The Decline and Fall of Katherine Franke
Anti-Zionist falsehoods, malicious absurdities, and self-serving martyrdom at Columbia.
On 10 January 2025, Katherine Franke announced her departure from the Columbia University Law School. After she issued a public statement, she had it republished on the Academe blog of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Law School dean Daniel Abebe claimed that Franke was merely bringing her planned retirement forward. Not true, Franke objected: “While the university may call this change in my status ‘retirement,’ it should be more accurately understood as a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.”
Guest Blogger
Two of Franke’s law-school colleagues had filed a complaint after Franke gave an interview to Democracy Now on 25 January 2024, in which she claimed that IDF veterans enrolled at Columbia had a history of harassing other students but that the university was not taking this harassment seriously. The complaint stated that Franke had “harassed members of the Columbia community based on their national origin.” An independent law-firm investigation found that she had violated university anti-discrimination policy.
Franke’s January 2024 remarks were occasioned by exaggerated accusations from anti-Zionist students following an unauthorised anti-Israel rally held on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library on 19 January. The students accused two IDF veterans of attacking them with a chemical weapon and falsely claimed that at least ten students required hospitalisation as a result. The student protestors said the chemical agent was “skunk spray” or “skunk water,” a non-lethal organic compound that Israel developed for crowd control. It leaves an odour like an open sewer that can cling to clothes for days and can cause headaches or vomiting in some people.
A short introduction accompanying the interview on the Democracy Now! website states: “Organizers allege the attack was carried out by two students who are former members of the Israeli military, using a chemical weapon known as ‘skunk’ that the Israeli military and security forces regularly deploy against Palestinians.” This feverish account makes it sound as though Columbia demonstrators are on the front lines of combat on the West Bank.
Curiously, not one of the four—at least—senior Columbia administrators on site during the protest experienced any of this. That is unsurprising, given that what was sprayed was not skunk spray but a commercial product marketed under a variety of prosaic names: Fart Spray, Wet Farts, Super Stink, etc.—a sometime favourite of high-school pranksters. The manufacturers recommend that it be used in closed spaces like a small room if it is to have any effect. It is not designed for open spaces like the steps at Low Library, where it will simply dissipate. When the perpetrators were brought up under charges, they produced their sales receipt from Amazon.
As a Congressional report would later observe, “the administrators’ observations from the scene of the incident served as early evidence that the incident was considerably less serious than anti-Israel activists alleged.” The report devotes five pages to the incident and opens with its key finding:
The administration at Columbia University allowed a false narrative used to vilify Jewish students to persist for months despite knowing it was not true. They also imposed severe discipline on the Jewish students while issuing lighter punishments for significantly more serious conduct offenses targeting Jews and Israelis in what appears to be a clear example of disparate treatment.
In what has become a national pattern of anti-Zionist exaggeration and falsehood, the students claimed that several of them were hospitalised, which would mean that they were admitted for treatment. One or more students showed up for treatment, but there was no need for hospitalisation. A doctor who lists chemical exposure as a possible cause is responding to student accounts of symptoms, whether or not those accounts are accurate. The Congressional report is worth quoting in full on that point:
While the anti-Israel activists claimed multiple students required medical attention after the incident, a medical inquiry conducted by Columbia Public Safety found that no students had sought medical care at Mt. Sinai Hospital with corresponding symptoms, that no complaints were made to Columbia University EMS, and that no reports were made to NYPD of students claiming to have been sprayed at the protest.
Columbia Public Safety noted that one student complainant reported the incident and originally claimed to have been sprayed directly by the perpetrators when she reported the incident but changed her account to state that the spray had been in the air around her. An examination by the NYPD of the complainant’s coat calls her report into question because it “did not reveal any odors which would be indicative of a ‘skunk spray.’”
Columbia sent this information to the FBI on 21 January, just two days after the incident at the library. By that time, it was already clear that the protestors’ claims should be treated with scepticism. Nonetheless, Columbia’s Interim Provost Dennis Mitchell issued a statement claiming the New York police were treating the incidents as “serious crimes, possibly hate crimes.”
By late February, Columbia had the Amazon receipts and had established that the substance used was fart spray, not a weapons-grade chemical. Nonetheless, in what looked a lot like a university effort to appease its anti-Zionist constituency, Columbia suspended the two Jewish students for eighteen months. As the report notes, that was “substantially longer than any suspension for antisemitic conduct violations.” It established a pattern of unequal punishment that would continue to plague Columbia’s reputation through the Spring 2024 encampment to come.
By that time, Franke had already intervened with her public comments on the case. The tendentious headline above her January interview read, “Professors Slam Columbia’s Response to Chemical Skunk Attack on Students at Pro-Palestine Protest.” The interview itself opened with a statement from Columbia graduate student Layla Saliba, who would later feature prominently in an Al Jazeera propaganda film about the rally released on 12 April 2024. There, she is more expansive about the effects of the spray: “I felt so sick. I kept on throwing up. I had a headache that would not go away. My eyes were burning.”
There are several possible reasons why reports of medical suffering and hospitalisation were overstated. Students may have been led to embellish their accounts by their own anti-Zionist fervour. Or they may have panicked, sincerely believing that they had been attacked with a more powerful agent. Or they may have deliberately exaggerated their accounts to inflict maximum damage on their antagonists.
The relevant portion of Franke’s remarks has been the subject of so much heated debate that it merits quotation in full:
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. But we’ve never seen anything like this. And the students were able to identify three of these exchange students, basically, from Israel, who had just come out of military service, who were spraying the pro-Palestinian students with this skunk water. And they were disguised in keffiyehs so that they could mix in with the students who were demanding that the university divest from companies that are supporting the occupation and the war, and were protesting and demanding a ceasefire. So we know who they were.
Franke went well beyond expressing over-hasty support for the skunk-spray version of the story. She defamed IDF veterans by suggesting that they are fifth columnists who represent a public danger to Western communities. Since most young Israelis do a stint in the military, this amounted to a slander based on their national origin. In our considerable experience, these students are smart, charming, irreverent, and more sophisticated than many of their US counterparts, since they are two or three years older and thus more experienced. The claim that they represent a special danger is a malicious absurdity. Both of us know more IDF veterans than we can count. One of us wore the uniform.
Franke singles out Israeli reservists as a campus danger due to their prior military service. But military service does not render anyone an unfit student. There are hundreds of thousands of active and reserve US military service people on US campuses, not to mention on Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs. Not one of them is deemed a danger to other students on campus.
Paul Berman
Franke’s comprehensive indictment of Israeli students was a remarkably ill-considered move for a law professor, and it raised legitimate doubts about her professional judgment. That concern was further elevated when Columbia’s then-president, Minouche Shafik, was questioned at a Congressional hearing on 17 April. Representative Elise Stefanik put this question to her: “Let me ask about Professor [Katherine Franke] from the Columbia Law School, who said that all Israelis students who have served in the IDF are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus. What disciplinary action has been taken against that professor?”
Stefanik has been criticised for misquoting Franke, but she was actually offering a fair characterisation of what Franke had said. Shafik sidestepped the question about discipline, but she categorically condemned what Franke said in the interview: “I agree with you that those comments are completely unacceptable, and discriminatory.” Stefanik then pressed her about whether or not Franke had apologised. Shafik’s answer would hang in the air for the next nine months: “I think she will be finding a way to clarify her position.”
That clarification finally arrived in Franke’s departure statement, but she offered defiance not contrition or regret:
In those statements [in the Democracy Now! interview] I noted that the parties that sprayed our students with a chemical were Israeli students who were currently enrolled in Columbia’s joint degree program with Tel Aviv University, and who had recently performed military service in Israel. These facts were confirmed both by Columbia University and the Israeli students themselves. I also noted that there had been a history of attacks against Palestinian students and their allies on our campus by Israeli students who had recently completed military service, and that Columbia University was not taking this pattern of harassment seriously enough. I have long had a concern that the transition from the mindset required of a soldier to that of a student could be a difficult one for some people, and that the university needed to do more to protect the safety of all members of our community.
All of this is just bigoted hallucination. And Franke’s additional call for the university “to do more” implies a demand for the allegedly dangerous elements she identifies to be excluded from campus. This is equivalent to a faculty member appearing on national media to wonder whether Palestinian students should be admitted to Columbia since Palestinian students have an alleged propensity for terrorism. The prejudiced nature of such a claim would certainly call into question a faculty member’s readiness to treat all students fairly, irrespective of national origin. A university administration has a clear interest in addressing manifest faculty antagonism towards either Palestinian or Israeli students. Educational equality requires nothing less.
While Franke evidently believes Israeli students are intrinsically hostile to her university’s educational mission, she paints herself as a true defender of academic freedom. Her job, she says, is to “defend the role of a university in a democracy, in fostering critical debate, research, and learning around matters of vital public concern, and in educating the next generation with the tools to become engaged citizens.” Fine, but how are these laudable goals advanced by repeating discredited lies and spreading antisemitic prejudice?
Franke concludes her retirement statement with the ludicrous claim that Columbia University—the only university in the United States to sponsor a Center for Palestine Studies and the academic home of the late Palestinian professor Edward Said—constitutes a hostile work environment for pro-Palestinian advocacy. But in Franke’s mind, Columbia is the scene of a new McCarthyism resulting from failed university leadership capitulating to “outside entities” bent on destroying higher education and promoting the interests of right-wing Zionism. The institution has been so corrupted that it is best to walk away and fight battles elsewhere. And so, in this academic morality tale, we find the self-description of a martyr to the cause of a true university.
Unsurprisingly, Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, rode to Franke’s defence on X:
Unwavering solidarity to @ProfKFranke. Yet another victim of the pro-Israelism that is turning universities, and other spaces of public life, into places of obscurantism, discrimination and oppression. What a loss for @ColumbiaUniver. https://t.co/v6FtBxIN8l
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) January 11, 2025
A more accurate summation is that Franke’s statement is the fabulation of a false martyr who claims to have experienced a symbolic academic beheading. Turning to Catholic tradition for the definition of martyrdom, a true martyr inflicts no harm, endures suffering, and bears witness to truth. Franke meets none of these tests in any secular sense.
Franke’s martyrdom fantasy was avoidable, particularly because events had provided her with an off-ramp. The day before Shafik testified before Congress, one of the suspended Jewish students filed suit against Columbia. “To date, there has been no medical or physical evidence to support the assertions of any of the students that claimed they were harmed and/or impacted by the spray,” the lawsuit stated. “Indeed, the spray is harmless, non-toxic, and can be purchased by anyone on Amazon.” Evidence of personal harm to the plaintiff, on the other hand, was significant:
[F]rom inception, Columbia’s investigation and adjudication process was flawed, biased, and deficient. Throughout the university misconduct process, Plaintiff was subject to unfair and discriminatory treatment. Plaintiff was presumed guilty from the start, due to his affiliation with Israel, while the other non-Israeli students who attended the protest were not disciplined in any manner.
As a result of Columbia’s flawed and biased investigation and adjudication process, Plaintiff was found responsible for disruptive behavior, harassment, and endangerment, and sanctioned to suspension from the University, forever marring his educational file with an improper finding of responsibility.
The complaint added:
Students have doxed Plaintiff on social media and also created fake FBI “wanted” posters with Plaintiff’s face stating Plaintiff is “armed and dangerous,” creating a hostile environment for Plaintiff and creating a grave safety risk if Plaintiff were to return to campus.
The lawsuit pointedly argued that Interim Provost Mitchell’s 22 January public statement to the Columbia community was offered “to paint Plaintiff as dangerous.” The lawsuit was reported in the press by a number of outlets between 16 and 18 April.
In a Confidential Settlement Agreement dated 29 August 2024, only four months after the suit was filed, Columbia agreed to pay the student US$395,000. The Congressional committee obtained a copy of the agreement and revealed the terms of the settlement in its November report. But Columbia fulfilled a key requirement the day after the settlement agreement was signed. On 30 August, the university issued the following statement:
We are writing to provide an update regarding a January 19, 2024, incident on campus. The “foul-smelling substance” sprayed during a demonstration was not any bio-chemical weapon, illicit substance or personal protective spray. Rather, the substance sprayed was a non-toxic, legal, novelty item that can be purchased online and in stores throughout the country.
Katherine Franke was unconvinced. Nor did the Congressional report move her. Perhaps she was afraid that admitting she had been wrong would increase her professional liability. Yet a detailed and convincing apology stating she was misled by press reports and student claims might have had the opposite effect.
When Columbia issued its correction, Franke had a clear professional responsibility as a faculty member to withdraw her claim about Israeli students. Instead, she ignored an ethical imperative to withdraw a false accusation that placed Israeli students under a cloud of suspicion and possibly endangered their physical safety. It is no accident that Franke decided to post her statement on the AAUP’s Academe blog, which has long been a committed vehicle for pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel opinion.
Threats to academic freedom in the United States arise largely from structural causes. These include the casualisation of academic labour, deterioration of faculty governance provisions, corporatisation of research enterprise, dismissal of humanities and arts studies, and so on. That is not the picture one gets from the Academe blog, where the primary obsession has been campus reaction to the Gaza war.
Readers of the blog in 2024 will have learned that a Holocaust-themed campus opera production embodies Zionist silencing over a “genocide” in Gaza, that there is no difference between free speech and campus building take-overs and obstruction, and that a university’s study of and proposed action against antisemitism not only suppresses political speech but undermines “the legitimacy and autonomy of democratic institutions, including universities, public K-12 schools, and unions.”
In short, browsers of the official AAUP blog will discover that Jewish forces manipulate campus life and pose the most pressing threat to US academic freedom. It is an old conspiracy in new clothes. The Academe blog has published dozens of articles that constitute a false martyrology of campus free speech over Gaza. The uncritical republication of Katherine Franke’s statement alleging her forced retirement is simply the latest example of this dispiriting trend—a consequence of lax editorial scrutiny and insufficient critical thought.
The question then turns to why an organ of the American Association of University Professors would publish a falsification of such an easily discernible record. That editorial credulity speaks to an a priori willingness to believe some preferred voices rather than ask searching questions. This same credulity led Franke to both endorse and intensify anti-Zionist myths that have proliferated on campuses since 7 October 2023. The editorial credulity represents a collective delusion; Franke’s represents a more personal one.
Franke first attracted international attention in 2018 when she was denied entry to Israel on the basis of its law allowing the government to bar entry to BDS leaders. Israel later reversed its ruling and no other faculty members were affected. But in the way that all anti-Israel news acquires an infinite lifetime, her initial denial stands as permanent evidence of her alleged martyrdom. It was evidently time to breathe new life into this self-serving legend.
