No, Columbia Did Not Fire Katherine Franke

Following up on Tuesday’s post, New York Times: Tenured Columbia Law Professor Says She Was Pushed To Retire Because Of Her Pro-Palestine Activism: Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed: No, Katherine Franke Was Not Fired, by Steven Lubet (Northwestern):

Franke 3 Katherine Franke announced earlier this month that she had been forced out of her tenured position at Columbia University’s law school because of her pro-Palestine activism. The Center for Constitutional Rights, where Franke once served as board chair, called it an “egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian-rights advocacy.” The president of the American Association of University Professors said Columbia’s actions were “truly shameful,” declaring that the organization “stands with “Professor Franke and against this repression of pro-Palestinian speech.”

These and other expressions of solidarity, however, all appear to have been based solely on Franke’s side of the story, which she posted in a two-page statement on January 10. Franke detailed what she called her “termination,” following an “unjustified finding” that her “public comments condemning attacks against student protesters violated university nondiscrimination policy.”

Franke’s statement is, at best, misleading. It contains substantial omissions. She was not terminated by Columbia, although she was found responsible for harassing Israeli students on the basis of national origin. …

Here is the actual quotation that formed the basis for the finding against her: “So many of those Israeli students who come to the Columbia campus are coming right out of their military service and have been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus.”

Following at least a dozen complaints to Columbia’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, outside investigators from the Sher Tremonte law firm — who had been retained by the university, as Franke had requested — found that this comment lacked a factual basis and constituted a negative, unfounded stereotype about Israeli students, who comprise a protected class under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and Columbia’s policies. Based on multiple interviews, the investigators also found that Franke’s comment had an adverse impact on Israeli students, causing them to experience isolation and distress and contributing to a hostile learning environment. …

The investigators found that Franke’s claims about harassment by Israelis at Columbia were not substantiated. They asked her to provide them with names or details of such instances, but she failed to do so. I posed the same question to her, through her attorney, but received no reply. …

In reality, as Franke herself ultimately puts it, her decision to depart Columbia was because the “administration has created such a toxic and hostile environment for legitimate debate around the war in Israel and Palestine that I can no longer teach or conduct research.” That is an odd claim to make about a university with the first Center for Palestine Studies in the country, and which is the home of such noted Israel critics as Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, and Nadia Abu El-Haj. …

The entire process has obviously been a taxing ordeal for Franke, who took the steps she believed necessary under the circumstances. As I have taught my advocacy students, however, there is always another side to the story, which I have attempted to explore here. Nonetheless, I wish her well. The concluding line in Franke’s statement read, “I will always be a teacher, and am always learning.” I trust that is so.

Brian Leiter (Chicago), More on the Franke Case:

Professor Lubet … [argues] that there were good grounds for finding that Professor Franke violated the anti-discrimination policy.

[T]his incident calls to mind Amy Wax’s disparagement of the competence of African-American students at Penn, for which the sanction was removal from a required 1L course she taught. Here we have disparagement not of the competence of Israeli students who had served in the military, but of whether it is safe to have them on campus. It’s hard to say which is worse, but both are comments a faculty member should not make about a segment of their student populations.

Even if one finds that persuasive, it still does not settle the issue how this investigation and its finding led to a “constructive” termination (as Professor Franke claims) or, in any case, her retirement without full emerita status. … There is, in short, still need for a University Senate investigation, since we do not know whether she was constructively terminated, threatened with further investigations or sanctions, or driven out by faculty and student harassment. The whole affair will remain a serious stain on Columbia’s reputation until more information comes to light.

Update on the Situation at Columbia University from Professor Katherine Franke (Jan. 18, 2024):