June 23, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Three Columbia College administrators placed on leave amid investigation into leaked texts sent during panel on Jewish life.

Three Columbia administrators have been placed on leave pending an investigation into text messages they sent in late May during an alumni weekend panel about Jewish life on campus, Columbia College Dean Josef Sorett told staff on Thursday.

As the panel’s four speakers discussed antisemitism at Columbia for nearly two hours, one attendee captured photos of Vice Dean and Chief Administrative Officer Susan Chang-Kim’s exchanges with Sorett, Dean of Undergraduate Student Life Cristen Kromm, and Associate Dean for Student and Family Support Matthew Patashnick.

One of the texts included vomit emojis while referring to an October op-ed penned by the campus rabbi, and another described the panel as “difficult to listen to.” The messages have drawn criticism from Columbia affiliates and congressional leaders alike for being “disparaging” and in “poor faith.”

[The Columbia Spectator] obtained photos of the messages, which were first leaked to the Washington Free Beacon and published on June 12. The attendee, a Columbia alum who graduated decades ago, spoke to Spectator on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns for safety.

It gets better: Sorett calls the cops.

Since then, the Free Beacon’s coverage of the administrators’ text messages during the panel on the ordeal of Jews at Columbia this past spring has been impacting…, as Drudge used to put it. On June 20 Eliana Johnson (my daughter) reported that Sorett placed his three texting colleagues on leave pending an investigation. Eliana drily noted the anomalies:

A Columbia spokesman said the school had no comment regarding why Sorett, who took part in the text exchanges, was not placed on leave or on the propriety of Sorett making the announcement that his colleagues are under investigation. Likewise, the spokesman declined to say who would conduct the investigation, to whom the results would be reported, and whether the results would be made public.

Can you imagine how Sorett’s conversation with his colleagues went down? It must have been like something out of Blazing Saddles: “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!”

Yesterday Eliana and Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium turned up the heat on Sorett. With a little help from their source, they extracted one of Sorett’s previously unreported text messages during the panel discussion: “‘LMAO’: Dean of Columbia College Mocked Hillel Head in Newly Obtained Text Exchange.” Subhead: “Josef Sorett has sought to distance himself from leaked messages that are now the subject of a university investigation. The latest text message shows his participation in the affair.”

What you mean “LMAO,” Kemo Sabe?

Seeking a comment from Sorett, the Free Beacon then sent reporter Jessica Costescu to Sorett’s Morningside Heights apartment. What happened next? Sorett called the cops (both Columbia’s and the NYPD). Costescu observes yet another anomaly: “Sorett’s willingness to call the police to protect him from a reporter comes four years after he signed a 2020 faculty letter calling to ‘defund the NYPD by $1 billion.’”

As I wrote at the beginning of the month, linking to a piece by Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner: Old and Busted: Defund the Police. The New Hotness? Lock ’em up libs run the Democratic Party.

UPDATE: Speaking of wanting to protect his phony-baloney job:

This seems like the admission of a man not up to that job. Given that Sorett writes on his homepage that “the study of religion” is one of his focuses, isn’t combating anti-Semitism something he should have spent some time “learning” a bit about before becoming the Dean of Columbia?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll