Michelle Moody-Adams, the new dean of Columbia College and vice president for undergraduate education, is the first woman and the first black person to hold the post. In February 2009, Moody-Adams co-sponsored with university funds a controversial student protest on the Cornell campus by the Islamic Alliance for Justice consisting of signs and 1,300 flags representing Palestinians and Israelis who died in the action in Gaza.

The news stories do not make it clear, but the point of the signs accompanying the flags was to show the vastly greater number of Palestinian dead, evidently without pointing out that among them were of course Gaza’s leading terrorists and cowards-in-residence who hide among civilians in order to make sure that Israeli retaliation against Palestinian violence creates as many Palestinian dead as possible, the better to condemn Israel.

An administrator declared that they had financed the display in order to promote “debate.” But there was no financing for the other side of the story. The signs were torn down on the same day, an action which was rightly condemned by the Cornell Israel Public Affairs Committee as a violation of freedom of expression, but which perhaps in its own way suited the quality of the “debate” initiated by the display.

Moody-Adams’s response to 9/11 at a teach-in at Cornell on the ”roots of terrorism” was to declare that ”vengeance is not the answer here,” and that the result of an American military response could be the end of everything worth fighting for, “even the end of the species.” Later on in the teach-in, Moody-Adams did concede, in typical liberal doublethink, that “some military response may well be necessary.”