Pro-Palestinian protesters near Columbia University in Manhattan, February 2, 2024. (Luke Tress)
(New York Jewish Week) — Columbia University paid a Jewish student nearly $400,000 in a settlement after suspending them for spraying a novelty “fart spray” at an anti-Israel protest last year.
The settlement was revealed in a sprawling report on campus antisemitism released on Thursday by the House’s Committee on Education and the Workforce. The report runs more than 300 pages and is based on correspondence and other documents from several schools, many of them elite universities like Columbia. It depicts administrations struggling to respond to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack and the large pro-Palestinian demonstrations and allegations of antisemitism that followed.
In one instance at Columbia, anti-Israel activists had claimed that Israeli students carried out a “chemical attack” against an unauthorized protest on Jan. 19 with “skunk spray,” a chemical used by the Israeli Border Police to disperse protests. The protesters claimed the alleged attackers were IDF veterans. The school said the NYPD was investigating.
The incident, and students’ claims that they had suffered adverse health effects from the spray, also garnered media attention, with Al Jazeera releasing a 15-minute video investigation of the affair.
But the House report said Columbia administrators failed to publicly correct the false claim of a chemical attack in a timely manner. The report said the school handed the offending students suspensions for a year and a half, even after learning in a disciplinary hearing that the incident involved a non-toxic gag “fart spray” and seeing receipts for the spray’s purchase from Amazon.
“While this conduct was inappropriate and a violation of University rules meriting discipline, it was also clearly a far less serious incident than characterized by anti-Israel activists or to the public,” the report said.
The incident is one of many detailed in the report in which university administrations debated how to respond to the Oct. 7 attack and the campus turmoil it sparked. At Harvard University, according to correspondence cited in the report, the dean of the medical school successfully lobbied to have the word “violent” taken out of the university’s statement on the Oct. 7 attack in order to avoid “assigning blame.” That Harvard statement also did not address an earlier declaration by student groups that blamed the Hamas attack entirely on Israel.
And at Columbia, the report revealed, administrators offered to consider divesting from companies “complicit in violating international law or international treaties recognized by the US government,” or ones that “manufacture certain categories of weapons.” The offer was made as part of negotiations over dismantling the pro-Palestinian student encampment at the school, which sparked a nationwide encampment movement that some Jewish students and organizations said created a hostile and antisemitic environment. The Columbia encampment leaders rejected the proposal, and police ended up clearing out the encampment and arresting dozens of people after protesters forcibly occupied a campus building.
In another instance, the report found that then-Columbia president Minouche Shafik said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Jewish majority leader and pro-Israel stalwart, advised her that “universities political problems are really only among Republicans.”
Shafik is one of several university presidents — along with Harvard’s Claudine Gay, the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and others — to step down in the wake of controversy over protests surrounding the Israel-Hamas war.
According to the report, there was a gap between Columbia’s public and private communications regarding the January spraying incident. In a public message, Columbia had suggested the incident involved “serious crimes, possibly hate crimes.” But according to the report, at least four senior Columbia administrators were at the scene of the protest and said in private correspondence days earlier that they did not observe any sign of the alleged attack. In addition, shortly after the incident and before that public message, the report said Columbia sent an account to the FBI that cast doubt on the pro-Palestinian protesters’ claims.
“I was in the thick of the rally with my personnel and to my knowledge this is untrue,” one of the administrators, Vice President of Public Safety Gerald Lewis, wrote in the correspondence to other Columbia leaders. “We also have not had any reports of such actions from our personnel.”
Based on the public discourse and communications surrounding the spray, anti-Israel Columbia activists seized on the incident, chanting days later, “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no IOF here,” a pejorative acronym for the Israel Defense Forces that replaces “Defense” with “Occupation.” A flier was posted around campus depicting a skunk with the Star of David on its side. “Beware! Skunk on campus,” it said.
A Columbia Jewish student leader and the director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel pressured the university to set the record straight, according to the report, but the university did not publicly detail the actual nature of the event for months. When asked about the incident in a congressional hearing, Shafik said only that “an odorous substance” had been sprayed on demonstrators and that the perpetrators had been suspended.
Columbia clarified what had happened only on Aug. 30, after reaching a $395,000 settlement with one of the students suspended for the incident. The student sued Columbia in April claiming they were, in the words of the report, “excessively and disproportionately disciplined.”
The settlement required Columbia to put out a statement saying that the substance was a “a non-toxic, legal, novelty item that can be purchased online and in stores,” and not a “biochemical weapon” or “illicit substance,” the report said. Columbia released the statement on the Friday evening before Labor Day weekend.
The student’s suspension was also downgraded to disciplinary probation. The report did not say what happened to the second student.
Asked about the reported details of the incident on Thursday, a Columbia spokesperson listed actions the school has taken in pursuit of campus safety, including clarifying policies, creating a single address for discrimination and harassment claims, and appointing a new rules administrator.
“Columbia strongly condemns antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we are resolute that calls for violence or harm have no place at our University,” the statement said. “We are committed to applying the rules fairly, consistently, and efficiently.”
