Campus leaders must show courage and stop radical profs from poisoning young minds

When I enrolled in Columbia, it was on a full academic scholarship.It helped make me who I am today — it allowed me to grow, learn and be successful as I set out into the world.

Without the opportunity I was given, I would not have been able to attend college and learn from professors that encouraged students to cultivate independent thought and the ability to engage critically with diverse viewpoints.Today, the attention and visuals surrounding the hateful protests taking place on Columbia’s campus have been focused on the students, but the students have been taught and empowered by faculty more focused on politics than they are on education.

These are not the professors I had who exemplified the fundamental principles underpinning the mission of higher education in the United States.Those principles were what set our academic institutions apart from the rest of the world and gave America a distinct competitive advantage. This is no longer the case. I do not recognize my alma mater.

Signs at Columbia University read “Go Back to Poland,” calling for the Jewish community to return to the horrific death camps of the Holocaust.They chant “Kill all the Jews” and “October 7th 10,000 more times.” This hateful rhetoric calling for the death and destruction of an entire population has no place at Columbia and no place anywhere.

Period.Students now celebrate and promulgate hatred and divisiveness against a whole people.

And worse, their professors are not only encouraging them, but joining them and partaking in the actions. The Columbia I loved is no longer a place I know.Those defining principles, once so revered, have been sacrificed by professors keen to use the classroom and the campus as a bully pulpit to promote their personal political viewpoints as opposed to fostering critical thinking — they preach eliminationist rhetoric championed by unchecked and dangerous activist groups. Jewish students have had to endure a level of fear and intimid...