A man wearing an Israeli flag climbs a pole to remove a Palestinian flag from a Columbia University fraternity building on April 26, 2024 in New York City Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Image

By Lauren Markoe April 26, 2024

Columbia University, in turmoil over a pro-Palestinian encampment on its central lawn, will bestow honorary degrees at commencement next month on two people with ties to Israel — an Israeli American computer science professor who once led Tel Aviv University and an entrepreneur whose mother immigrated to the U.S. from Israel.

Zvi Galil, a former head of Columbia’s computer science department, is renowned for creating affordable online degree programs. Robert Reffkin, founder of the real estate company Compass, says he was inspired by his mother, an Israeli immigrant to the U.S.

Speaking from his home in Atlanta, where he teaches at Georgia Tech, Galil kept his comments on the protests short: “I am sad to follow what is happening at Columbia and many other universities. I’m sad and I’m very worried.” Reffkin, who holds a bachelor’s degree and MBA from Columbia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Israel is at the center of protests at Columbia, which this week inspired a wave of demonstrations and encampments at dozens of other universities across the nation. Those protests have led to more than 400 arrests and the cancellation of commencement at the University of Southern California. 

Angry over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, demonstrators want their universities to divest from companies that work with Israel or profit from its war with Hamas. At Columbia, protesters are also demanding the administration sever ties with Tel Aviv University and dismantle the university’s Tel Aviv Global Center, one of 11 Columbia outposts around the world. 

But many Jewish and Israeli students — backed by mainstream American Jewish groups — have accused Columbia and other universities of failing to protect them when protesters cross the line into antisemitism and anti-Zionism. One protester at Columbia this week, for example, shouted for Jews to “go back to Poland.”  

Politicians have weighed in the chaos on campuses. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Columbia protesters “antisemitic mobs. President Joe Biden has condemned antisemitism that has cropped up at protests but also those who dismiss the plight of Palestinians. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who visited Columbia’s New York City campus on Wednesday, earlier that day denounced its president, Nemat Shafik, as “weak,” saying “she cannot even guarantee the safety of Jewish students.”

On Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited Columbia’s encampment to encourage the protesters. 

A lull in the chaos

Columbia remained calm on Friday, despite rumors, denied by the university, that administrators would summon the police to campus as they did last week, when more than 100 students were arrested. Still, some Columbia students worry that their May 15 graduation may be disrupted or canceled.

Shafik, in an email to students earlier this week, said she hopes for an agreement with protesters, but added that if negotiations are not successful, Columbia would consider alternative options for clearing its lawn to allow graduation to proceed, the NY1 news channel reported.

“I am deeply sensitive to the fact that graduating seniors spent their first year attending Columbia remotely. We all very much want these students to celebrate their well-deserved graduation with family and friends,” Shafik wrote.

The university’s 111-member senate — composed of faculty, administrators and students — on Friday was scheduled to consider a motion to censure Shafik for calling city police to campus but senators are also reportedly considering a lighter reprimand. 

Also Friday, Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial and museum, sent a letter to Shafik imploring her to stand against antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

“[W]hen thousands of Columbia faculty, staff and students call for the elimination of the State of Israel and the abolition of Zionism, you must take a stand,” he wrote. “Not a political stand. A moral stand.”

Later in the day, the student-run Columbia Spectator reported that a junior, a member of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest,” apologized on Instagram for saying on Instagram Live in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

“When I recorded it, I had been feeling unusually upset after an online mob targeted me because I am visibly queer and Black,” Khymani James wrote in his Friday post. “Those words do not represent CUAD. They also do not represent me.”

The honorees

Galil, 76, was born in Tel Aviv, attended Tel Aviv University and was its president from 2007 to 2009 when he resigned amid reports of conflict with its board of trustees. He was then hired by Georgia Tech and led its College of Computing from 2010 to 2019.

He is best known as the architect of Georgia Tech’s online master’s in computer science, which Forbes called “the greatest degree program ever” for its curriculum, flexibility and relatively low price — about $10,000. Launched 10 years ago, it has graduated 10,000 students and now enrolls more than 13,000.

The other Jewish recipient of an honorary degree this year, Reffkin, 44, was raised by his Jewish mother, a real estate agent who, he says, sparked his entrepreneurial spirit.

“She’s an Israeli immigrant, disowned by her parents because I was Black,” Reffkin in 2021 told TechCrunch, which covers the business of the tech industry. “My father abandoned us and died, homeless, when I was young.”

The other three honorary degree recipients at this year’s graduation are Kizzmekia S. Corbett-Helaire, a leading immunologist and vaccinologist; Barney S. Graham, an immunologist and virologist; and Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation

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