A quick update on what has been going on here at Columbia in recent months:
- The campus has been rather quiet this semester, about to get much more so as the semester ends and we go into winter break. The only sizable demonstrations on campus this fall were ones on Oct. 6 and 7 in support of Israel and Israeli hostages, as well as to commemorate Israeli victims of the October 7 massacre. The Columbia Spectator has had a team of student journalists look into why there have been no anti-Israel protests on campus, see Amid a crackdown on protests, students began organizing Palestinian cultural events. The University keeps canceling them.
- Security remains tight, with IDs carefully checked by multiple guards at each of a few gates to the central campus (“Checkpoint Charlie” is the one at Broadway and 116th). While a second level of ID checking at entrances to each academic building has very recently been discontinued, there’s no indication of a plan any time soon to open the gates.
- We get lots of stirring communications from the administration about their devotion to freedom of expression. Also, we get announcements of new policies that, for instance, seem to indicate we’re no longer allowed to post unapproved things on our office doors (to be fair, no one knows whether this is actually going to be enforced, we’re getting conflicting information).
- The Task Force on Antisemitism issued its fourth report, which is about classroom and teaching issues. It starts with a vigorous endorsement of academic freedom, and makes clear that what’s at issue is not so much antisemitism as excessively anti-Israel or “anti-Zionist” behavior by the faculty. The Specter has detailed coverage here.
One problem I’ve always had with arguments about “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism” has been that it’s unclear to me exactly what “Zionism” means. I always thought I was a “Zionist” (since I support Israel’s right to exist, in particular as a state providing protection to the Jewish people). But Scott Aaronson explained here that to him it means being willing to kill Palestinian children on a large scale (and giving the finger to the rest of the world when doing so) in order to eliminate any possible threat from the Palestinian people. This seems to also be the point of view of a sizable part of the Israeli government. By his definition, I’m (very strongly) opposed to “Zionism”. The task force report doesn’t engage with the issue of what limits it’s appropriate to put on faculty and student expression of their opposition to murdering children.
- We recently received notification from the university that we can submit claim forms asking for part of the \$20 million Columbia is paying out to Jewish or Israeli members of the community who have been victims of antisemitism. Quite a few of my Jewish colleagues are trying to figure out if they qualify because of what happened to them when they expressed opposition to the genocide in Gaza.
- The search for a new president of Columbia was supposed to be done by now, with a candidate chosen and in place Jan. 1. Instead we have an announcement that the trustees need to
extend this process beyond the start of the new year to take the time to fully understand each candidate’s strengths and potential fit.
According to Bloomberg, a major reason they haven’t managed to hire anyone is that leading candidates have opted out, specifically the chancellor of Vanderbilt and the provost at Harvard.
For a good explanation of the illegal Trump campaign to shakedown universities (and of the role of the Columbia trustees in going along with this), see this article in the Chronicle. There’s an explanation here of how this affects anyone thinking of taking the Columbia job. Would you take the job if it was offered to you by people now famous the world over as the most willing to go along with illegal demands from the Trump fascist would-be dictatorship? A high priority of the trustees appears to be making sure that nothing happens here that will upset Stephen Miller. Would you take a job that came with marching orders “Don’t do anything to upset Stephen Miller, or we’ll fire you as fast as we fired Katrina Armstrong”?
Stephen Miller not Steven
Bob,
Thanks, fixed. I often get this wrong, since my brother Steve is a Steven not a Stephen.
I also have a brother named Steven! But more importantly, I worked with a Steven Miller many years ago.
Minor correction about the Bloomberg reference. Vanderbilt does not have a president as its highest academic officer. That position is called Chancellor.
Charles,
Thanks! Fixed.
Your insinuation that Zionism rationalizes killing children to protect the state of Israel is a classic example of Fascism as perpetrated in 1930’s Germany as a way to foment hatred of Jews.
It would be interesting to hear what the Jewish teachers were subjected to for which they would be remunerated, something missing from your pro-Palestinian diatribes to date.
I was going to let this post pass without comment, just one more of Peter’s slanders against me. But then I woke up to the news of the shooting in Sydney. If it isn’t obvious, Jews everywhere on earth are under attack, as they were 80 years ago. The intifada was successfully globalized. And as at German universities in the 30s, but this time everywhere, huge numbers of students and professors have enthusiastically thrown themselves into the struggle for a Judenrein planet. I’m through pretending that this is about anything other than that. The people who believe Israel is guilty of “genocide,” in >98% of cases, do not have some alternative proposal on offer for how Israel could have defended itself non-genocidally. Their position is instead that Israel is a fake settler colony that never had any right to defend itself because it never had any right to exist at all. (As far as I can see, that’s the only possible reason to describe as “genocide” what was called “self-defensive war” when, for example, the Americans and British did it in WWII.) But again, the new assault on Israel’s continued existence is happening at the same time as Jewish existence outside Israel becomes more and more precarious. If Jews can’t exist safely outside Israel, and they can’t flee to Israel either, then we know how the story ends, in bullets and gas chambers, because for the vast majority of our families, that’s exactly how it did end. Israel’s self-defense, the sacrifice of its soldiers, is the main reason to hope that the story might have a different ending this time around. So go ahead: denounce me, call me mentally ill. The Jewish students reading this blog will send me private messages of thanks, and that’s the part I care about.
Charles Weis,
The argument that “Zionism” is about justifying the murder of innocent children is Scott Aaronson’s. It’s not my definition of Zionism, which I gave above. I agree that such a definition is appalling, but you should take this up with Scott, who in his comment here doesn’t deny that is his position, but explains somewhat why he holds it.
All,
I suppose if Scott wants to further comment to clarify his views, that’s fine. But the rest of you who are itching to jump in to debate whether “huge numbers of students and professors have enthusiastically thrown themselves into the struggle for a Judenrein planet” or whether Zionism justifies killing Palestinians and their children will have to do so elsewhere.
If it’s not specifically a well-informed comment about what is happening at Columbia, take it somewhere else.
1) About the situation in Columbia:
In June I commented over here that it seems indisputable that there were some antisemitic expressions in the protests in Columbia and among the leaders of the protests. For example, one of the leaders asserted that “all Zionists deserve to die” (and then retracted, and later retracted the retraction).
Peter wrote in response “About ‘antisemitism’ at Columbia. I will not get involved in arguing over the details of what happened here in late 2023-early 2024. It’s a complicated story. I will state that there are a huge number of lies being told about what happened then. ” And then Peter went on to explain in detail three reasons for why he cannot get into this discussion.
This is fine, but the details of what happened in Columbia in late 2023-early 2024 are the crux of the matter, and I don’t see how one can have 35 posts about the “situation in Columbia” and avoid referring in detail to the (complicated) situation in Columbia at this period. What I care about even more than the ideological views of the anti-Israel camp, is to what extent Jews and Israelis on campus were under pressure and under risk.
2) About Peter Woit’s definition of Zionism:
Peter’s definition of Zionism is fine from my perspective. Supporting Israel’s right to exist is sincerely appreciated and the question is if the opposite stance, namely, opposing Israel’s right to exist should be regarded as antisemitic. I think that opposing Israel’s right to exist and calling for the violent destruction of the state of Israel are, in fact, antisemitic stances.
I also agree with Peter in viewing Israel as a state providing protection to the Jewish people (and appreciate this view). The question to what extent Jews in Israel (and earlier in mandatory Palestine) should rely on military force to ensure the existence of the Jewish community (and later on the Jewish state) and how to apply their military force (and how to reach peace), was always a matter of debate within the Zionist movement and Israeli society. It is, however, fair to say that the concerns regarding real dangers to the existence of Israel have been part of our lives since my childhood (and since my parents’ childhood). It is not a myth or paranoia that, unfortunately, there are formidable forces that are actively against the existence of Israel.
The (terrible) anomaly that enemies of Israel call for Israel’s destruction (along with other forms of antisemitism), is part of our lives since the birth of the State of Israel. However, for the past decades Israel has had peace agreements with some important Arab states, tremendous economic success which improved our standing and chances, and good quality of living. (Also some good mathematics.) Israel’s right for self-defence is widely (while not universally) recognized. Israel does have friends and allies that assist her but also at times strongly disagree with various specific actions. (One of Israel’s keys for success and even survival is the ability to co-exist and even cooperate in an ad hoc manner with various hostile, and at times antisemitic, entities.)
Of course, October 7 was a terrible setback, and it revealed greater dangers than those we anticipated on October 6. The bloodshed and suffering in this war were unprecedented and heartbreaking, and the recent cease-fire in Gaza has brought some relief and hope that many of us feel.
Gil Kalai,
I’m glad to see that we don’t really disagree much about Zionism and Israel, but don’t want to encourage debate on these topics here.
About what happened at Columbia during the period around 2 years ago, including why I don’t want to discuss this with anyone unless they were here and are scrupulous about what’s true and what’s not. A lot of people at the time felt it extremely morally urgent to fight for their side of the Gaza conflict, and the field of battle was propaganda about the evil deeds of the other side. The pro-Israel side conclusively won this battle, ultimately achieving the victory they wanted: essentially complete suppression of any pro-Palestinian demonstration on the Columbia campus, and discrediting of the pro-Palestinian side as “antisemitic”.
In retrospect, here’s my own personal take on living through that period. Israel had to respond somehow to the Oct. 7 massacre, and I was not very sympathetic to groups that immediately after Oct. 7 2023 wanted to demonstrate against Israel. My main general feeling was annoyance that both sides wanted to bring the extremely ugly Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Columbia campus and fight about it here, especially through propaganda and lies. As months went on, I became intensely aware that what I was reading in news sources was very different than what I was seeing first hand.
I was generally sympathetic to the student encampments, as a very non-violent form of protest activity. If you’re going to fight for your side by occupying part of a campus, choosing to occupy a rarely used lawn seemed to me the best possible choice. I had just left the country on a trip when some students chose to change tactics and occupy Hamilton Hall, violently breaking windows in the process. I thought this was a horribly bad idea, both on general principles and tactically given the circumstances. Instead of confronting the administration with a difficult choice about how to handle protest, it gave them no viable choice except to bring in the police, shut down the protests and close the campus. The students who did this completely blew up and ended what had been an increasingly successful protest movement.
I only started paying very close attention to what what was going on and writing about it many months later, when the university came under illegal attack by the new would-be dictatorship. At the same time I started paying more attention to what was going on in Gaza, and realized that “genocide” was not over-the-top sloganeering, but a defensible characterization of what the Israeli army was doing and what one faction of the Israeli government wanted to achieve. The student protesters I hadn’t been paying much attention to in the spring of 2024 had been understanding the nature of the Gaza conflict better than I had.
In the end I think the fact of the matter is that the student protesters were basically right. If they and not their opponents had been successful in the battle for US public opinion, perhaps there would have been a much earlier end to the slaughter.
While I wanted to make the above clear, I also don’t have the time/energy/interest to debate this recent history with anyone. Someday historians may get to work on the huge project of sorting through the propaganda to provide an accurate account of what really happened. I’m going to stick to trying to do what I’ve been doing since March, describing as accurately as possible what is actually happening here and now.
Two brief clarifications.
I disagree with Peter Woit regarding the protestors in Columbia, I share the view that many of them and many of their leaders expressed antisemitic demands and that the situation placed Jewish and Israeli members of the Columbia community at risk. A few expressions of notable members of Columbia that glorified the protestors and showed no empathy to Israel or Jews also came across to me in a similar troubling light.
Regarding Zionism, in addition to Israel’s obligations of protecting and being a shelter to Jews, Israel is, of course, obligated to protect and equally benefit all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. The declaration of independence of the state of Israel can be seen as a good expression of the vision of Zionism. (And, of course, there are plenty of disagreements.)
Gil Kalai,
I’ll just comment that this is giving me a bit of a deja vu feeling (for those not familiar with “Gina Says”, see https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2137).
You’re confidently making judgments here about something that you don’t have first hand experience of, likely relying on sources that are not very reliable. I’d urge you and anyone who wants to spend their time debating the nature of statements made in the heat of the protests of spring 2024 to keep in mind both the reliability of reports about these statements and the current context of debate about them (mass slaughter of civilians, protesters imprisoned and kicked out of school, this university put under partial control of a Fascist dictatorship and under an intense security regime to stop protests, Scott Aaronson’s paranoid psychosis, etc.). Put differently: don’t you have anything better to do with your time?
Hi Peter, everybody
About my book.
Indeed, Gina Says is a book I wrote in 2009 (published in 2017), whose main protagonists are “Gina” and Peter Woit, along with various other participants in the “blogosphere string wars.” It is a peculiar mix of fiction, popular science, and documentary writing. (Your recent statement, Peter, supporting Israel’s right to exist, certainly makes me feel more comfortable about my only book.) Writing it was an enjoyable way to spend my time, and it touches on many topics that interest me. I am still hoping for a movie 🙂
About high-energy physics and string theory.
a) From time to time I read your posts, Peter, about string theory with my old contrarian attitude. Here is one example. You wrote a post (closed to comments) about a paper by Baumgart, Christeas, Heckman, and Hicks. My view is that this is a good paper, and that the questions it raises—about which irreducible representations are relevant to high-energy physics and string theory, and why—are very interesting. I found your specific technical criticism to be incorrect (it is amply discussed in the paper itself), and describing the work as something that “discredits science and the scientific method” strikes me as completely unreasonable. (In addition, the paper was not hyped.)
b) One possibly related mathematical project that I have promoted since 2006 is the study of noise sensitivity and noise stability (and related Fourier-analytic notions) for Lie groups relevant to high-energy physics. (My earlier work focused on Z/2Z and O(1).) In the past five years there has been substantial progress on general Lie groups, though not specifically tied to the groups and representations that arise in physics.
c) At times I have found your logic, Peter, to run counter to common sense. In your response to my June comment, you wrote:
If the current situation in HEP is typical of academia but different from the pre-1973 era, then the common-sense conclusion is that the pre-1973 period was the exceptional one—a rare, especially fortunate phase in academic science, rather than a standard we can reasonably expect or demand today.
A long-standing comment.
One comment I had twenty years ago, during the string-war era, and still hold today is that I do not think it is appropriate, Peter, to make public comments about the (speculative) mental difficulties of people with whom you disagree. If there is one point on which I would genuinely hope you might reconsider your approach, it is this one.
On Israel and the protests.
As I said, I do not regard concerns about threats to Israel’s existence as paranoia. Regarding the protesters at Columbia and those who glorify them, my judgments are based on the information available to me. My judgements also apply to future situations: I regard voices calling for the destruction of Israel, in protests, in classrooms, in the media or in politics—as antisemitic in nature.
Gil Kalai,
Your comment about the “How to Falsify String Theory at a Collider” paper just makes clear the point I was trying to politely make that you really should avoid going on about things that you don’t have any expertise in or direct knowledge of. The title of that paper is on its face deceptive nonsense.
Hi Peter,
The discussions on your blog about physics and mathematics are related to two questions that interest me, as part of my academic work, for a long time. One question is the value of scientific blogs and other platforms of this kind, and about ways to make them useful for advancing and promoting scientific research. The other question is the value of skepticism in the scientific discourse, and what are the proper methodologies and ethics to conduct research from a skeptical point of view – either regarding a whole theory, a specific direction, or even a single paper. Very shortly, my view is that what matters for both topics is the academic quality. (And, BTW, this criterion also applies to the brave new world of AI applications to mathematics and science.)
Specifically regarding my comments on the paper “How to Falsify String Theory at a Collider,” you wrote: “You really should avoid going on about things that you don’t have any expertise in or direct knowledge of”
This is a fair point, and I am quite hesitant about it myself in other discussions—and also in this one. Sometimes I do avoid going on about things that I don’t have expertise or direct knowledge of, but sometimes I don’t. There is a saying from rabbinic Jewish literature (Pirkei Avot) “A shy person does not learn” (In Hebrew: “לא הביישן למד”). This seems especially relevant to blog discussions.
Specifically, in my layman’s eyes, the suggestion to detect “standing-alone 5-plet” in LHC experiments (or future experiments of higher energy) seemed interesting. After learning more about it from experts in the last couple weeks, I am quite confident that it is a good paper and that your post and strong rhetoric about it represents a sort of “automatic pilot” attitude.
Your criticism, Peter, was: “If the LHC were to find states such as those discussed in this paper, it would take less than 24 hours for there to be several papers on the arXiv giving a ‘string phenomenology’ explanation for them.” This is not really a criticism. Finding such states would be a major discovery on its own. (As any proposal that goes beyond the Standard Model physics, it is a long shot.) The paper mentions motivations from physics that are separate from string theory. Excluding even fragments of string theory would be interesting. And the paper itself addresses in Appendix B the point you have raised, namely, possible explanations for such states within string theory.
Wishes for a happy, peaceful, and fruitful new year, everybody.