Prof. Katherine Franke, a legal scholar specializing in gender and sexuality law, and the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, on January 25 the left-leaning radio and television newscast “Democracy Now!” host Amy Goodman on air that Columbia’s program forging a “relationship with older students from other countries, including Israel,” is “something that many of us were concerned about, because so many of those Israeli students, who then come to the Columbia campus, are coming right out of their military service. And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus. And it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past.”
— Katherine Franke (@ProfKFranke) May 28, 2024
Over the years, Franke, who is Jewish, has made six trips to Israel. Her academic responsibilities included overseeing graduate student dissertations in the country. During her visits, she typically arranges meetings with civil rights activists. While Franke serves on the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and generally backs its objectives, she does not hold a leadership position within the organization. As someone who has criticized Israel’s human rights practices, she has chosen to avoid conferences funded by the Israeli government. However, she has taken part in other scholarly gatherings held in Israel.
Franke said Columbia was using an attack “from those who support the Israeli government and the violence that’s being meted out towards Gazans as a kind of pretext to clamp down even further on peaceful protest by our other students.”
Franke, a tenured professor, told Inside Higher Education that she’d heard that a report on her investigation is imminent, and she expects it to result in her sacking after 22 years of teaching at Columbia.
Columbia University recently fired law professor Katherine Franke as part of an investigation linked to an interview she gave to “Democracy Now!” in January. pic.twitter.com/qIzGtvogft
— Kuffiya (@Kuffiyateam) July 13, 2024
In May 2018, Prof. Franke was detained for 14 hours at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv and then deported. She told the NY Times: “They were not interested in why I was there. They already had a story. I was a leader of Jewish Voice for Peace. I was there to promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — all this untrue. It quickly ramped up to where the guy was yelling at me for lying. He Googled my name and came up with right-wing trolling sites like Canary Mission or AMCHA that push out ugly stuff about faculty held to be enemies of Israel.”
The Democracy Now interview’s impact extended far beyond its initial airing. According to Franke, it sparked a university investigation that gained widespread attention when Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, disclosed it during her Congressional testimony in April.
This hearing followed a high-profile December session where House Republicans questioned the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT about antisemitism on their campuses. That televised event may have played a role in the subsequent resignations of two of those presidents. Building on this, the House Education and Workforce Committee summoned Shafik to address similar concerns at Columbia.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (D-NY) asked Shafik, “Let me ask about Professor Katherine Franke from the Columbia Law School who said that all Israeli students who have served in the IDF are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus. What disciplinary action has been taken against that professor?”
Shafik answered: “I agree with you that those comments are completely unacceptable and discriminatory,” adding that Franke “has been spoken to by a very senior person in the administration, and she has said that that was not what she intended to say.”
Later in the hearing, Shafik said Franke was under investigation, alongside several faculty members, at least one of whom “will never teach at Columbia again.”
