So how does Katherine Franke, the former Columbia law professor ousted for discriminating against Israeli students, bid adieu to the New York City Ivy? By renewing the canard that Israeli students, during an anti-Israel protest last year, peppered protesters with a “toxic chemical” that caused “such significant injuries that several students were hospitalized.” The substance turned out to be none other than a “non-toxic, legal, novelty item” — fart spray. 

“Staggering” is how a cohort of Jewish and Israeli Columbia students brand Ms. Franke’s repetition of the debunked allegation. “She still thinks her comments about Israelis were innocuous, when in fact they led to increased harassment against the Israeli community on campus and were officially found discriminatory,” they write, adding that on her way out she “perpetuates the lie about the fart spray incident as a ‘chemical attack.’” 

Ms. Franke’s “early retirement” was put into motion after Columbia concluded, via an internal inquiry, that the law professor had violated the school’s anti-descrimination policy while speaking with “Democracy Now” last year. During the interview, Ms. Franke contended that “so many” of the Israeli students at Columbia who “are coming right out of their military service” have “been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus.” 

The evidence, she gave, of such infractions? The spray attack, which she claimed, without proof, involved an IDF crowd control weapon known as “skunk water.” The interview helped fuel campus-wide hysteria and an Israeli student was eventually handed a year and a half long suspension. It was only after the student sued the university and received a $395,000 settlement that Columbia quietly admitted that the spray was not a “biochemical weapon.”

Now, though, a year and a lawsuit later, Ms. Franke continues to peddle the foul-smelling fib. This time, she’s using it to defend her comments about Israeli students and paint the university’s accusations against her as “unjustified.” In her departure letter, shared on Friday, Ms. Franke laments that Columbia targeted her over her “support of pro-Palestinian protesters” and “weaponized” its disciplinary process against her. 

Although Ms. Franke acknowledges that her so-called retirement is “more accurately understood as a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” she attempts to pitch her departure from Columbia — after 25 years — on her own terms. She contends that Columbia’s 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.” 

Ms. Franke’s refusal to take responsibility for her own words and actions and her insistence on laying the blame elsewhere strikes us as a reflection of the modus operandi of the pro-Palestinian movement on campuses. That is, to accuse Jews, and Israelis, of crimes that they have not committed, and to deny any evidence that points to the contrary. With faculty members like this, it’s no wonder universities have come to this point.