‘Best Strategy Is To Keep Heads Down’: Schumer Advised Columbia’s Leaders To Ignore Anti-Semitism Backlash, Saying Their ‘Problems Are Really Only Among Republicans’

The committee’s 300-page report stems from more than a year of interviews and over 400,000 pages of internal documents produced by elite schools like Columbia, Harvard University, Yale University, Northwestern University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. It demonstrates, by producing the private emails and text messages of university leaders, how they failed to protect Jewish students as anti-Semitic mobs seized their campuses in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree.

It also reveals that Schumer advised Shafik to tune out the criticism she was receiving from House Republicans.

Shafik, who resigned from her post in August amid a series of anti-Semitism scandals that roiled the school, texted board of trustees co-chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman in January to inform them that she had met with Schumer. The top Senate Democrat, according to text messages obtained by the committee, “advised Shafik that ‘universities political problems are really only among Republicans'” and “recommended the ‘best strategy is to keep heads down.'”