The Trump Administration has withheld $400 million dollars in federal funds from Columbia University and vowed to remove even more if the president’s demands are not met. Columbia has an endowment of $14.8 billion and an annual operating budget of $6.6 billion. The cuts amount to roughly 6 percent of their annual budget – a non-trivial share. It is within the capacity of the university, through its trustees, to unlock part of the endowment in order to cover any lost funds over the next four years until Trump is out of office. However, the university seems more inclined to work with the White House to unlock the funds – a posture that will cost the university much more than money.
In order to meet the Trump Administration’s demands, Columbia would have to adopt a number of illiberal measures. They’d need to put their Middle East, South Asia and Africa Studies department into academic receivership; they’d need to change their admissions policies to reduce admits of people from those countries and increase admissions of Jewish students; they’d need to grant campus police more power to include giving campus police far more power to surveille, detain and remove people from campus without following the usual due process. They’d need to accept permanently heightened restrictions on campus protest and speech. They’d need to actively facilitate (or, at the very least, passively comply with) unlawful orders to detain and deport people without probable cause or due process, as the Trump Administration is currently trying to do with Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil.
Khalil has been thoroughly vetted by multiple governments over the course of his work prior to coming to Columbia, with no evidence of any ties or support of terror organizations. Columbia University not only cleared him of wrongdoing but formally apologized for suspending him during the crackdown against Columbia protestors, because he did violated no university policies. Even the federal government has acknowledged that Khalil has not been confirmed as committing any crimes and is not suspected of committing any crimes or having any concrete ties to terror organizations. In their own telling, they want to deport Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, based solely for his purported political beliefs. When he reached out to his alma mater for help, Columbia University offered no defense of its alumnus and provided no assistance with respect to financial or legal support. They couldn’t even bring themselves to file an objection that a Columbia affiliate was arrested on Columbia property, apparently without a warrant. And the federal government is demanding further silence and compliance of this nature in order to keep the prospect alive of restored federal funds.
I have previously stressed, and I maintain, that the tumult at Columbia University and other elite schools about Middle East policy is of little consequence to the people struggling in the Middle East. However, what Columbia does is of immense consequence to the overall landscape of higher education in the United States because of a phenomenon sociologists describe as “institutional isomorphism.”
In conditions of genuine uncertainty and dynamism, especially when paired with high apparent stakes, and a lot of competing demands and tradeoffs, institutional leaders often find themselves at a loss on how to proceed and try to defer decision making as long as possible. However, circumstances often force someone to be a first mover. If the first mover also happens to be an institution that others look up to or aspire towards, then institutions will often tend to rapidly copy that institution – assuming that, for, instance, Harvard must know what it’s doing. Everyone wants to be like Harvard, and few university leaders would be faulted for emulating Harvard. Consequently, Harvard’s policy ends up becoming the de facto policy of most other schools too – starting with elite peer institutions and then trickling down.
We can see this dynamic at work in university hiring: a couple of non-elite state schools announced a freezes in the wake of budget uncertainty. Then Stanford University adopted the policy, and it promptly exploded throughout elite private universities and “public Ivies” like the UC system. Similar patterns have played out in graduate admissions. Similar patterns are likely to play out here, too. Other universities are desperate to avoid falling into the Trump Administration’s crosshairs, and they’re closely watching how Columbia University navigates this situation to see how they should respond to similar pressures. This is distressing because the Wall Street Journal telegraphed that Columbia University was nearing an agreement to concede to most of the Trump Administration’s demands without resistance. And this is what has, indeed, transpired.
With this ignoble precedent set, the “America First” president seems poised to successfully suppress criticism of a foreign country and its policies nationwide under the auspices of fighting antisemitism – a scourge that, while very real and pernicious, is demonstrably less pronounced or accepted on college and university campuses than almost anywhere else in American society. Antisemitism is certainly far less accepted at Columbia than, say, in the GOP, where our sitting president casually decreed that Chuck Schumer is not Jewish anymore because he doesn’t accept all of Trump’s policies – and then proceeded to call the Senate Majority Leader “Palestinian” (another Semitic population) as a slur.
This is not a partisan political point. Virtually every aspect of the Trump Administration’s current posture rests on track laid by the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party.
For instance, the reason Trump could plausibly refer to Gaza a “demolition site” is because, for more than a year prior to his reelection, his Democratic predecessor (urged on by the aforementioned Chuck Shumer and others) supplied unlimited weapons to Israel to carry out a campaign of destruction that has few modern equivalents – a campaign that was not just restricted to Gaza, but also the West Bank, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. Biden’s planned successor, Kamala Harris and her surrogates repeatedly stressed to voters that these policies would continue roughly unchanged under her watch.
Even before Trump had a chance to weigh in, Joe Biden immediately characterized the protests at Columbia as “antisemitic” and declared to that “order must prevail” on college campuses. Democratic lawmakers put aggressive pressure on former Columbia University President Nemat Shafik to crush the campus protests. She ultimately carried out with the assistance of Democratic mayor Eric Adams (who justified his clampdown via evidence-free statements that the protests were driven primarily by “outside agitators”). The pictures and videos of students getting roughed up by the NYPD were enthusiastically celebrated by Trump and, upon reclaiming the White House, he interceded on behalf of Mayor Adams – making his criminal investigation go away in exchange for the mayor adopting a more aggressive posture on immigration.
In a similar vein, it was Joe Biden who enshrined the IHRA definition of antisemitism into federal guidance, despite the definition’s author repeatedly describing it as a “travesty” to use this definition to regulate speech and behavior. Building on Biden’s introduction, Trump is poised to sign a bill that would implement this same definition into federal antidiscrimination law – and in the meantime, he’s insisting Columbia University and other schools adopt this definition for their own codes of conduct. NYU and Harvard have already taken this step, overriding concerns by civil rights and civil liberties organizations — from the ACLU, to FIRE and the AAUP, to Israeli civil rights groups — who stressed that IHRA’s definition is extremely vague and provides strong leeway for institutional stakeholders to censor most critical discussion of Israel, Zionism or Judaism more broadly, by Jews and non-Jews alike.
Likewise, before Trump called upon Columbia to put their Middle East Studies programs into receivership, Democratic governor Kathy Hochul took the extraordinary step of demanding that CUNY eliminate a job posting for scholars who study Palestine. This is the same type of overreach Trump is currently trying to carry out at Columbia – politicians setting the agenda for what can be taught and who can be hired – justified on the exact same grounds.
Even the race baiting is cross partisan. Trump’s assertion that Schumer isn’t really Jewish if his politics aren’t correct doesn’t stray far from Joe Biden’s assertion that if you don’t vote unquestionably and without hesitation for Democrats then “you ain’t black.”
The Democrats will not save colleges and universities. They have been key partners and pioneers for all of the actions currently being undertaken by the Trump Administration in this domain.
If universities are to be saved, they will have to save themselves. And if a desire to preserve academic freedom and institutional autonomy isn’t enough for Columbia University’s leadership, they should perhaps look to its own recent past to see what the wages of compliance are likely to be.
Former university President Nemat Shafik did everything the hardliners asked of her: she three her faculty under the bus at a Congressional hearing, while offering absolutely no defense of her institution and its value. She suspended student groups like the Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. She unleashed administrative punishments on protestors, and then sicced the cops on them. The school has been since transformed into a veritable fortress – it’s more secure than a typical military base, as I learned first-hand when I did a series of talks there recently (and speaking as a military brat).
What did all this capitulation yield? Still more demands for capitulation! Shafik was driven out. The demonization of the campus has continued apace, and the punishments have ramped up further. The same can be expected for all others who adopt this subservient posture. University leaders should understand that there will be no point at which their compliance is “enough.” The Trump administration seems committed to executing a set of punishments on colleges and universities and espousing particular narratives about institutions of higher learning independent of what colleges and universities say and do in the meantime. The institutions can debase and betray themselves ad infinitum and get the same outcome as if they did nothing.
Indeed, even though Columbia has agreed to all of Trump’s demands without contest, the administration has not released any funds, and administration officials suggest still more demands will be made in the near future of Columbia and other universities. Even Columbia University’s interim president has characterized full compliance with the initial demands as merely an “opening bid” in negotiations with the federal government. It is, shall we say, unconventional to deploy full appeasement without resistance as one’s opening bid in a negotiation. And, once again, immediately playing possum hasn’t worked out well for the university.
Far from recognizing or rewarding the university’s uncontested compliance with their orders, the administration is now working to put the private university under direct federal oversight through a consent decree. By showing the administration that they will not resist, they invite the White House to turn the screws harder.
I saw this dynamic up close after I was dismissed from the University of Arizona following a Fox News smear campaign. I was far from the only scholar who lost a job because of a witch hunt. Whether the attacks came from the left or the right, university leaders consistently think that if they just give the mob a head it will make them go away. In fact, it just makes them hungry for more heads – and it shows them that their tactics work. It’s a strategy for virtually guaranteeing subsequent pressure campaigns downstream.
Meanwhile, showing you have a spine can often lead adversaries who are used to steamrolling people without resistance to back off and choose a different target. We can see this clearly at Northwestern University. A House committee demanded information about support the university provided for students facing prosecution for protests. Law professors at the university filed suit (despite the universitiy’s stated intent to acquiese to the investigation) — and when the House realized they’d have a protracted fight on their hands, one they stood a good chance of losing, they quickly and quietly dropped the probe. Universities would be amazed how effectively they could shut this down by demonstrating a willingness and capacity to fight. By responding to unlawful orders and unilateral usurptions of Congress-appropriated funding by saying, “I’ll see you in court” instead of “Please, please, please give the money back. I’ll do anything you want!”
Unfortunately, a desire for peace, order, and non-confrontation dominates the academy. Higher ed institutions, in general, are full of people who are risk averse and conformist. People who fall into “leadership” roles are often the most quiescent of all – allowing themselves to get steamrolled by PR teams and lawyers into servile postures, offering limp and half-hearted defenses of the academy and its mission, when they are offered at all. And to their credit, they recognize this about themselves: most university presidents acknowledge they have done a poor job responding to declining faith in their institutions and the accompanying efforts to impose reforms from the outside.
Small wonder the public doesn’t trust academia! Not only are we apparently unable or unwilling to address stakeholders’ concerns, we also seem incapable of effectively communicating our own value in society in the face of adversaries who are out to gut our institutions.
Now is the time to dispense with both of these tendencies. We need to be more explicit about addressing ways our institutions are not, in fact, representing and serving large swaths of America. However, we also need to be more muscular about pushing back against false narratives, asserting our value to society, and defending our institutions from inappropriate forms of political interference.
Institutional neutrality, now the rage, is no shield for cowardice. The Kalven Report, the foundational document of the institutional neutrality movement, emphasizes, “From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.” We find ourselves in such a moment now.
If, in this moment, faculty refuse to make use of the rights and freedoms we have, then it doesn’t matter if they’re stripped away, and they will be. If “academic freedom,” “free speech,” and “viewpoint diversity” organizations have nothing to say to this illiberalism, or even support these moves, they’re worse than useless. If university leaders cannot muster the strength or conviction to decline to follow unlawful and unethical orders and challenge these actions in the courts, then they should resign in disgrace or be pushed out. If we, as a collective, cannot and will not stand against this overreach and defend ourselves in public — then we deserve what we get. But others do not deserve to suffer from our failure. And so, we must not fail.
Critically, any resistance to the administration’s illiberal policies, or defense of our institutions and their mission – these must not be framed in banal partisan terms. This is not just a matter of effective praxis (to prevent further polarization and resentment), it’s also a matter of respecting the truth. Again, we got here through bipartisan political actions. Moreover, the chronic failures of our own professions and institutional leaders provided fodder for the “populist” forces now aligned against us. We’ll only get out of this predicament by engaging with those who are currently skeptical of, or alienated from, our institutions – by acknowledging and constructively responding to their concerns.
Fortunately, there are some signs of life in the university sector. A few weeks after Columbia folded, Harvard has formally declared that they will not comply with unlawful orders from the president. They have rejected the White House demands, and have vowed to see them in court. The university previously committed to refrain from taking unnecessary moral and political positions. However, in the spirit of the Kalven Report, they view this as a moment where the basic functioning and core purpose of the university is at stake — a subject they cannot be neutral about.
Hopefully more universities follow the path of Harvard instead of Columbia downstream.