Columbia “doubling down” on a Hamas-supporting professor shows its leadership do not want to stop “radicalizing kids,” according to one professor who quit in disgust.
Columbia Business School’s Avi Friedman resigned after the school announced Professor Joseph Massad will teach a course on Zionism, called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” this spring.
Massad previously called Hamas Oct. 7th terror attack on Israel “astounding” and “awesome,” leading to accusations of him condoning and supporting terrorism — but the university has stood by him since.
Massad has been a tenured professor at Columbia since 1999, but his latest appointment confirms moves the university’s efforts to combat antisemitism were merely performative in Friedman’s eyes.
“They appointed this committee on anti-Semitism, and I don’t know what they came up with.” Friedman told The Post in his first interview since leaving.
“I don’t think the change is coming from inside. The inside is completely hollowed out, and it’s full of people that do not want to change.”
“When they gave Massad the class to teach on Zionism… that was deliberate… There are smart people sitting in a room and saying actually this is fine.”
Friedman, an award winning professor, cites mismanagement of the pro-Palestine encampment in the quad and a general lack of civil dialogue as contributing factors to his departure from the Ivy League school.
But the new class for Massad, whose title is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, was a step too far.
Friedman said it “represents a deliberate choice which aligns with the university’s ideology,” and “represents a complete abandonment of academic integrity and unbiased scholarship,” in his scathing open letter to interim university president Katrina Armstrong announcing his departure from the school.
“You have these university professors that are radicalizing kids,” Friedman added to The Post. “Tenured professors have this particular, usually very progressive worldview… [and] they have been teaching this oppressor-versus-oppressed mindset for years.
“I was disappointed when the university just kept making bad reactive choices,” Friedman said. “They reacted poorly and slowly to everything that was coming at them…. They seem to be paralyzed.”
Columbia responded to outrage over Massad with a statement pointing out his class is limited to 60 students and is not a required course.
They also claimed “[Columbia has] taken decisive actions to address issues of antisemitism, including by strengthening and clarifying our disciplinary processes.”
However, the statement was the final straw for Friedman.
“When they were challenged on it, and they said… it’s not a required course, blah blah blah — the decision was bad, and then doubling down on it just made it worse,” Friedman said. “That was when they lost me.”
Friedman wrote in his letter to Armstrong that this move proved “Columbia’s values are fundamentally incompatible with my own.”
“We have established a centralized Office of Institutional Equity to address all reports of discrimination and harassment, appointed a new Rules Administrator, and strengthened the capabilities of our Public Safety Office.
“We will continue and build on this essential work to combat antisemitism and ensure the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff,” a spokesperson for the university said.
Freidman left Columbia after four years as an adjunct professor. He had taught second-year MBA students a course called The Credit Superhighway. Previously he was senior advisor at Davidson Kempner Capital Management, where he oversaw $37 billion in assets.
“I was having a great time [teaching at Columbia],” he said. “Walking away from something that you love doing is really hard.”
Friedman isn’t ruling academia out entirely, saying he “could definitely go back to teaching.” Other universities have already reached out expressing interest in hiring him.
He says he was able to hold out amidst the chaos at Columbia so long because the business school, which has a separate campus on 130th Street, was free of protests while the main campus devolved into madness last spring with an encampment and the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
He did visit the encampment, where he found students to be more confused than anything and feeding off an “echo chamber”.
“If you looked at the signs around in the encampment, there were more things there that were anti-America, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, the West is bad, everybody’s racist, than there were about Israel and Gaza,” he recalled.
When he approached a student in the encampment and asked her why she was participating, she told him, “We’re holding space for Gaza.”
“I don’t understand what that means. I don’t think she understands what that means,” he said.
Friedman also said he thinks Columbia’s $14.8 billion endowment should no longer be tax exempt unless it changes its message.
“If you’re going to teach your students to hate America… why should the country that you’re actually hating on and having curriculum to say how it’s the most evil, terrible thing in the world, give you a tax break?”
