Is Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke’s statement last year on Democracy Now! expressing concern about Israeli students — “So many of those Israeli students who come to the Columbia campus are coming right out of their military service and have been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus” — protected by academic freedom? At the time I argued that it was not, although, as I noted the following week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression disagreed with me. Wherever one comes down on this specific utterance, though, almost everyone committed to academic freedom would probably agree that, on its own, it should not justify termination.
But, more or less, that’s what Franke says happened. As she writes in a statement published January 10, “While the university may call this change in my status ‘retirement,’ it should be more accurately understood as a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.” Others also have their suspicions. A large group of Columbia Law School faculty has issued a letter explaining that “the reported allegations against Franke do not meet the University’s high bar for termination of tenure or the function equivalent"; they accordingly urge Columbia to launch an “inquiry” into the process that resulted in Franke’s early retirement.
In our pages, Steven Lubet agrees that termination “would indeed be an extraordinarily severe penalty for a single sentence in an interview.” But he is skeptical of Franke’s claim that she was effectively terminated. Among other things, he observes that the official determination letter finding Franke had violated university policy “did not recommend a sanction, much less termination, saying only that the matter would be referred to ‘respondent’s supervisor for follow-up as deemed appropriate.’” Moreover, before anyone could actually fire her, “she would be entitled to an entirely new proceeding before the university’s Faculty Affairs, Academic Freedom, and Tenure Committee, which consists of 17 faculty members and no administrators. Given the support she has mustered from numerous colleagues, it seems vanishingly unlikely that she would have lost her job.”
Brian Leiter is not convinced. Although he considers it “arguable” that Franke had violated antidiscrimination policy, he thinks there’s too much we don’t know to conclude that Franke is misrepresenting the situation. “There were obviously conversations going on between Columbia and Professor Franke’s legal counsel we know nothing about. It hardly strains credulity to imagine that there was animus towards Professor Franke given her outspokenness on Israel/Palestine, and that this played a role in the administration’s approach to her case.” For those reasons, Leiter says, a University Senate investigation remains necessary.
One curious feature of the whole case observed in passing by Lubet: Franke had appealed the decision, but announced her retirement while the appeal was still pending, thereby withdrawing it. The 40-page dossier of documents in support of the appeal makes for fascinating reading, not because it helps clear up the ambiguity around Franke’s departure, but because it offers a unique window into the political culture of universities today.
The first part of the dossier consists of letters of support from other Columbia academics. Every letter — there are six of them — grounds its bid for authority in the identity of its author. Marianne Hirsch, an English professor, writes “as a Jewish member of Columbia’s faculty with an expertise in the study of memory and trauma, including the Holocaust.” Alisa Solomon, a member of the school of journalism, writes “as a Jewish professor ... with personal ties in Israel.” And so on. Sarah Haley, a professor of gender studies, not only foregrounds her own ethnic and religious identities (“As a Black and Jewish faculty member, who descends from relatives who were part of a well-established American progressive Jewish political tradition, relatives who faced allegations of disloyalty for political views and who were harmed by discrimination on the basis of a purported association between Jewishness and political infidelity”), she also invokes Franke’s: “Let us remember that Professor Franke is a member of categories protected by Title IX and Title VI. It would benefit the entire Columbia community if the antidiscrimination apparatus was staffed by administrators who can assess cases before them through an intersectional legal lens.”
The second part of the dossier consists of testimony from Columbia and Barnard students attempting to substantiate Franke’s claim that former Israel Defense Forces soldiers have perpetrated harassment. As far as I can tell, the bulk of the complaints describe acrimonious verbal exchanges between pro- and anti-Israeli protesters, but not culpable harassment in the sense Franke described on Democracy Now! One account describes a fraught classroom encounter:
I did a presentation on why women in the military was an anti-feminist position, not a form of feminist leadership, using the Israeli military as a case study. In my class, one of my classmates had served in the Israeli military in a combat unit. The former soldier went to the professor, stating I had made her feel “unsafe” in the classroom as a result of my presentation. Instead of encouraging the student to confront her discomfort in the classroom and engage with the substance of the class — what constitutes feminist leadership — the professor held me after class to tell me that I had made the former solider unsafe. I felt I was being reprimanded by my professor for my position in the classroom. I was unaware of what I could do to redress the matter. At the time, I thought if my professor had sided against me, why would the University position be any different? Later, months after this took place, we consulted Professor Franke about this instance, who advised us I should have reported it.
If the situation unfolded as here described, the fault lies with the professor, who should have told the former soldier that her feeling unsafe was unwarranted. But whatever really happened, the testimony surely captures much of the tenor of campus life today: All parties are suspicious, insecure, perpetually threatened, and in search of redress from the authorities.