More than 400 Columbia university faculty and community members are calling on the school’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, to lift the suspension of an Israel-American professor, Shai Davidai, who was recently banned from campus for allegedly having “harassed and intimidated” fellow faculty members. 

The co-authors of the letter are expressing their concern over the school’s “reputation and future” and cite the suspension of Mr. Davidai as yet another example of the school’s “double standard” which “serves to protect other minority groups at Columbia while penalizing its Jewish students and faculty, particularly Israelis.” 

Mr. Davidai, an assistant professor at the business school, had his campus access temporarily revoked last month after he allegedly “harassed and intimidated” faculty members while objecting to a walkout staged by an anti-Israel student group on the one year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack. 

In several videos that Mr. Davidai posted on his social media accounts, he can be heard confronting Columbia’s chief operating officer, Cas Holloway, and the assistant director of public safety, Bobby Lau, during the protest. 

In one clip, he says to Mr. Holloway: “You are indifferent and you know what? Hatred happens when people like you are indifferent. You are the chief operating officer of Columbia. Do you realize that?” Another video shows Mr. Davidai calling Mr. Lau “such a useless administrator” and telling him that “there were so many useless administrators in Nazi Germany” who claimed after the war that “they did everything they could.”

Mr. Davidai, who has been outspoken in criticizing Columbia’s response to pervasive campus antisemitism, maintains that he was suspended “because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob and because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f****** Cas Holloway,” he said in a later video announcing his suspension. 

The authors of the letter decry Mr. Davidai’s suspension as “an egregious act of retaliation and an attempt to silence Professor Davidai” who, they write, “has been calling out the University’s complacency and bystander role in allowing faculty to endorse terrorism and threats against Jews and the United States within the curriculum and on campus.” 

“Professor Davidai neither condones genocide nor violence and harassment” they note, drawing a comparison to a Columbia Middle East Department professor, Joseph Massad, who publicly described the October 7 attacks as “astonishing,” “astounding,” and “awesome” and participated in a pro-October 7 conference in Turkey on the massaccare’s one year anniversary. 

A student-led petition calling for Mr. Massad’s immediate removal has garnered nearly 80,000 signatures since it was launched last year. It has recently surfaced, however, that Mr. Massad is set to teach a course next semester on the history of Zionism. 

The authors further cite Mr. Davidai’s punishment as evidence of the administration’s “selective enforcement of policies” given that they failed to discipline the anti-Israel student agitators who violently took over Hamilton Hall and temporarily held several Columbia facilities managers hostage. 

“Instead of sanctioning Professor Davidai’s response to the University’s inaction in enforcing its own rules to protect the Jewish community, it should sanction those who are breaking the rules,” the authors charge. “Unfortunately, the University continues to be complacent with attacks on Western civilization in general, and on Jews in particular, mounted by some of its own administrators and professors within the very same campus that Professor Davidai has been barred from for objecting to said attacks.” 

The authors of the letter include current professors of Columbia university as well as several board members of Columbia’s Jewish alumni association. 

Columbia made headlines last week after the House Committee on Education and the Workforce described the Ivy League school as “the site of some of the most disturbing and extreme antisemitic conduct violations in the country.” Their report follows a year-long investigation into several elite universities including Columbia, Yale, and Harvard, and offers a harrowing account of administrative neglect in the face of rising harassment, intimidation, and assault over the past year. 

The 325-page report also charges the university with offering “greater concessions to encampment organizers than they publicly acknowledged” and failing to expel any of the 22 students who were arrested for occupying Hamilton Hall, in spite of their explicit commitment to doing so. 

Columbia responded to the report by claiming that it “did not consent” to the release of dozens of the confidential documents that were publicized by the Committee. “When the Committee provided one day’s notice of the report, we again raised with the Committee our repeated requests that they protect students’ privacy, and we are deeply disappointed that the Committee did not do so,” a university spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, told the Columbia Spectator.