Columbia University placed three administrators on leave this week, a university spokesman said on Saturday. The moves comes a little more than a week after images emerged showing the school officials sharing disparaging text messages during a panel discussion about antisemitism on campus.
The panel, which focused on Jewish life on campus amid tensions over Israel’s war in Gaza, occurred during a Columbia College reunion on May 31.
The spokesman did not identify which officials were placed on leave, but The Washington Free Beacon, the website that first published the images, reported that they were Susan Chang-Kim, the vice dean and chief administrative officer; Cristen Kromm, the dean of undergraduate student life; and Matthew Patashnick, the associate dean for student and family support.
Ms. Chang-Kim also exchanged texts during the event with Josef Sorett, the dean of Columbia College, according to The Free Beacon. In one exchange, Mr. Sorett texted “LMAO,” for “laughing my ass off,” in response to a sarcastic message Ms. Chang-Kim had written about Brian Cohen, the executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, according to The Free Beacon.
Mr. Sorett is cooperating with the investigation of the text exchanges, according to a university official. He will be recused from matters relating to the investigation while continuing to serve as dean.
Mr. Sorett oversees Columbia College’s curriculum and his central role is “to ensure that students have the best possible experience inside and outside the classroom,” according to the university’s website.
In a statement sent to the Columbia College Board of Visitors on Friday afternoon, Mr. Sorett told the advisory board that he deeply regretted his role in the text exchanges and their effect on the community.
“I am committed to learning from this situation and to the work of confronting antisemitism, discrimination and hate at Columbia,” he said.
Attempts to reach the other administrators were unsuccessful.
Because the investigation is pending, the Columbia spokesman said the university would not address specifics about it or the initial episode.
The Free Beacon, a conservative news site, said it had obtained the images from a person who sat behind Ms. Chang-Kim at the event and took photos of her phone screen as she texted with the other administrators.
As the panelists spoke, the deans exchanged messages, the pictures show. “Difficult to listen to but I’m trying to keep an open mind to learn about this point of view,” Ms. Chang-Kim texted to Mr. Sorett at one point. He responded “yup.”
In another exchange, Ms. Kromm texted her colleagues a message that referred to an October 2023 opinion essay by Yonah Hain, Columbia’s campus rabbi, called “Sounding the Alarm,” and followed up with two different vomit emojis, the images show.
Mr. Patashnick accused one of the panelists of “taking full advantage of this moment,” according to the images. “Huge fundraising potential,” he wrote.
The event was advertised as including a discussion of the climate at Columbia since Hamas’s attack against Israel on Oct. 7, the responsibility of universities to ensure the safety of “not only Jewish students on campus but also of all students” and how Columbia can move forward.
Speakers at the panel included David Schizer, dean emeritus of the Columbia Law School and a co-leader of the university’s task force on antisemitism.
The controversy is only the most recent one to affect the elite university since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last fall and Columbia’s emergence as a center of a campus protest movement that has swept the country.
In April, after weeks of students demonstrations, during which protesters asked university leaders to divest from Israel, among other demands, a group of protesters occupied Hamilton Hall. Within days, Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, asked the Police Department to enter the university’s Upper Manhattan campus to clear the building, resulting in dozens of arrests.
This week, the cases of 31 of the 46 people who were arrested and charged in the siege were dismissed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
In May, the university decided to cancel its main commencement ceremony, instead holding smaller ceremonies for each of its 19 colleges. The same month, the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a resolution of no confidence in Ms. Shafik’s leadership following the student arrests, creating further tension on the campus.
Earlier this month, the website of The Columbia Law Review, one of the country’s most prestigious student-edited law journals, was taken offline by its board of directors after its editors published an article arguing that Palestinians were living under a “brutally sophisticated structure of oppression” that amounted to a crime against humanity.
As the protests at Columbia intensified during the spring, some Jewish students were targeted with antisemitic vitriol inside and outside of campus. In early March, nine Jewish college students — including one from Columbia — testified before members of Congress about feeling unsafe on their campuses and facing antisemitism.
Pro-Palestinian student protesters on Columbia have expressed concerns about being doxxed by pro-Israel groups who have accused them of antisemitism. Such protesters at Columbia and other campuses have faced online harassment, rescinded job offers and death threats. As a result, some have chosen not to share their full names publicly.
Virginia Foxx, a Republican representative from North Carolina who chairs the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, demanded this week that Columbia share the administrators’ text messages with the committee by June 26.
“I was appalled, but sadly not surprised, to learn Columbia administrators exchanged disparaging text messages during a panel that discussed antisemitism at the university,” Ms. Foxx said. “Dean Josef Sorett’s weak private ‘apology’ to the college’s Board of Visitors shows that the school doesn’t get it. Columbia’s Jewish community deserves better than this.”
