Columbia University caved. After the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal funding based on the claim that the university had failed to protect Jewish students from harassment during pro-Palestinian protests last year, the university has agreed to a series of demands that will make major changes to the university’s core functions, including the way it handles admissions, security and academic inquiry.
Trump appears to view Columbia as a guinea pig for trying to limit free expression of ideas on college campuses.
If anyone were somehow still under the illusion that the MAGA right champions free speech, this may be the clearest example yet that President Donald Trump is in reality one of the country's greatest enemies of free speech. Strong-arming Columbia University is an affront to the First Amendment. And at a time of rising authoritarianism, Columbia’s concessions should be setting off sirens about the repression of free speech on campuses, one of the most essential spaces for dissent in American life.
My colleague Clarissa Jan-Lim summarized the concessions so far:
In a memo issued Friday afternoon, the university said it will ban face masks “for the purpose of concealing one’s identity”; hire 36 “special officers” empowered to arrest students and remove them from campus; appoint a senior vice provost to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African studies; adopt a formal definition of antisemitism; review its admission procedures to ensure those processes are “unbiased”; and commit to “greater institutional neutrality” — most of which address demands from the Trump administration.
Notably, Columbia has declined to pursue legal challenges to Trump’s suppression agenda and decided to go along with many of its suggestions (some of which it was reportedly considering on its own).
One thing must be clear: Trump’s demands aren’t about protecting Jewish students from bigotry. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp writes, Trump is at the forefront of the pro-Israel, antisemitic right. Our president has posted antisemitic memes, dined with Holocaust-deniers, declared that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer isn’t Jewish and allied with militants who traffic in antisemitic ideology. He leads a movement brimming with antisemitic sentiment, and his movement’s theories of society and power rely on antisemitic tropes.
And while there were reports of antisemitic conduct on Columbia’s campus last year, Trump has failed to demonstrate why those episodes warrant something so radical as ruining the university financially instead of letting the university deal with the issue on its own, as it already has been. As a group of legal scholars at Columbia University have pointed out in an article, Trump’s claims that Columbia violated provisions of the Civil Rights Act protecting Jewish students entail “no explanation of the alleged violations, no mention of a completed investigation, and no account of how Columbia has been deliberately indifferent to ongoing antisemitic discrimination or harassment on its campus — perhaps because any such account would be implausible at this time. There is therefore no apparent statutory basis for a funding cutoff.”
Trump appears to view Columbia as a guinea pig for trying to limit free expression of ideas on college campuses. The new policing policies are likely to make students more afraid of expressing dissent on campus. They signal a radically punitive attitude toward the kind of spirited free expression that has long defined the political power of student movements. And after ICE conducted raids on Columbia’s property and the university harshly punished students who occupied buildings to express their support for Palestinians last year, it’s likely that many students at Columbia and elsewhere will hold their tongues rather than express their views of justice.
Trump also appears to be trying to limit academic freedom. As The Wall Street Journal points out, while the academic changes to the university’s Middle East department aren’t formally being described as a receivership, “the changes align with what usually happens in a receivership.” The new senior vice provost, per the newspaper, is meant to “ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced.” It’s unclear what “balanced” means, but in the context of Trump’s broader aims it reads as an euphemism for pushing curricula and instruction to the political right. As Amherst political scientist Austin Sarat wrote in a recent column for MSNBC about Trump’s demands of Columbia, “One can (almost) admire the Trump administration’s ingenuity in using receivership as a smoke screen for censorship.”
According to Reuters, Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, called Trump’s demands “arguably the greatest incursion into academic freedom, freedom of speech and institutional autonomy that we’ve seen since the McCarthy era.” He added, “I know every academic faculty member in this country is angry about Columbia University’s inability to stand up to a bully.”
Academia has long been a lifeblood of the left in America, the site of some of the most influential intellectual and political resistance to injustices in American society and politics. Trump is trying to put a muzzle on that resistance — before it even fully takes shape — as swiftly and aggressively as he can. It’s frightening that Columbia is helping Trump strap the muzzle on.
