During a closed-door meeting last week, Professor Ester Fuchs, who is one of the chairs of the task force, invoked a Supreme Court justice’s famous line about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

Amid the campus debate over the task force’s purpose, the university has opened a 35-hour per week job posting for a research director for the group, with a salary range of $110,000-$135,000.

While the task force has said it is concerned about other forms of discrimination, including Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry, Columbia has not set up any specific processes to study those issues.

If we wanted to have a task force on protests, we could have had one of those — except we already have a Senate Rules Committee that put in a lot of work on the new events policy,” said Professor Joseph Howley, a member of the university’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine group, and the chair of one of the school’s core undergraduate classes, Literature Humanities.

“The clearly stated ground rules governing all Task Force listening sessions have been and continue to be that the proceedings are confidential and off the record,” Fuchs wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

We condemn all these toxic forms of hate, and we look forward to working with colleagues and to partnering on initiatives to counter them across the University,” wrote co-chairs Fuchs, Nicholas Lemann, and David M. Schizer.

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