Luke Tress, New York Jewish Week via JTA
NEW YORK — Columbia University paid a Jewish student nearly $400,000 in a settlement after wrongly suspending him for spraying a novelty spray against an anti-Israel protest last year — a spray that was wrongly characterized at the time as toxic.
The settlement was revealed in a long report on campus anti-Semitism released on Oct. 31 by the House of Representatives’ 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.
The report depicts administrations struggling to respond with moral clarity to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack and to the large pro-Palestinian demonstrations and allegations of anti-Semitism that followed.
In one instance at Columbia, anti-Israel activists charged 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 incident, and offended students’ claims that they had suffered adverse health effects from the spray, 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 House report said the school wrongly handed the aggressive students suspensions for a year-and-a-half, even after learning in a disciplinary hearing that the incident involved a non-toxic gag 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 House 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.
At Harvard University, according to correspondence cited in the report, the dean of the medical school successfully lobbied to have the word “violent” excised as a description of the Hamas attack from university’s statement on the Oct. 7 attack in order to avoid “assigning blame.”
The current president of Harvard, who was the provost of Harvard at the time — Alan Garber — acceded to the demand to delete the word “violence” from the Harvard report.
The dean of the Harvard law school successfl lobbied to delete all refereces to hostages kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 3 from the university statement.
That Harvard statement also did not address an earlier declaration by student groups that blamed the Hamas attack entirely on Israel.
At Columbia University, 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 anti-Semitic environment for Jews.
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, 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 what was seen as spineless testimony before Congress last Dec. 5 or in light of subsequent ambiguous responses to what a federal judge in California labeled unconstitutional behavior by students on campus.
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 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, 2024, 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.
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 Oct. 31, a Columbia spokesperson said the school has creating a single address for discrimination and harassment claims, and appointed a new rules administrator.
“Columbia strongly condemns anti-Semitism 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.”
