Sen. Rick Scott: Stop Funding Columbia

Not only should donors stop funding Columbia University amid the antisemitic protests, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., says, but the board members should start resigning.

"If you're a donor to Columbia University, stop," Scott told "The Cats Roundtable" with hosts John Catsimatidis and Rita Cosby, The Hill reported. "If you're a board member, if you're not going to hold your administration accountable, you should resign."

Showing the protests are far more hate speech than free speech, anti-Zionist Columbia tent encampment leader Khymani James declared in a January social media video: "Zionists don't deserve to live."

President Nemat Minouche Shafik has faced an outcry from many students, faculty, and outside observers for summoning New York police to dismantle James' tent encampment to protest the Jewish state of Israel.

After a two-hour meeting Friday, the Columbia University senate approved a resolution that Shafik's administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members by calling in the police and shutting down the protest.

"The decision... has raised serious concerns about the administration's respect for shared governance and transparency in the university decision-making process," it said.

The senate, composed mostly of faculty members and other staff plus a few students, did not name Shafik in its resolution and avoided the harsher language of a censure.

The resolution established a task force it said would monitor the "corrective actions" the senate asked the administration to take on dealing with protests.

There was no immediate response to the resolution from Shafik, who is a member of the senate but did not attend Friday's meeting. Columbia spokesperson Ben Chang said the administration shared the same goal as the senate – to restore calm to the campus – and was committed to "an ongoing dialog."

Police arrested more than 100 people on Columbia's campus last week and removed the tents from the main lawn of the school's Manhattan campus, but the protesters quickly returned and set up tents again, narrowing Columbia's options on dismantling the encampment.

Since then, hundreds of protesters have been arrested at schools from California to Boston as students set up camps similar to the one at Columbia, demanding that their schools divest from companies involved with Israel's military.

Some Republicans in Congress have accused Shafik and other university administrators of being too soft on protesters and allowing Jewish students to be harassed on their campuses.

Information from Reuters was used in this report.

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