobbing security guards to stop a protest where people were just walking with signs saying they're only two genders.
Or if it had been a black person begging for an anti-affirmative action.
Protests to stop.
Conservatives would be deriding those people today as pathetic little neurotic snowflakes who need therapy, but this woman, she was an example, a noble example of just how assaulted, under danger, Jewish students in America are.
There was actually a free press.
No, it was Canadian Jews under Justin Trudeau that I'll show you about one day.
What she thinks are the unspeakable horrors of Canadian Jews.
I'll give you a hint.
The world's most powerful and richest country in all of human history did not pay another military to carpet bomb their communities in Canada and to reduce their entire neighborhoods to rubble and purposely destroy all of their schools, hospitals, and places of worship and prevent food from getting in and medicine
so they die of famine and treatable infections and diseases, nor did they ethnically cleanse them from one part of Canada to the next by forcing them to go leave their homes to go trek to another side of Canada only to then start bombing that one repeatedly throughout the war.
None of that happened, but it was an unspeakable plight of what's happening to Canadian Jews that Barry Weiss has so empathetically uncovered.
And this is the kind of thing that has been permeating our culture.
Now, Harvard, for whatever reasons, either they're being externally pressured and threatened, which they have been.
Remember Bill Ackman, the billionaire and fanatical Israel supporter?
Got a whole group of his fellow billionaire friends together and said they're going to cut off all donations to Harvard because they didn't act aggressively enough to condemn Hamas and defend Israel and allow too much free speech on campus.
So they lost donations.
They've had congressional inquisitions against them for allowing too much pro-Palestinian protest on campus, all by the people who pretend that they oppose censorship and cancel culture and love free speech.
Harvard, in response to those lawsuits, those totally frivolous and laughable, whiny, petulant lawsuits, self-victimizing plaintiffs that have brought them, to settle those, this is what they did.
Here's from the Harvard Crimson today.
One day after Trump takes office, Harvard settles two anti-Semitism lawsuits.
Harvard reached a settlement in two ongoing Title VI lawsuits accusing the university of mishandling anti-Semitism on campus for an undisclosed amount on Tuesday.
Per the settlements, Harvard will clarify that its nondiscrimination policies protect Israeli and Jewish students and adopt the widely used but controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism.
Harvard's decision to adopt the IHRA definition and enshrine protections for Zionist students drew concern from some free speech advocates.
Criticizing Israeli government policy can now get you punished at Harvard.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which long supported the free speech rights of conservatives, wrote in a post on Acts.
Quote, "Instead of choosing consistent, robust protection for free speech, Harvard is opting for consistent censorship.
Two scholars affiliated with the Nexus Project, which developed a definition of anti-Semitism that does not classify contentious student or harsh criticism of Israel as necessarily discriminatory, said Harvard's decision to adopt the IHRA definition instead could blur the line between legitimate political discourse said Harvard's decision to adopt the IHRA definition instead could blur the line
University of California, Los Angeles professor of Jewish history, David Myers, who sat on the task force that developed the alternative definition, called the IHRA definition, quote, "a form of virtual signaling," saying that it did not offer a practical tool for combating anti-Semitism.
We've covered this alternative definition of anti-Semitism before.
It was concocted in Israel to wildly expand the definition of hate speech, another concept conservatives long pretended to oppose on college campuses.
Not just to include anti-Semitism but to drastically expand the range of ideas that you're now prohibited to express, particularly when it comes to criticizing the Israeli government.
They first succeeded in inducing the always guilt-ridden Europe into adopting this definition and then criminalizing, making it a crime to express any of the views that fall within its wildly permissive parameter.
This was also, as you might recall, What the House of Representatives did last year in response to this hysteria of trying to race each other and see who could most protect Israel.
They also adopted a bill, there you see it, May 2024, House passes anti-Semitism bill with broad bipartisan support amid campus protests.
That was about introducing the same definition.
And I just want to show you what this definition is.
We've shown you before, but I just want you to see what a grotesque...
And undeniably violent assault it is on what we all understand to be core views of free speech.
Because what it really does is it prohibits various common criticism of Israel and of American Jews that you may not like, may not agree with, but clearly are valid.
They're political expression at the end of the day, and that's all that matters.
Here's the working definition of anti-Semitism that Israel created to try and erode free speech in the West in order to protect itself.
Quote, And what's so important about these examples,
because obviously the definition is written to be vague and inoffensive, is, if we can just back one screen, these examples are not just illustrative, they are incorporated into the definition itself.
So when the House of Representatives voted to adopt this radically expanded definition of what includes antisemitism for purposes of Anti-discrimination law in educational facilities and on college campuses.
They explicitly said we're not just adopting this vague definition but also the examples.
The examples are now officially lists of things you cannot say without being officially found guilty of anti-Semitism and hate speech.
Not just in the United States and in educational institutions, but now at Harvard as well.
And certainly it will just continue to grow because the more an institution like Harvard adopts it, the more pressure there will be from the Bill Ackmans and Ben Shapiros and Mike Johnsons and Mike Huckabees and Barry Weiss of the world to continue to do it.
So here are some of the examples of things that you are now not allowed to say because they are anti-Semitic.
Ready?
Remember, this is the United States, a country supposedly that honors a very robust and even absolute vision of free speech.
These are things you may not do from now on at Harvard in soon-to-be United States.
Quote, manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived of as a Jewish collectivity, accusing Jewish students of being more loyal to Israel or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide than to the interest of their own nations.
Okay, I believe that many Jews, many whom I know, who I grew up with, who I speak to to this very day, many whom I know in media, Ben Shapiro being one and so many others who basically admit it, I absolutely believe they have a higher loyalty to the state of I absolutely believe they have a higher loyalty to the state which they've been inculcated with birth to adore and love and to feel loyal to.
They have a religious affinity for it.
They have every right to have that.
And I have every right to observe it.
And the idea that you're not allowed to say this about Ben Shapiro any longer, you're not allowed to say this about Joe Lieberman or all kinds of politicians, many of you even aren't Jews.
The people who have the hardest core loyalty to Israel and the United States Congress are often evangelicals for religious reasons.
You're allowed to say that about them, notice.
You're allowed to say Mike Huckabee has more loyalty to Israel than to his own country in the United States.
You're just not allowed to say it about Jews.
So that's one thing you're not allowed to say.
Something that is extremely common every day to hear.
And that I think has a lot of basis to it.
Here's another thing.
Denying the Jewish people the right of self-determination, e.g.
by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Think about that.
You are not allowed to say that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
You know what you are allowed to say in the United States?
That the United States and the existence of it is a racist endeavor.
That you're allowed to say.
That you hear all the time.
Nobody tries to censor that.
Nobody tries to punish that.
You can say that the state of China is a racist endeavor.
You can say the state of Peru is a racist endeavor.
Pick any country in the entire world at Harvard and you are totally free to call the existence of that country a racist endeavor except one country where you fall into the crime of hate speech and that is the state of Israel under this definition.
Here are a couple more.
Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism, for example, claims of Jews killing Jesus.
To characterize Israel or Israel or Israelis.
I've read the Bible.
I picked it up when I was 20 and just read it from start to finish because I wanted my own ideas of it.
You know what?
It talks about the role that Jews played in the killing of Jesus.
It's been something Christians believed for centuries.
Many of them still do.
You can believe it all you want.
You're just not allowed to say it any longer.
No expression of that Christian.
Dogma, that Christian perspective about the historical death of Jesus and who was responsible.
You can say Romans are responsible.
No problem at all.
Just go ahead and say that all you want.
Just don't say that Israelites played a role in the death of Jesus because then you fall on the list.
Here is the last example.
Applying double standards.
Actually, the second to last.
Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Think about how, what madness that is.
I can criticize China without having to make sure that I'm applying the same criticism that I'm expressing toward China to every other country so I'm not engaged in a double standard.
I can criticize the United States freely.
Without having to worry about whether I'm being inconsistent and applying to the United States a double standard because I'm not applying the same to Norway, to the Philippines, to Uruguay, whatever country you want, feel free to apply double standards or inconsistent statements.
But the minute you criticize Israel, you better make sure and you'll be scrutinized for it.
That the criticism you're making of Israel is a criticism you've expressed of other countries that deserve it as well, or you are now formally guilty of expressing hate speech and anti-Semitism.
And then finally, the prohibited example, you may not draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
So, if you happen to believe, and it doesn't matter at the moment whether you do or you don't, But whether you happen to believe that what the Israelis did in Gaza over the past 15 months or what they've done to the Palestinians for two decades bears at least some similarities to the mentality and the mindset and the ideology of dehumanization that permitted so many Germans to view Jews as not only
Justifiably killed, but as deserving of that, if that's a view that you just happen to hold, you better not express that view.
You better cling tightly to it because you're allowed to compare any other country you want in the world, including your own government, the United States, to what the Nazis did.
There's one country and one group of people where it's now prohibited to make that comparison, and that is...
That's the new rule that has been first adopted by the House and now under great pressure by Harvard.
And having seen it adopted by Harvard, it is undoubtedly the case that it will spread to all sorts of other academic institutions.
Other academic institutions might even be legally vulnerable to these kinds of lawsuits if they don't follow Harvard's suit.
This is nothing more than an outright systemic assault on the free speech rights of American citizens, on the academic freedom that is supposed to prevail in our institutions of higher learning.
Not to protect our own country, our own culture, our own government, the security of our own people, but to protect this foreign country all the way on the other side of the world.
That constantly gets all sorts of protections and benefits from the United States and its government for reasons that we talked about many times before that no other country gets.
And if it's a military benefit or a financial benefit, that's objectionable, but that's one thing.
But when it comes to eroding, the core rights that the Constitution guarantees to our citizens and our country and the critical value of academic freedom at institutions of higher learning that make them uniquely valuable, without which they're nothing other than instruments of propaganda,
That I consider a real crisis and this act of censorship to protect Israel is doing nothing but rapidly growing.
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Our guest tonight is Professor Catherine Franke, who has a long list of academic awards and credentials, including having been the recipient in 2011 for legal research from the Guggenheim Fellowship.
She was the founding director for the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, the faculty director of law, rights, and religion products.
She has been a favored professor of many students who have passed through Columbia during these years.
I know some of them and have talked to them.
She's always been, as professors not only have the right to be, but in many cases are expected to be, of a whole variety of causes that she believes in.
That's the idea of being a public intellectual and a member of a college faculty.
And yet now, as the Washington Post reported in a lengthy profile of this situation earlier today, and we had planned to have her on our show prior to this, but we're glad that the Washington Post is covering it too.
I thought it was a reasonably fair accounting of what took place.
You see the headline, a college professor.
Criticize Israeli students.
It put her job at risk.
In fact, it forced her to leave the academic institution of higher learning to which she had devoted much of her professional life.
There's a lot of lessons and a lot of important controversies in this story that are highly relevant to so many things we cover, and we are therefore delighted to welcome her to our program.
Professor Franke, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
It's great to see you.
Hope you're doing well.
Thank you, Glenn.
It's great to see you, too.
Absolutely.
So, before we get into the controversy that has sadly brought us together tonight, let me just ask you to talk a little bit about the quarter century that you spent at this institution.
I hope that doesn't date you.
I hear myself described in that way sometimes, too.
It's not always great, but it's accurate.
What has been your involvement in the Columbia?
Culture, which is really what these academic institutions are, and what have you been teaching?
What have you been doing?
What has your experience been like there until this?
Well, Glenn, I was an undergraduate at Barnard at a period when actually Columbia didn't admit women, so I proudly went to Barnard at All-Women's College in the late 70s and early 80s, and then went off and...
Went to law school and became a lawyer, a civil rights lawyer, and then an academic, and found myself back on the Columbia campus in 1999, joining the Columbia Law Faculty as a tenured law professor.
So I've been on the faculty for 25-plus years now, but have a very long tenure of being part of the Columbia community proudly, so starting out my undergraduate education at Barnard.
While I've been at Columbia as a professor, my specialty has really been in teaching sex and sexual orientation-based discrimination courses, race discrimination courses, legal philosophy, and legal history.
You know, when you teach for a long time, as I have, it's kind of nice to come up with new things to teach.
So over time, I've moved into different areas of law that's also tracked where my own writing and research has gone.
Before we get into the details of what happened to you, I think the context is really important.
I see so often, especially these days, different things getting conflated, maybe deliberately.
So we've always had pretty contentious debates in the United States, at least over many decades, over the types of things that are taught appropriately or not appropriately in places like junior high or elementary school.
Even in high school, there's a lot of anger sometimes over professors, over teachers importing their politics into the classroom.
What kind of material is age-appropriate?
What sort of things should and shouldn't be discussed?
And as a parent, I have to say, I've become more sensitive to those things, too.
And my kids come home from the seventh grade and tell me some of the things they've heard.
I'm not necessarily a big fan of all of that.
But it's an entirely different world when we're talking about people who go off to college.
Because by then, you are an adult legally, and the idea is to open your brain to all sorts of ideas.
That's the point of college, to start considering every other conceivable way of life.
So so much of what might be inappropriate, at least according to some people, in high school and junior high, both in terms of subject matter and the ability of teachers to be able to make themselves heard, both inside the classroom and out, have a much different kind of Can you talk about how you see those distinctions and what academic freedom
is supposed to mean for students when they get to a place like Columbia?
I think the most important thing we can do as educators, and I think this is true whether you're in graduate school, as I am in teaching law students or undergraduates or even middle schoolers, is to teach our future citizens how to be critical thinkers, how not to just accept something because they're told it's true, but to actually interrogate whether indeed is true.
And if you have a disagreement with it, why?
Too often we see these days that students are asked to just memorize a kind of orthodoxy about one topic or another.
And to me, that's an abandonment of our responsibility as educators.
So in my own classrooms, I teach issues of sex discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, race discrimination.
I will always teach material I don't agree with.
I will always be provocative.
In asking students questions, even if I myself agree with what they're saying, I want them to be able to critically defend their position, understand what it means to hold a different position, and be able to engage that other position respectfully.
So that's what we should be doing, whether it's in a higher education or in middle school or high school, is teaching students, teaching all of us how to think and how to reexamine things that we think we believe to be true.
And always be open to being wrong and to seeing another perspective.
I have this interesting experience that really kind of galvanized my thinking on this.
I think about 18 months ago now, maybe two years, I participated in a panel discussion slash debate about identity politics.
And my two fellow panelists were Cornel West and Professor Judith Butler.
And when I was invited and told who was going to be there, Freshman or sophomore year of college, Professor Butler was a guest lecturer, and I was obsessed with philosophy, and she taught a philosophy class, and I remember we were studying or reading essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvais,
and she had a very emphatic view, or at least one that she defended, Professor Butler did, that the passages we were reading from Sartre were deeply misogynistic.
And I remember thinking, like, wow, is this really what...
College is a college course supposed to be where I'm basically being indoctrinated, told to what to think because the professor has such a strong view until she said, and now I want to hear from you.
Those of you who seem agitated, those of you who don't agree, raise your hand and confront me.
And I was one of the first people who did and we had a long back and forth.
Obviously, I didn't leave that discussion very well because I was a sophomore and she had a PhD in philosophy and had been studying this material for decades.
But I remember how kind of enervating it was, like the idea that, wow, I'm now in a place where I'm not only permitted but kind of expected to start debating and hearing different views and being challenged and even aggressively.
And this is part of the...
I don't know.
You've been closer to academia much more than I have over the years, but it seems like that has changed where it's almost like there has been this growing sense that even college students, despite being adults, are supposed to be similarly shielded from that kind of Well,
I don't know.
I think if you're a good teacher, you make room in the classroom for everybody to express their views and to get a wide spectrum of views.
I always feel a class is not going well if everybody's agreeing with me and they're all agreeing with each other.
First of all, it's boring.
But second of all, we're not thinking hard enough about hard things.
Judith Butler has been my mentor also.
They're a close friend.
Gender Trouble was a book that just blew my mind when I read it for the first time in 1990. And it made me think really differently about things that I thought I already understood.
And it's the way that they think, the way that Butler thinks, and approaches a hard problem that was extremely instructive for me, both in my own writing and in my teaching, is to push myself to think, hmm.
Have I actually got that right?
What if I used a different frame for thinking about this?
And it's what I encourage my students to do in their own thinking, but with each other.
And if we're not doing that in class, then we're actually not performing the function I think we're supposed to as educators.
But I'll also add, Glenn, that I know that there's a lot of pressure on students, whether it's in high school or college or graduate school, to be politically correct.
And they're embarrassed or worried.
About expressing a view that they don't think sort of follows whatever the thinking du jour is that students are supposed to have.
And I feel it's my job as an educator to make room for them to express views that perhaps disagree with the current thinking among progressives or others, or that just interrogate it.
But that kind of policing between students or among students is something that I know the students bear very heavily in the classroom.
Well, I'm really glad to hear you say that because it's actually a good segue to what I wanted to ask you.
There is this kind of oddity that when I was growing up and kind of identifying with the movement of the ACLU and the free speech movement that grew out of Berkeley.
Things like Daniel Ellsberg and Watergate, that was kind of the formative ideology of my young connection to politics.
Free speech was very much associated with the left.
And then certainly into the 80s, when there was a lot of debates over censorship that came from social conservatives under Reagan with the arts and like, free speech was, for me, a value on the left.
And over the past, I would say, 10 to 15 years, that has kind of shifted.
I think there's a perception, to me at least somewhat valid, that universities have become We're increasingly tilted to the side of the view that free speech can sometimes be too excessive, it can become too offensive, create a hostile environment for especially marginalized students.
And so when it came time over the last, say, 15 months since October 7th, for me to try and get people to object to censorship of Israel criticism or pro-Palestinian speech...
From conservatives, people who don't agree with that speech but have been waving the free speech banner.
What I heard a lot of, and also this was true when the college professors testified before Congress at that inquisition, was, look, maybe I would be more sympathetic to this if not for the fact that these institutions have been doing exactly what you just suggested,
suggested, which is kind of imposing a compelled homogeneity on a wide range of hotly debated issues, and therefore their attempt now to raise this free speech banner seems inauthentic and unconvincing.
Do you understand where that comes from, that critique, and is there validity to it?
Well, I think this connects absolutely directly to the segment that you had right before you brought me on, which is about Harvard adopting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
And I will just note, Glenn, that Columbia is in the process of settling a lawsuit brought by some Jewish students who claim that Columbia has maintained an anti-Semitic learning environment.
And I have every expectation that Columbia will make the same announcement that Harvard just did, that they, too, will adopt an IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
But at the very same time that schools are doing this, university presidents are also announcing a commitment to institutional neutrality.
And by that they mean that it's not the place of universities to take positions or express views on matters of public concern unless they really deal with a core academic mission.
At Columbia, our former president spoke out about George Floyd's murder.
Spoke out about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I remember when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran, was invited to Columbia's campus.
And he said some very controversial things.
And Lee Bollinger, our president, stood up to him and said, you are a petty dictator.
And I disagree deeply with all the things that you just said.
So the president of the university, face-to-face with the president of an important country, Iran, took basically a foreign policy position as part of the pedagogical mission or the academic mission at the university.
And Lee's view, Lee Bollinger's view, was that the antidote to bad speech, if you will, and that's how he was characterizing Ahmadinejad's position, is more speech, not censorship.
But it's only now.
Only now that universities are being asked to express a view about a genocide that they say, well, we actually can't speak about matters of public concern.
And at the same time are saying that we will only allow speech by members of our community if it complies with the state of Israel's view of Zionism and Israeli citizenship.
So they're imposing a particular set of guardrails, if you will, about what we can say on campus that comply with a political project, the state of Israel as a political project, as a Zionist project for some Jewish people, and that if you exceed those or go outside those guardrails, you're engaging in bias rather than you're doing exactly what Lee Bollinger did.
In confronting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to say, I don't agree with that political project.
I think it's offensive.
I think it's problematic.
I think it's anti-democratic.
Whatever you want to say.
And that's normally what we do in universities is debate these kinds of issues.
But now that is somehow out of bounds.
And it is no mistake.
That these guardrails are being set up in the name of service of a particular political project at the very moment when the pressure on universities to speak out about the genocide in Palestine and in Gaza has increased and increased.
And I have finally come to the position...
Given my own experience at Columbia, given the enormous work I've done over the last year and a half across campuses, not just in the U.S., but across the globe, is that what we're seeing is not just a defense of the state of Israel, but forms of anti-Palestinian racism that are shutting down any kind of critique of the state of Israel and prejudging.
Any speech in defense of the rights and dignity of Palestinians as a form of bias against Jews.
That, to me, has obviously revealed itself as a kind of bias towards Palestinians.
And we see it manifest itself on campuses with this idea that any pro-Palestinian protest is always already violent.
We have to bring in the police.
We have to shut down the campus.
We have to prohibit that protest.
Or that they're using the disciplinary codes in pretty much every university in this country in ways we've never seen.
To punish students for engaging in peaceful protest.
That's part of why I went to Barnard as an undergrad, is I thought this is a place where students are engaging world events.
For me at the time, it was apartheid in South Africa, U.S. involvement in Central America.
We all protested those things.
And so there's a really...
And before that, the Vietnam War, the prior generation, the Vietnam War, and...
That's right.
I want to get to the details of your case, which is the next thing I want to ask you about.
I don't want to leave this yet until I just press a little bit more on this, which is everything you just said there is something I agree with 100%.
And in fact, not to agree with, but have been myself using every platform I can find to express exactly those thoughts about the increasingly repressive effort to punish...
Criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian speech.
What particularly offends me is how easily conflated So all of this is,
you know, not just repressive, but often offensive, this kind of conflation of Israel and Jews.
But to just go back to the reason I at least have had sometimes trouble convincing people of this, is that everything that you just described about the attempt to compel a compliance with a certain orthodoxy, in this case support for Israel, a lot of people believe and have perceived that on a lot of elite a lot of people believe and have perceived that on a lot of elite American colleges campuses, exactly that has been happening prior to this, only in support of a left-wing agenda, that people who are critical of or deviate from new gender ideology designed to support
people who are critical of or deviate from new gender ideology designed to support the identity and rights of trans people are accused of hate speech, that people who weren't on board with the George Floyd protest or all the reforms of police were accused of that people who weren't on board with the George Floyd protest or all the reforms of
That in other words, this kind of speech policing on college campuses is not just suddenly appearing now to protect Israel, but has been a long time in the making, including by people who were advocating it, who now suddenly are protesting it, including those university presidents who appeared before who now suddenly are protesting it, including those university presidents who This is why a lot of people found their free speech defense so unconvincing.
Is there validity to that concern?
There is validity to the branding campaign, to a kind of reframing of what it means to think about a campus that allows people to all be equal citizens and participants in that campus as something that censors the views of those who don't agree with equality principles that are applied in a university setting.
So why do I say this?
What we see is a distinction between the way that disciplinary codes are now being used, I think, inappropriately, without evidence, and in a much more enforceful way against pro-Palestinian protesters, whereas in the past what we saw was this whole disciplinary infrastructure hardly ever get used.
I have a colleague who tells slavery jokes in law school classes, a white male.
And his black students finally said, enough is enough, and filed a complaint with the very office that went after me, and nothing ever happened.
I have another white male colleague who likes to use the N-word in class.
He thinks it makes him seem hip.
Well, the students don't take it that way.
He was never called to account for that, even though students filed complaints against them.
So there's a little bit of a way in which I feel people with privilege have expressed a kind of of false vulnerability when called out for engaging in practices that actually do interfere with the educational project.
Students did not feel like they could participate in classes where their professor was making slavery jokes, and they knew the professor was going to get away with it.
And so today what we have is a kind of censorship of an over-exercising of the disciplinary process as a kind of censoring of what we can say in the classroom in contradistinction with what we used to see where this process was never used.
Yes, there was a kind of political correctness at times that I think exceeded what would be the scope of things that I think were actually biased.
And I think there was a chilling effect that had an impact on some more conservative members of our campus.
But, you know, as a lesbian who felt for many, many years like I could not talk about who I was and who I loved and what my identity was, and that kind of censorship that I lived with because of the real bias I could encounter, a little bit I felt like, well, now you're feeling what it's like to have to live in the closet because your ideas or who you are is unpopular.
Yeah, no, I get that.
That's a very human reaction.
All right, let me ask you about the specific comment that you made that seems like it has initiated the entire labyrinth of investigations and denunciations and condemnations that finally drove you out of Colombia.
I empathize a little bit because it was on Democracy Now!, a show I appeared on many times.
I used to always joke there's no easier way to get in trouble than going on Democracy Now!
because Amy Goodman has a way of asking questions that elicit things that you don't actually want to say.
I remember once Ta-Nehisi Coates was desperate to avoid endorsing Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, and he went on Democracy Now!, and she just asked him repeatedly.
Which candidate do you prefer?
And he finally said Bernie, and there were major headlines.
Ta-Nehisi Coates versus Bernie.
Exactly what he wanted to avoid.
Somehow it only happens in the democracy now, but here's the exchange that created this impetus to start targeting you.
This is from January 2024. It's about 50 seconds.
I realize there may be a broader context, so feel free to say so if you think so, but we tried to pick a pretty fair excerpt of what caused all the problems.
Here it is.
Let's go to some of that interview with Professor Franke.
Columbia has a program with a graduate relationship with older students from other countries, including Israel.
And it's something that many of us were concerned about because so many of those Israeli students who then come to the Columbia campus are coming right out of their military service.
And they've been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus.
And it's something the university has not taken seriously in the past.
But we've never seen anything like this.
And the students were able to identify three of these exchange students, basically, from Israel, who had just come out of military service, who were spraying the pro-Palestinian students with this skunk water.
And they were disguised in keffiyeh so that they could mix in with the students who were demanding that the university divest.
So, and again, if you feel like there's more context needed to clarify that, feel free to add it.
But the reaction of your critics there was that you had singled out a specific group.
of people with a very particular national origin, namely Israelis and Israeli soldiers.
You didn't make the claim about people from militaries of other countries who come to study at Columbia.
You specifically said there seems to be a kind of unique acute danger of IDF students in particular coming to Colombia and bringing with them a propensity to violence that people said evinced a sort of discrimination against Israelis and therefore more broadly Jews that made it impossible for you to be a professor, to treat students like that fairly and to give them a welcoming environment.
What is your response to that critique?
Well, I think it's an unfair summary of what I said.
And what I was doing was essentially serving as a whistleblower.
Over 10 to 15 years, I had had a series of students, groups of students and individuals, come into my office and say, We have students in our classes.
We have students we're encountering in the dorms.
We have students that we have to sit near or around in the dining halls who are part of this joint program we have with Tel Aviv University and who have just come out of their military service, which is not surprising because for many people in Israel, military service is mandatory.
And they've come to the Columbia campus and they have harassed physically and verbally.
Palestinian students and their allies.
And there were many complaints like this that students brought to me.
And I had seen a pattern, which I had spoken to the university about.
The students had registered complaints and concerns with public safety and with the discrimination office at Columbia, and nothing had happened.
And then last January, a year ago January, Palestinians and students and their allies were protesting on our campus.
Making a demand for a ceasefire and for divestment.
And they were sprayed with this very noxious chemical that put some of them in the hospital.
So when I went on Amy's show, I was merely stating facts known to me.
That there had been this history.
Of this problem on our campus, and I saw this spraying that happened in January of 2024 as part of a pattern on our campus that meant to me that our university was not taking the safety of all of our students seriously enough.
I did not say that all Israelis are dangerous or should be banned.
What I was worried about is that the state of mind one has is a soldier, where you're taught to kill or to defend.
Your people against an enemy is not the state of mind you should bring onto a university campus where you may be sitting right next to those people who you've just been trained to are an enemy.
And that there needs to be some transition for some people coming out of military service, particularly in a context where we have pro-Palestinian protests happening on our campus, and you've just been fighting against Palestinians at home.
For you to integrate into our academic context.
That's what I was talking about.
That's what I talked to the president of our university about, both Lee Bollinger before and Manu Shafiq after.
And that's a concern that I have seen certainly in an acute way on our campus.
So I wasn't expressing a view, stereotypic or otherwise, about all Israelis.
What I was doing was acting as a whistleblower.
I totally get that.
And I'm only playing devil's advocate here.
I'm a staunch defender of your right to say everything you said without question.
But wouldn't that same critique apply to students with any recent military service, including, for example, people who came out of the U.S. military who have seen conflict?
In all kinds of places abroad, that they too might have this sort of quasi-violent posture with which they've been indoctrinated against other types of students on campus?
Absolutely.
And if we had Russian students coming on our campus and they were sitting next to students from Ukraine or the other way around, I would expect the same kind of problem.
And it's for that very reason that I had been involved, probably 10 years ago now, in a working group on our campus that was critical of the idea of expanding the ROTC,
the Reserve Officer Training Corps, at Columbia's campus to bring more and more people with military training, in the case of ROTC, active military training, onto our campus because I was afraid of this exact dynamic.
So I've not expressed a problem only with Israelis or IDF soldiers.
It's something I've talked about for years, and it's not just me, it's a number of people at the university, about the militarization of universities, whatever military you may serve in.
Whether it's even the U.S. military, and having somebody who's a U.S. citizen who served in the military come to Columbia's campus, I have a very similar concern.
And for that reason, I was urging the university to take this integration process more seriously in order to protect the academic mission of the university, but also all of our students and faculty.
I just have a couple more questions left out of respect for your time, because I find this a fascinating case in so many ways, an important one.
But I noticed that in the course of having defended you, not just leading up to this show, but previously as well, and just the broader context of sponsorship of Israel critics and campuses and elsewhere, a lot of conservatives do resort to the standard that if you say something that makes a group of students feel like they're not welcome on campus, That's the kind of thing that disqualifies a professor.
And, of course, it's so ironic since that's been so much of the rationale as to why people on the left who believe that the reverse kind of reduction of permissible speech is warranted, that faculty members with anti-trans views make trans students feel uncomfortable, etc., etc., are the other examples we gave.
But right now there's a very controversial case where most conservatives and the American right Have completely sided with the professor, who's Professor Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania.
Don't know how familiar you are with her, but she's been on my show.
Things she says, particularly to black people, black students, but pretty much everybody, is about as offensive under our prevailing mores as it gets.
I mean, she is pretty much...
Willing explicitly to say that, not necessarily her professional view, but she really questions whether the reasons why, in her view, black people and Latinos have so many greater social pathologies of violence and crime and unemployment, etc., is because of their genetic inferiority in those areas.
I mean, that says, if you can think of a professor saying something that might alienate the ability of students to feel like they're being treated fairly in the classroom...
That's her.
That's in a completely different universe, even if you wanted to give your statement the most ungenerous reading possible.
Do you feel like that the forces in college campuses in general and at Columbia University in particular who are vehemently pro-Israel and want there to be a restriction on the ability to criticize Israel have far more power than most other similar advocacy groups?
No, what I think we're seeing is what we call the Palestine exception to the First Amendment and academic freedom.
The rules that apply to everyone else don't seem to apply when you're talking about Palestine, whether it's in any context, really.
And the kind of speech that we see that you described to Professor Wax, who's well-known and whose comments, which are...
Been criticized quite broadly, take place in the classroom.
And we'll note that my comments, whatever you might think of them, were on a television program that were not in the classroom, where they're not directed at individual students.
Hers have been.
Yet the First Amendment comes to rescue for her in a way that it never does in the Palestinian context.
So, I think what we're seeing here is a kind of double standard, to be sure, but not just any double standard, one that illuminates what I think is a really cross-contextual form of a Palestinian exception to the First Amendment.
Yeah, and long before October 7th, there were great reports.
One from the Center for Constitutional Rights labeled the Palestine exception to the First Amendment.
There are all kinds of professors previously.
Who were denied tenure or who got fired for criticism of Israel.
There's a long list of them.
It's long been one of the most frequent forms of censorship.
All right, just to conclude, let me ask you, once these comments on Democracy Now!
became publicized, you became the target of formal investigation from your colleagues and a whole bunch of other proliferations of investigations.
Your university professor explicitly denounced you, even implied strongly, if not said, that At least those comments were anti-Semitic when pressed on that by, I believe, Elise Stefanik during that inquisition into colleges.
You ended up not getting fired, but feeling like you had to leave Colombia.
It was no longer tenable for you to remain there, given all the various attacks and pressures you were feeling.
What were those that finally caused you, which I'm sure wasn't easy to leave after so much time, to make the decision that it was in your best interest to do so?
Well, let me just correct you, Glenn.
It was the president of the university, not a university professor.
I meant to say university president.
I'm sorry, who testified.
President Shafiq was testifying before Congress and was questioned by Elise Stefanik, our new ambassador to the UN. Representative Stefanik completely mischaracterized what I had said.
You showed the clip.
And she said something quite different.
And President Shafiq knew what I had said on that show.
I had told her.
And I said, there are some mischaracterizations circulating out there.
I just want you to know what I said and why I said it.
And rather than correcting her, she said, no, I agree.
That's discriminatory.
And basically, she'll be dealt with.
And what that did is put a target on my back.
I got death threats at home.
I had colleagues stand in front of the law school on 116th Street yelling horrible things to me about being a Hamas supporter and that I applauded what happened on October 7th, which of course I did not.
It was horrible.
I had other law school colleagues who followed me, stalked me across the campus.
Saying horrible things to me, follow me in the building, get in the elevator with me to go up to my office, accusing me of horrible things when there are students in the elevator who were then themselves feeling like, my gosh, I guess if I say anything and I'm in this professor's class, what's he going to do to me if he can do that to Professor Franke in front of all of us?
And then, I mean, one of the just...
Most things that rattled me the most is this person who posed as a student came to my office hours several times in tears, saying he was so upset about the way in which the university was abusing the protesters, the pro-Palestinian protesters, and asked my advice.
And I said, well, you should make an appointment with the president of the university and let her know how you feel about it.
Be very personal about it.
Turns out he wasn't a student at all, and he was videotaping me without my permission and then cutting it in certain ways that were not at all what I said and putting it onto social media.
I came to the point where I didn't trust my students.
I certainly felt fearful of my colleagues.
I was worried about going into the classroom.
And I approached the university and I said, how are we going to deal with this?
And they offered nothing.
My dean offered nothing.
The university offered nothing other than to prosecute me further.
And I thought, this is not an institution that will protect me from the students, from my colleagues, from people who want to harm me.
I don't see how I can start teaching again this spring.
And they said, well, we'll let you retire.
We'll let you step back as long as you surrender pretty much all of the rights you get as a retired employee.
I felt like I had no choice, based on my own safety, to agree to a deal that I still don't consider to be a retirement, but it was a deal that I was not going to have to teach this spring with the university.
You know, they may say that was a voluntary agreement, but it certainly wasn't from my perspective.
It was such a hostile environment that I was being asked to go in and work in that I felt like I had no choice but to walk away.
Yeah, and as I don't need to tell you, in the law, there's a very well-established doctrine of constructive discharge where they make it so impossible for you to work that even though they don't technically fire you and you quit, it's because they force you to do certain amounts of determination, which is clearly what happened in your case.
Just a quick last question.
Have you decided what's next for you?
What are you planning on doing with your now ample free time?
Or at least greater free time?
I have a lot of good trouble I'm going to make.
You know, Columbia picked a fight with me.
It was not a fight I ever wanted to be in.
But we, as you know better than anybody, Glenn, we are in a very rough period in the United States and globally.
And I will turn my attention to fighting those fights where I think I can make a difference.
And Columbia was not a worthy opponent.
This was not a worthy fight.
And I'm happy to turn at this point, actually, to other fights where I can join with people who share my values to try to make a more just and fair world.
Well, I'm sorry you had to go through what you went through.
I'm sure it wasn't easy, but at the same time, I'm glad you stood up for yourself, have used your platform to denounce it, and are now even more liberated to do so.
A lot of times when people try and silence someone, it ends up having the opposite effect.
They become more empowered, more emboldened, more vocal, more effective, and I have a feeling that will happen in your case, and I really appreciate your taking the time to come on and talk to us tonight.
Thanks so much, Glenn.
It's great to talk with you.
Have a nice evening.
Thank you.
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