The Trump Administration has announced that it's suspending $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University in response to Columbia's failure to protect Jewish students from harassment and discrimination as required by federal law. I think Columbia richly deserves this, but I don't know whether this is lawful, or whether federal law requires hoops to be jumped through before such sanctions can be levied.
In this post, though, I want to respond to some of the left who have seen denying that Columbia has an antisemitism problem to begin with, despite my pointing to a report from the antisemitism task force at Columbia which, after it authors interviewed hundreds of Jewish Columbia students, found that antisemitism was "severe and pervasive."
It's remarkable the extent to which people on the left will wax eloquent about the lived experiences of this or that group, and how we should never question their interpretation of such experiences, but somehow when hundreds of Jewish students at Columbia report experiencing an intensely hostile environment, so much so that some left the dorms to live at home, some transferred, etc., suddenly the same folks will be not just skeptical, but entirely dismissive.
