As Columbia University continues to grapple with the fallout from months of campus protests, a longtime faculty member is accusing school leadership of fostering fear rather than healing.
According to Fox News, Mahmood Mamdani, a prominent scholar and the father of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, said student activists opposed to Israel are increasingly alarmed by how the university is handling allegations of antisemitism.
Mamdani made the remarks during a conversation published Friday on journalist Peter Beinart’s Substack.
Mamdani, who served as Columbia’s Herbert Lehman Professor of Government before taking leave in September, said the administration’s approach has created an atmosphere of intimidation on campus.
“Well, students are terrified,” Mamdani said. “They are terrorized. In the smallest move they make, they are targeted. They are expelled. They are suspended. They are warned. Which means we have less and less of an idea of what they think and how they might respond to their situation. The administration is in a vindictive mood.”
He argued that the university’s focus on antisemitism has gone beyond addressing discrimination and instead has become a mechanism to suppress dissent.
Mamdani took particular issue with Columbia’s decision to establish a task force dedicated to antisemitism without forming similar groups for other forms of bias.
“As you know, they created a task force on antisemitism,” he said. “And then they followed suggestions that… why don’t we have a task force on Islamophobia? Why don’t we have a task force on XYZ? Student experiences cover lots of, you know, grievances.”
Mamdani said he intended to address Columbia leadership at a university senate meeting later that day, urging administrators to pursue reconciliation rather than discipline.
“Can’t you resist turning anti-discrimination into a device to set up one group of students against another group of students, like a divide-and-rule policy under British colonialism that I grew up under?” he asked.
His comments came shortly after Columbia’s antisemitism task force released its final report, detailing incidents involving Jewish and Israeli students.
The report documented cases in which Israeli students were singled out during class discussions, including one student who was allegedly told she should be considered “one of the murderers” because of her prior service in the Israel Defense Forces.
The task force also cited an incident in which a faculty member accused Jewish donors of attempting to “launder blood money” and referred to Israel as “so-called Israel.”
