Post #14
Reading Between the Lines: HEALS and the Art of Missing the Point
By The Specter Editorial Staff
The co-chairs of the Task Force on Antisemitism have issued an official rebuttal to CUIMC Stands Up’s Reframing the narrative on antisemitism at Columbia: What the data say. On the surface, the rebuttal is filled with percentages, acronyms, and appeals to “rigorous social science.” But beneath the veneer, it is performatively disingenuous. Most glaringly, it never once grapples with the actual point: that Jewish and Muslim students’ survey responses cannot be understood apart from the context of Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza and Columbia’s heavy-handed repression of protest against it.
What They Said vs. What They Meant
What they said:
“HEALS was designed to capture the experiences of all Columbia students… Jewish and Muslim students had particularly bad experiences.”
What they meant:
“Yes, Muslims got a cameo, a brief walk-on role to establish our fairness. Then we cut straight back to the lead character: antisemitism. The war in Gaza and Columbia’s crackdown on protest? Left on the editing room floor.”
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What they said:
“The president tried to form two task forces. We [co-chairs of the antisemitism task force] accepted; the other declined.”
What they meant:
“See? The university tried to have an Islamophobia task force. We accepted peace; they refused to negotiate. Balance was on the table, but tragically, no one from the other side showed up. And so we [the antisemitism side] nobly carried on alone, narrative intact.”
What they left out:
CNN reported that when President Shafik belatedly sought a parallel task force, Professor Rashid Khalidi called it an “‘Islamophobia’ fig leaf to pretend they were ‘balanced,’” after the administration had already shown its “blatant partisanship” and lost faculty confidence. He noted the deeper issue was “an acute bias of the administration from the outset of the war against student activism… activism that probably represented a majority of Columbia undergrads, including many students who were Jewish.”
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What they said:
“Our response rate, 25 percent for all students, was not low in comparison to other campus climate surveys.”
What they meant:
“Three-quarters of students ignored us. But hey, other surveys also get ignored, so mediocrity is the new validity.”
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What they said:
“We asked about religious affiliation in the standard way.”
What they meant:
“Why complicate things with Arab identity or secular Jewish identity? If the standard erases you, perhaps you just don’t belong in the data.”
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What they said:
“We chose to call the survey HEALS… it is unlikely the name skewed results.”
What they meant:
“Yes, we called it HEALS. No, we did not imply students were broken and needed fixing. Acronyms are magic when mocked…HEALS: Hastily Engineered Antisemitism Legitimization Survey”
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What they said:
“In Spectator’s later news report about our survey, Professor Melanie Wall referred to ‘the manufactured hysteria over antisemitism.’ This language invalidates the demonstrated feelings of Jewish students.”
What they meant:
“How dare you suggest the University inflated the antisemitism narrative. We simply found Jewish students who felt discriminated against, elevated those voices above all others, and used them to call the NYPD on campus and chill any protest against Israel. That’s not hysteria, that’s strategy. And when protesting Jewish students were called ‘self-hating Jews’ by their peers, we filed that under Jewish hate too, a neat trick that turned repression of protest into more proof we were right.”
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What they said:
“We doubt faculty members would feel comfortable saying [this about manufactured hysteria] if another identity-based group of students was involved.”
What they meant:
“Gotcha. Consider this a reminder: criticize our antisemitism narrative and you risk being labeled antisemitic yourself. Palestinian, Arab, and protesting Jewish students can be erased without consequence, but suggest the antisemitism narrative is inflated? Now you’re going to have problems.”
Final Diagnosis
When challenged, the Task Force insists HEALS was just another campus climate survey, defended with all the usual consultant jargon. But this was never an innocent exercise in measurement. Numbers without context don’t just mislead, they provide ready-made evidence, the kind of “data” tailor-made for those who wanted Columbia brought to heel.
The survey results were published after Trump cut Columbia’s federal funding and landed squarely in the middle of negotiations to get that funding back. The framing of HEALS with its emphasis on antisemitism and its erasures of context helped pave the way for the settlement Columbia ultimately signed: a deal that hardwired the IHRA definition into University policy and placed our research enterprise under continuing federal oversight. That “climate survey” is now compliance machinery becoming the data appendix to Columbia’s spine sale, a contribution to the bargain that lets federal monitors sit in judgment over our classrooms, our research, and our dissent.
