A quick summary: Jaafari's admission was an almost classic case of influence-peddling. The daughter of Syria's UN ambassador and a press aide to Assad, she helped to coordinate Barbara Walters' interview with Assad. (She told Assad to stress to Walters that unspecified mistakes had been made, because the "American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are 'mistakes' done and now we are 'fixing it.'") Walters subsequently informed Jaafari that she had forwarded her resumé to CNN's Piers Morgan, and offered to help any application by Jaafari to the Columbia School of Journalism. Walters ended the e-mail with the word "Hugs."   

Walters then reached out to Columbia journalism professor Richard Wald, telling him that Jaafari--who was "brilliant, beautiful, speaks five languages"--had helped her Assad interview, and wondering whether there was anything that Wald could do to further the application. (That Jaafari worked for a brutal dictator appeared not to concern the newswoman.) Wald wrote back to inform Walters that Jaafari had applied not to the Journalism School but to SIPA, but that in any case he would work through "the Admissions Office network" to "get them to give her special attention," and that he was "sure they will take her."

Since the campus community learned that Jaafari would be attending SIPA, almost 2000 people have signed a petition urging Columbia to revoke her admission. This would be a bad idea--not because Jaafari deserved admittance, which she almost certainly did not--but because it could set a dangerous precedent. Would such a move--rejecting applicants on the grounds of the student's political affiliation--mean that members of the university's notorious Middle Eastern Studies department would have grounds to protest admission of Israeli students?

Moreover, focusing on Jaafari misses the broader point in virtually anything Columbia-related that involves instructors who teach about contemporary events. In this respect, the response former Bush administration diplomat Jay Lefkowitz gave to Tablet makes the most sense. "More problematic" than students' backgrounds, he argued, was "that many universities seem to relish the idea of promoting faculty members who harbor their own radical ideologies--especially since they are the ones entrusted with doing the educating."

Given the radically anti-Israel atmosphere that too often pervades Columbia's campus, it seems rather unlikely that student Jaafari will experience many basic challenges to her worldview during her time at SIPA.