Columbia Bestows ‘Highest Academic Distinction’ Upon BDS-Supporting Professor

Columbia University has appointed Farah Jasmine Griffin, a longtime supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, to the position of “University Professor,” the Ivy League school’s “highest academic distinction” reserved for “exceptional scholars.”

Columbia president Claire Shipman announced the move in a Monday statement, lauding Griffin as “a scholar of rare breadth and clarity” known for “the depth of her contributions to Columbia’s intellectual life.” Griffin joined Columbia in 2000 and served as the inaugural chair of the school’s American and African Diaspora Studies Department. She has been an outspoken proponent of the BDS movement during her time at Columbia.

As early as 2002, Griffin signed a divestment petition targeting Israel, prompting criticism from Columbia’s then-president, Lee Bollinger. More recently, in 2016, Griffin signed a faculty petition that accused Israel of “inhumane segregation and systemic forms of discrimination” and called on Columbia to “take a moral stance against Israel’s violence in all its forms” by divesting “from corporations that supply, perpetuate, and profit from a system that has subjugated the Palestinian people for over 68 years.”