Columbia Law Professor Kicked Out After Investigation Finds She Violated School Policies

We had this in the headlines but I think it’s worthy of a longer post. Katherine Franke was until last week the founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. Last Friday she announced she’d agreed to resign after an investigation concluded last November that she had violated school policies with her comments about Israeli students.

All of this started in January 2024 when pro-Palestinian Columbia students held an unauthorized gathering on campus. Student counter-protesters sprayed them with something smelly and the claim quickly spread on campus that it was an Israeli chemical agent called Skunk.

Two Columbia University students, both IOF soldiers, sprayed a chemical weapon on peaceful protesters. Skunk spray is used on Palestinians in the West Bank by the Israeli occupation. It is known to cause nausea, abdominal pain, and vomiting. @Columbia must take action. pic.twitter.com/Sx3MYHkjbw

— Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (@ColumbiaSJP) January 20, 2024

The student newspaper picked this up and ran with it as did The Intercept. The students responsible were banned from campus and one of them sued. He claimed the “chemical weapon” described by the activists was actually a fart spray called “Liquid Ass” which he’d bought on Amazon.

In any case, while all of this was circling on campus, Professor Franke gave an interview to another left-wing outlet, Democracy Now! And that’s what actually got her in trouble.

In the Democracy Now! interview several days later, Ms. Franke said that she and other professors at Columbia had been concerned about Israeli students coming to Columbia “right out of their military service” because they had been known to harass Palestinian and other students on campus.

Two Columbia colleagues filed a complaint against Ms. Franke, saying that her comments amounted to harassment of Israeli members of the Columbia community.

Here’s the clip in question:

NEW: @Columbia Law School has just announced that Prof. Katherine Franke is “accelerating her planned retirement” to tomorrow, Jan 10th. Franke encouraged students to take over buildings, said Israeli students should be removed from Columbia because “so many of them” are “known… pic.twitter.com/ddrb1PsULn

— Columbia Jewish & Israeli Students ✡️🇮🇱 (@CUJewsIsraelis) January 9, 2025

Franke complained that Columbia was too biased against her to investigate this fairly and the school eventually agreed to hire an outside law firm. But the outcome didn’t change.

An outside law firm hired by the university to investigate the complaint found last November that the remarks violated Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action policies, which Ms. Franke said she appealed.

The investigator also concluded that Ms. Franke had violated policy by disclosing the name of one of the complainants against her and reposting a social media post that made disparaging comments about him.

She was dropped by her lawyers and responded by filing an ethics complaint against them. But as of last Friday she announced she was done and wrote a letter criticizing the school and saying she wasn’t really resigning so much as she was being fired.

I have come to the view that the Columbia University administration has created such a toxic and hostile environment for legitimate debate around the war in Israel and Palestine that I can no longer teach or conduct research. 

Effective today, I have reached an agreement with Columbia University that relieves me of my obligations to teach or participate in faculty governance after serving on the Columbia law faculty for 25 years. 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. In exchange for my agreement to step down as an active member of the Columbia faculty, the university demanded that I surrender significant rights and privileges that are provided to all retired faculty as a matter of policy. To describe my change in status with the university as a “retirement” is both misleading and disingenuous.

So this looks like the end of the line for Franke, at least at Columbia. Perhaps she’ll fine a job at another school looking for a left-wing agitator.