CV NEWS FEED // A Catholic doctoral candidate at Columbia University reports that the school’s new Office of Institutional Equity (OEI), founded to help prevent antisemitism, targeted him for expressing online that people cannot change their genders.
According to the university’s website, the OEI was founded to handle discrimination and harassment issues, including antisemitism, after President Donald Trump signed executive orders ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
As CatholicVote previously reported, the university lost $400 million in federal funding after the Trump administration announced that the institution had failed to protect Jewish students.
Daniel Di Martino, who is earning his doctorate in economics at the university, wrote in the City Journal that OEI officials told him in an email that he was guilty of “conduct that could constitute discriminatory harassment” without specifying or clarifying what that conduct was. When he met with them in person, they pointed to several social media posts.
“They then showed me screenshots of my social media posts, treating my public Catholic beliefs as if they were prohibited,” Di Martino wrote. “I smiled when I saw them. I had nothing to regret.”
Each of the posts were critical of transgender ideology, or celebrated politicians that were combating the ideology. One of the X posts read, “God does not teach us that we can change our gender.”
The officers also criticized his statements made on the podcast Timcast, where he said that immigrants who look criminal, especially those with facial tattoos, should be subject to stricter screening. Di Martino himself, according to his personal website, is an immigrant from Venezuela.
Di Martino wrote that the officials told him that he might be creating a hostile environment on campus and that if “transgender” classmates saw his posts, they might feel unsafe to walk around on campus.
Di Martino responded, “If someone is offended, that’s not going to stop me from sharing what I believe. The overwhelming majority of people in this country agree with what I said. . . . I just don’t believe men can become women and women can become men. It is crazy to me that in 2025 there are people reporting me for an opinion that 90 percent of humans share.”
Di Martino concluded that Columbia was using bureaucratic institutions to target Christian students and pressure them into silence.
He wrote, “To all students who have been told that their faith or conservative views amount to hate speech, here’s my advice: don’t back down. Your beliefs aren’t dangerous; they’re sacred. And they remain essential to the American experiment in free expression and self-government. No Ivy League bureaucracy can change that.”