First the good news: a Vermont judge has ordered ICE to release Rumeysa Ozturk. This is yet more evidence that one does not need to bow to the dictatorship. The judicial system is still functional, so one can go to court to successfully challenge illegal behavior.
Now the bad news: the Columbia acting president and trustees still won’t do this. There’s a new message that just came in (5pm Friday is a typical time for these) from Shipman about Supporting and Strengthening Columbia’s Research Enterprise. It starts off
For the past several months, Columbia’s research enterprise has been confronting one of the most sustained and serious disruptions in its history. Major interruptions in federal funding, especially from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are affecting nearly every part of our research community. However, we are also responding with determination, urgency, and an unwavering commitment to what defines us as an institution.
The Trump administration on March 7 notified Columbia that its grants and contracts were being cancelled. Since this was clearly completely illegal, the obvious thing to do would have been to have Columbia’s lawyers immediately go to court and challenge this. Instead the trustees decided to agree with the Trump panel that the bogus antisemitism charges were accurate, announce that we’re guilty of the charges and seemingly willing to accept our punishment, not challenge it. The long and sorry story of how agreeing to the Trump demands led to nothing but more grant cancellations and more demands has now been going on for over two months. The only “urgency” in Columbia’s response was how fast it caved-in. As far as “unwavering commitment to what defines us as an institution”, what the trustees have done has permanently defined Columbia as the highest profile US institution to refuse to resist the new dictatorship as it tried to see how far it could push unconstitutional government by decree from the dictator.
Columbia has now waited so long that it may no longer even be possible to go to court. People have lost their jobs, labs are being closed, lab animals euthanized. I’m not a lawyer, but if you wait this long before doing anything, and spend the months publicly announcing your guilt and how convinced you are that the dictatorship is dealing with you in “good faith”, surely this must sooner or later destroy any possibility of getting a court to stop the illegality.
So, what is Columbia doing to “support and strengthen” research here? They’re still trying to negotiate a further cave-in:
We continue to engage with the federal government with the aim of restoring funding and reestablishing the flow of grant support in a manner that upholds and strengthens our institutional values.
They’re signing on to a lobbying effort about next year’s budget, both its size and ICR rates:
Through the Association of American Universities (AAU), we are also part of a coordinated national effort to push back on proposed cuts to NIH, National Science Foundation (NSF), and other agencies; reductions to facilities and administrative (F&A) reimbursements; and other policy changes that threaten the foundations of U.S. academic research. The AAU has launched a campaign aimed at educating the public on indirect costs, which is similar to the information we have posted about facilities and administrative costs at the University. These efforts are vital—not only to restoring funding, but also to reinforcing public trust in the research enterprise itself.
They are trying to replace some of the lost funding:
To support as much continuity as possible for our faculty, students, staff, and labs, we have launched two research stabilization funds:
- One, created with the support of NewYork-Presbyterian, is focused on Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons and the clinical and translational research taking place there.
- The other supports the broader university research community, with special attention to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows whose training grants have been affected.
These funds are not intended to replace federal support, but to serve as a bridge—allowing researchers to bring projects to completion, explore alternative funding, or pivot to new directions. The Office of the Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR) will oversee the application process, and more information is available on the EVPR website. Efforts to expand these funds through philanthropic support are already underway.
What’s also being done is what university administrations always do when a problem becomes urgent and needs to be immediately addressed: form committees. One new one is the Presidential Task Force on Columbia’s Research Mission, which will try to figure out what to do now that the money’s gone. The second is the Working Group on Strategic Engagement and Institutional Credibility, which is supposed to “change the narrative” and get us better PR. To change the narrative and restore the credibility they have wrecked, the trustees and president need not to form a PR committee, but to join Harvard and others fighting the dictatorship instead of continuing to appease it. It’s appalling that there’s no indication that this is even an option on the table.
Update: Harvard president Garber has issued a letter of response to the lunatic letter from McMahon. Columbia acting president Shipman should do some light editing and send something similar in Columbia’s name to McMahon.
Update: The bogus excuse of “antisemitism” continues to be the main tool of Trump’s war against Harvard. Here’s the latest. They also announced they are going after another antisemitic “prestigious university in the midwestern United States” without identifying it. Anyone know which midwestern center of antisemitism the Trump people are now going after?
Update: According to this document, today ICE filed warrants to enter the Columbia student residences of Ranjani Srinivasan and Yunseo Chung. One odd thing is that Srinivasan fled the country on March 11, after ICE agents came to her home without a warrant on March 7. There’s no evidence she has returned to the US (seems unlikely she’d get past immigration). Yunseo Chung’s whereabouts are not known. She is a legal permanent resident, living in the US since age seven. ICE is after her because she participated in a pro-Palestinian protest at Barnard.
She has been identified as the person targeted together with Mahmoud Khalil by Marco Rubio, based on names he was provided by individuals intent on getting pro-Palestinian Columbia students deported. This Forward article claims “members of Columbia’s board” had been involved in reporting Khalil to officials. There have been various denials by the university of involvement of the trustees in these deportation efforts.
In Columbia’s favor, the agent requesting the warrant says it is needed since Columbia will not arrange access to student residences without a judicial warrant.
While expressing your views regarding this situation between the Administration and certain universities (Columbia most notably), and while I agree with your commentary, it really would be also great if you at the same time continue your posts regarding physics and math. Don’t let that stop. Please.
Peter,
You keep trying to ignore the elephant in the room. At Columbia, a small but very powerful group of Zionist extremists are in charge, and they will not stop until they attain their objectives. One of those objectives seems to be to prevent any acknowledgment of the suffering of the Palestinian people by any individual or groups associated with Columbia. That they are collaborating actively with a fascist government is highly ironic but not unique to our times. Zionists offered to collaborate with Hitler also!
Bran. A. Raskovic,
Posts on math/physics will return… On the fundamental physics front, things still are completely dead, so if I was writing about that, there would be legitimate complaints about a dead horse being beaten.
On the twistors front, I am working on a paper, hope to have a preliminary version in 2-3 weeks The one quite interesting thing I do want to write about, but haven’t had time, hope to find time soon, is Wojciech Zurek’s new book “Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism”. It”s the deepest thinking I’ve seen about the “measurement problem” of quantum mechanics, dealing with the central mystery of how our classical understanding of the world emerges from an underlying quantum theory. The problem with writing about this is that it requires finding a significant amount of time to think about a third complex topic, when I’m too busy trying to manage twistors and what’s happening around me at the same time.
An old alumnus,
I don’t think I’m ignoring that topic at all. One thing I’m trying to understand and write about here is the extent to which that may be true.
The problem here right now is that there is basically zero information available about what the trustees are doing. The only one speaking to us is the acting president, who clearly is just a spokesperson repeating what she has been told to say. Having a university of this size nominally being run by someone with no qualifications for the job, just a mouthpiece for an anonymous group we know nothing about, is pretty weird.
What demands have the Trump people made? In the past, when demands came into places like Columbia, Harvard, Penn, the demand letters were made public. Now, for a month and a half, zero information about that, except for dubious reports from the Wall Street Journal mouthpiece about a consent decree.
Why not litigate? The board must be looking at detailed arguments from very expensive lawyers. We don’t know what they are at all.
Why did the board fire Armstrong? No one knows, except that it seems to have been some combination of attempting to placate the Trump people and firing her for cause for insufficient devotion to the cave-in and its supposed fighting “antisemitism”. Shipman is not making that mistake.
Who amongst the trustees is in favor of further cave-in to Trump and who is in favor of joining Harvard and fighting? Likely very influential in this argument are major donors who are not trustees. Who are they?
At Harvard, the New York Times has sources behind the scenes, and this reporting
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/business/harvard-trump-deal.html
gives a good idea of what has been happening there. To try and understand the Columbia story, one can reasonably guess that much the same sort of people/arguments have been happening here, we just don’t know who they are, or what exact issues they are arguing about.
Another conjectural way to understand what is going on is to pay attention to Scott Aaronson and his fanatical views about what is happening here. A couple Scott Aaronson billionaires yelling at the trustees that they won’t give a dime until the antisemites are all squashed would explain a lot.
There has been a huge moral failure here at Columbia, of a sort I don’t think the university will recover from in my lifetime. Part of that moral failure was immediately clear to me (the failure to stand up to Fascist dictatorship). The other part has been less obvious, and I’m still trying to better understand it and write about it here. This other part is the moral failure you refer to, caving in not to Trump, but to those with a single-minded devotion to the support of the Israeli government and suppression of justified criticism of what it is doing in Gaza and the West Bank.
I don’t think the evidence points to motivations coming from the loss of donations from “Zionist donors” as a *prime mover* for what we are seeing. While there is some of that, and we know that in some cases at other schools this has been true (e.g. Bill Ackman and Penn), the evidence shows that so far the losses one could attribute directly to this are relatively minimal.
1.The biggest donors to Columbia by and large are not Jewish and have made no comments on the war or the protest. They are people like Roy Vagelos, who gave 400M *after* the protests started.
2.Most Jewish donors have been circumspect and not stated that they would withdraw funds (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/dealbook/donors-protests-columbia-kraft.html). There are some that have threatened to withhold (Cooperman, Kraft and Blavatnik), but also from the other side millions have been threated (https://bwog.com/2024/05/columbia-university-alumni-threaten-to-withhold-over-74-million-in-donations-in-support-of-pro-palestine-protestors/).
3.Overall, Columbia has seen a sizable decrease in donations-but this amounts to on the order of a couple of hundred million dollars. A large amount, but something that pales in comparison to federal funds at risk, especially when you consider that most donations do not alter the operating budget of the university.
4.The decrease in funding cannot be all tied to pro-Israel sentiment. Indeed when a university is in turmoil often donations drop. In the aftermath of the 68 protests donations dropped substantially. Going forward a big issue is also fear of donating due to Trump backlash. Thus people like Bill Gates are withholding donations to universities (and he has donated to Columbia in the past), and in particular foreign donations which are under scrutiny have and will drop more.
Most importantly, I doubt this is the major issue for the administration and the trustees. I think instead the behavior we see now towards the protests is driven both by a combination of fear of the federal government broadly, but also because the administration of any university is not going to be aligned with the behavior of the protestors towards university operation. Many of the DOE demands on Columbia are (in my mind) outrageous. Things like putting MESAAS under receivership and adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism are non-starters to me, and may most likely have driven by pro-Israel voices inside and outside the university. But some of these things are things probably most administrators would want to implement anyway. I know that Minouche (not a Zionist) wanted to have a way to keep order on campus and was not up to the task. Part of the problem was her own failings as a leader, but another part of the problem was a long standing lack of well-stated and enforceable guidelines for proper protesting and violations thereof. Eventually this was going to be rectified in response to what we have seen, with or without Trump, and I don’t think the primary motivation here was donations.
In the end I think the main thing here is a combination of trying to fend off Trump and fend off disruptions with or without Zionist donations. I think pro Israel donors do have power and this is a consideration, but the numbers and other considerations do not support this being primary. With respect to fending off Trump-I agree with Peter that this is a pipedream, but I do believe this is what is driving things.
Let’s get this straight, Peter. You’re saying that you’re angry and miserable, not for any of the reasons that are immediately apparent, but instead, because a shadowy cabal of unnamed Jewish financial elites is pulling the strings behind the scenes for its own incomprehensibly nefarious purposes?
If that’s really what you think, don’t hold back! Say it loudly, clearly, and often, directly into the microphone.
One thing, though: I find it hard to reconcile this paranoid conspiracist vision with the view that you yourself endorsed earlier, that the MAGA crackdown on higher education has nothing really to do with antisemitism—that antisemitism is just a pretense, a fig leaf, if not for which they’d easily find a different one (as proven by their continuing to withhold funds even when universities agree to all requested actions on antisemitism).
If this is so, then despite the efforts of unscrupulous actors on both sides to conflate the two issues, the antisemitism issue and the academic defunding issue decouple from each other. Those of us who want to save academic science can fight for that cause, suing the administration if needed, confident that we’re not blocking a necessary crackdown on antisemitism. And, by the same token, those of us who care about Jewish and Israeli students not living in fear can speak out about that cause, confident that by doing so we’re not giving the MAGA forces any ammunition that they actually needed anyway.
Given the way things have developed, it would seem that the only reason for you to continue to put CUAD, and the (((shadowy cabal of financiers))) opposed to CUAD, at the center of your narrative about Columbia would be if, despite your protestations to the contrary, the freedom to commandeer university buildings to chant slogans that are reasonably seen as calls for Jewish genocide (“from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab”) really is an issue that you intrinsically care about.
Dave,
What I was trying to get at was not a crude explanation based on the influence of money. Reading the NYT piece about the inside story of the debate at Harvard, it was striking that it portrayed the main players as not the Harvard corporation members who had the official responsibility, but a group of other alumni, large donors, ex corporation members. If you just look at the membership list of the Harvard corporation, that would tell you very little about who had influence and who the real players were. About the Columbia story, I keep emphasizing that I have no idea who has influence on the trustee’s decisions. And of the many people I’ve asked, no one else seems to have any idea either.
Scott,
I thought I made it very clear who I was blaming in that comment: you (and others who share your completely unhinged view that pro-Palestinian protestors want to kill your family and cause a second Holocaust).
When I first heard news of the cave-in, and that the trustees were refusing to go to court, instead talking about how agreeing to illegal demands from a dictatorship on the march wasn’t so bad, for many days I could not understand how this was possible. The trustees seemed to be reasonable, non-MAGA people, well aware that dictatorship was bad. Yes, they were scared, but that couldn’t explain why they wouldn’t go to court.
Exchanges with you were very illuminating. Here was someone utterly reasonable, who was not only fine with the cave-in to the dictator, but seemed to be of the opinion that it was just a start, given the entrenched antisemitism problem. Columbia was full of people who wanted to kill your family and start a second Holocaust, so dangerous that you were telling students not to come here. To deal with this horrific situation, a T-Rex was needed and collaboration with the new Fascist dictatorship was a necessary evil.
So, I had a possible partial explanation for the decisions of the trustees. Some people with influence on the decisions, trustees or possibly large donors, have the same mental illness you do, and see the issue of dealing with Trump the way you do. Is this actually the case and part of the real explanation? I have no idea.
Peter-that’s all well and good, but you could ask that question at any time- who really has sway at a university like Columbia?
To me a thought experiment is in order here. Do you think if Harris had won the election, and there were no pro Israel people of influence behind the scenes that in the long run we would not have ended up in substantially the same place with the perceived ever more forceful crackdown on the protests, lost donations and with locked gates, etc.? I am quite sure we would have. You only have to look at Columbia from 1968-1972 to see the answer. Eventually when the people protesting repeatedly disrupt university function, the university will adjust to it in this way. Balancing the right to speak and protest with a functioning campus is always hard, and there are always lines beyond which the university will take actions some find oppressive and some think came too late. The question of who is telling the university not to fight is also not so mysterious. Only Harvard is fighting and only because they were asked things so comically untenable they had no choice. Is it right for universities not to fight? I don’t think so-but to me that’s not an Israel-Gaza thing. Universities are so risk averse they eventually cause damage to themselves . They have a hide and wait mentally like the Catholic Church. I’ve seen this first hand dealing with general council and I know it’s true elsewhere too. It was this same risk aversion that caused paralysis in the face of proper leadership when the protests started ironically.
Peter, I don’t think you are antisemitic. However, you are flirting with statements which are very close to it. It is okay to claim that there is no antisemitisms in Columbia (although I disagree). But claiming that because Scott thinks otherwise he is delusional is just gaslighting.
Scott,
This is the third time I’ve felt morally obligated to say this: STOP HALLUCINATING NASTY OPINIONS FROM PEOPLE WHO DISAGREE WITH YOU. You were so careful about the definition of Zionism a few days ago (side note: I agree with your definition, I just think it’s not who protesters think of when they say “Zionist”. I also think the desire for an enforced, ethnically pure Israel is fundamentally disgusting and misguided, but that’s for another time.) Why can’t you take that same level of care when reading Peter’s words?
@Peter: I see. So this is all my fault — or rather, given my obvious lack of causal role in any of this, it’s the fault of mysterious elites who I’ve never met but who think just like me (these “Scott Aaronson billionaires,” at least one of whom I wish would cut a check to the OG Scott Aaronson!).
Two questions:
1) Given how otherwise reasonable and non-dictatorial you say these elites are, does the thought ever cross your mind that maybe they … actually have a point about the antisemitism thing? Maybe, for example, they’ve simply spent a lot more time than you have, or than “AJewishGuy” has for that matter, reading the CUAD/intifada types in their own words, arguing with them, desperately searching for a non-genocidal vision of what they want to have happen to the Israelis, anything involving peace and coexistence, and failing to find any such vision? So, maybe these Zionists sadly concluded, after decades of such experiences, that the rule that’s held infallibly for 2000 years — namely, “when someone talks about gloriously killing the Jews, assume they’re serious” — hasn’t suddenly found its first-ever exception today?
2) To date, we have (alas) zero examples of universities getting their funding back, not by cooperating with the fascists and not by resisting them either. So it’s still early to say what approach works or doesn’t work. One thing seems clear, though: showing the country that we, universities, are willing to enforce the rules on our books against masked, violent intifada hoodlums would either help us survive or, at worst, be neutral. Given that, isn’t it counterproductive to denounce the people pursuing that goal — if, that is, the thing you care about is universities surviving this crisis, rather the intifada people’s power to win, by screaming and intimidation, a war over universities’ values that they couldn’t win by argument?
Dave,
Pre-Trump we already had a long list of problems associated with the protests, including the ones you mention. Scott and many others I know were telling people not to come here because of the dangerous antisemites. The university administration’s “yes we have a terrible antisemitism problem but we’re trying to do something about it” campaign wasn’t working. This was annoying, but I was perfectly able to mostly ignore it and go about my work.
Then Trump realized he could exploit this to try and destroy this and other universities, exercising dictatorial powers under the excuse that this was the only way to solve the antisemitism problem, keep Scott’s family from being killed and stop the second Holocaust. This was obviously absurd, but Scott and many others took it seriously and for this reason supported the idea that Trump doing this was a good thing. Does the same craziness have anything to do with the current situation the trustees have put us in? I don’t have any evidence for this, but I also can’t come up with any explanation that makes sense to me for what the trustees are now doing.
I don’t have any opinion on what the right thing to do is to control disruptive student protests. It’s a difficult and complicated problem with no good answer. One thought though is that if a few years ago we had been told “a group of 100 students has entered a Butler reading room and put up banners protesting fracking”, everyone would have just ignored them and gone back to work. Public safety and administrators would have dealt with the problem somehow. The bogus accusations of antisemitism and the desire to fight the Gaza war here made the whole thing toxic last year, and Trump’s exploiting this has been disastrous for the university.
Yiftach,
Sorry, but Scott and others ARE delusional on this topic, and the untrue accusations they have been making about this university have been extremely damaging. I’m not going to apologize for pointing this out.
What they were doing before Trump was quite bad. Topping it off by signing up to collaborate with a Fascist dictator to destroy the people you think are your enemies is much worse.
Scott,
Besides the fact that your goals are delusional, what I’m criticizing is your choice to pursue them by collaborating with a Fascist dictatorship. I’m not going to further waste time trying to deal with your delusions about what is going on here.
As for what universities should do now: they should fight in court, they should tell the truth, and they should not collaborate.
Peter,
Firstly, there is an interpretation of the action of the trustees that is rational and has nothing to do with antisemitism. They might be thinking long term that winning in court might solve the short term problem of grants, but Trump is vindictive and in the long term this will guarantee that Columbia will not get any future grants. On the other hand, achieving some agreement will not risk future grants. (I have no idea whether this is true, but it is a possibility.)
Regarding antisemitism, there are lots of different possibilities of what people mean when they talk about “Zionists”, “Intifada”, “Palestine will be free”, etc. In particular, Scott’s interpretation is a possibility. Moreover, I think it is very possible that organizers of the protests keep it vague on purpose and discouraging participants to discuss it, exactly to be able to tell different groups different things. So claiming that Scott’s understanding of this language is delusional seems based on your reluctant to deal with uncomfortable possibilities.
Finally, I just wish to point out a question that does not seem to be discussed, why does large part of the public turned against universities? There are somewhat lazy answers (although partially correct) about the use of social media (mainly by the right), antisemitism, DEI, the way covid was dealt with, people like you exposing deep problems with science, the replication problem and similar credibility issues. However, in my view, the biggest things is that universities seized to be a tool for social mobility for many students. Studying in university gets people in such debt that it is a serious gamble for most students. It is not surprising that many resent universities.
Yiftach,
It’s just as illegal for Trump to refuse to approve grants to Columbia in the future as it is for him to cancel current ones. To legally do this he needs to do an investigation and prove to a judge that Columbia has a major antisemitism problem it refuses to deal with. He can’t do this because that is a lie (no matter what Scott thinks or says).
I don’t think it’s hard to understand why most of the students are participating in these protests: it’s not because they are antisemites, want to kill Scott’s family and start a second Holocaust. Just pick up the New York Times and read the same stories the students are reading about what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. They want to do something about this.
I agree with you that there’s a justified public resentment of elite universities because of their role in perpetuating and making worse an increasing level of inequality in US society. This isn’t at all though why Trump wants to destroy elite universities, since increasing levels of inequality are fine with him.
Peter,
Glad to see you standing up to Scott on this. I have read his blog for a long time now. It is sad to see how an otherwise rational person can be so delusional (whether because of indoctrination or ignorance, I don’t know) about something as obvious and undeniably true as what you’re saying. Namely, of course antisemitism exists, but to claim that it is a major problem at elite universities (including Columbia) is unhinged.
Jews are 2.4% of the US population. Over 5% of professors are Jewish and although difficult to get an accurate count, I’ve seen sources indicating that 20+% of professors at the Ivy leagues are Jewish and 10% of students at the Ivy leagues are Jewish.
The exact figures are irrelevant as either way, Jews make up a higher portion of students, faculty, and likely administration staff at elite universities than they do of the general population. There is of course nothing wrong with that. But it’s one of many indicators that the idea of rampant antisemitism at elite universities is, as you have said, a hallucination.
As for Scott’s constantly invoking his online arguments with “CUAD/intifada types”: any group or person can post anything racist, antisemitic, offensive, etc., online. But just because some fringe group has done so in no way indicates that this country is careening toward the second Holocaust that Scott is ranting about.
Scott is an easy online target for these lunatics because of how easily he gets triggered by online comments. Part of the problem is that he’s confused his online experiences with the real world—as evidenced by the fact that he can’t accept real-world evidence (e.g., your on-the-ground experiences at Columbia) and instead keeps returning to his experiences with online trolls as evidence of rampant antisemitism at elite universities.
Peter-
While I agree that I personally would fight this straight up and down in court, there are very obvious reasons why Columbia is not. This has been my point and I guess this is also part (?) of Yiftach’s point. One doesn’t need to make conspiracy theories here. As I have said What Trump is doing to Penn, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins and the like is also illegal and damaging. They are not fighting in court. What Trump has done with overhead which impacts all universities is illegal-where is the fight? To see what is mostly going on, let’s look at past Columbia and University history:
1.In the early 70s the federal government threatened to take *all* of Columbia federal funding away for non-compliance with civil rights laws in hiring. Columbia stalled for nearly 2 years when the government froze funding. After a 5 month freeze Columbia scrambled to be in compliance and have their funding restored. While compliance is something we liberals say was the right thing-there were lots of faculty who were unhappy and felt we would now be using quotas for hiring.
2.In 2013 Columbia and all universities got a “Dear Colleague” letter saying that the way sexual assault would be adjudicated on campus would move to a preponderance of evidence basis, or else no federal funding. Most universities seemed somewhat uncomfortable with this (I know Columbia was) but they complied.
What does this mean to you? To me it means universities will do their very most to comply until a far line is crossed. Those examples didn’t come close to that line. In the cases of Harvard and Columbia, just like the first example above, *some* of the demands are most definitely something the universities want, some are uncomfortable, and some are a strict NO (Harvard). For example I can guess the university is thrilled to have an excuse to reorder rules and the senate. Look what happened viz the senate and Shafik. In fact the senate had become a drag even going back to the last 5 years of Bollinger (who stopped showing up). Basically universities will comply when they feel they can and should, and the line for that compliance is going to be further down the road than you like. You simply don’t need to invoke cabals of shadowy figures to explain.
>It’s just as illegal for Trump to refuse to approve grants to Columbia in the future as it is for him to cancel current ones.
You are missing something Peter. The Trump administration can easily do this outside of the courts. Since Trump has put loyalists in charge of the NSF, NIH, etc, they can manipulate the system by simply making sure you deem the grant less competitive via the reviewers you pick, the panelists you pick, or simply via the opinions of program officers. This can’t be touched by any court on any reasonable timescale. This has already been acknowledged by Harvard-you could eventually prove this by discovery but it is much harder than a judge just waving his or her hand.
Dave,
My understanding is that a large group of universities did go to court to fight on the ICR rate (and won, at least temporarily), see for instance
https://www.aip.org/fyi/judge-blocks-doe-move-to-cut-indirect-cost-rate
The previous examples of this that you mention did not involve illegal government action. I should emphasize that I’m not saying the university should not negotiate with the government, or try to find some way to satisfy the demands being made. I am saying that it is not comprehensible to me that the university is refusing to exercise its legal right to challenge illegal actions of a dictatorship in court. I’m not understanding this as a practical matter maybe because I’m missing information. But more importantly, I’m not understanding this at all as a moral matter. I’m not big on moral outrage, the world is a complicated place and people do what they do for complicated reasons. But, as a moral issue, I just find this decision incomprehensible and appalling. This was how I felt before the Harvard story, and now that they have gone to court and we’ve seen explicitly what negotiation with these people looks like, I feel even more strongly about this.
The early 70s story was before my time, but I do remember the 2013 story, and thought it was pretty bad at the time. The Laura Kipnis book “Unwanted Advances” shows well what that unleashed. It was a sorry example of abuse of government power (but not of dictatorial illegality). In retrospect it and some other similar actions did a huge amount of damage, not just because of the unfair way people got treated in some cases, but because it discredited this kind of civil rights legislation. It also clearly is what gave the Trump people the idea to do what they did (“look how successful the left was at weaponizing “sexual assault” accusations, we can do the same with “antisemitism” and really mess up our enemies”).
>The previous examples of this that you mention did not involve illegal government action.
I am not so sure. How is it different for a non-congressional agency in 1971 to freeze Columbia’s funding due to claimed civil rights violations that were not adjudicated in court from the Trump administration doing the same thing over claims of violations of FAIR v Harvard (which probably have some legal merit)? It is just that the current administration is so scattershot that they have lots of stated “reasons” for holding money-some of them might have a legal precedent, some are clearly crazy.
Dave,
About agencies operating under instructions to find some way to make sure Columbia didn’t get grants. I’m not saying that would be easy to fight in court, I’m just saying it would be illegal.
If the Trump people were very clever about finding ways to hide their illegality, yes, it would be hard to fight in court. But that’s not what they do, the illegality is out in the open. And that’s intentional. If you publicly broadcast that you are breaking the law and no one challenges you, you have proved to everyone that you are successfully able to operate outside the law. No one any more has any legal protection from your actions and everyone has to do whatever you say. This is why I think, whatever the practicalities, Columbia and other institutions have a moral obligation to go to court.
Dave,
I’m not familiar with the details of the 1971 story and not interested in spending the time necessary to learn about what really happened back then. The facts were very different than the current ones, and those were very different times (we’re talking about actions of the Richard Nixon administration, intensely hated by liberals, to impose a controversial policy favored by liberals on a rather liberal institution…)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41822149
“We are no longer in all respects an independent private university. Our access to federal and state resources depends on our ability to provide a level of accountability heretofore not practiced or even envisioned at Columbia University… We simply must be prepared… to subject ourselves to an external scrutiny that makes us all occasionally uncomfortable. I see no other way.”
-President McGill, 1972.
>The facts were very different than the current ones
From a legal standpoint this is not relevant. Yes this wasn’t pushed by Nixon (indeed we had independent agencies then), but I am not asking about interpretation of motivations.
Dave,
The quote starts to explain to me the 1971 context better (Columbia struggling with the fact that it had to follow new civil rights laws). I still think that is completely different than the current context (Columbia has been following civil rights laws, is struggling with dictatorial illegality).
There’s a basic problem here that I’m not a lawyer and there’s no information available about what legal advice the university is getting. But I’m looking at the totality of the Trump actions against universities, and seeing what on its face is blatant, outrageous illegality (can the president really just say “wouldn’t it be cool?” and take your funds away?). I just can’t believe the university has no legal recourse.
One thought that just occurred to me is that it would be helpful if Shipman would form not a committee to get better PR, but a committee to examine the trustee’s decision not to go to court. Appoint a group of respected people from the law school and other faculties, give them access to the details of the negotiations and the legal advice the trustees have gotten on legal options. If such a group would report back that the trustees were making the right decision on this, that would start to restore my confidence a lot more than the launch of a PR campaign.
The problem is that the trustees are operating outside of any constraints that would make them answerable to the university community. They have made decisions that appear to be morally indefensible and have wrecked the university’s reputation. There needs to be some mechanism for them to explain and justify to the community what they have done.
This will be the last comment I’ll make on this. First-as noted about the uses and abuses of Civil Rights legislation on universities from the press at that time: “In November 1971, HEW’s Office for Civil Rights announced its intent to institute proceedings for Columbia’s permanent debarment—even though no charges or findings of discrimination had been made” (in the article that last line is in bold).
That’s one point. Is that viewed as different from the illegality of the Trump assault?
Second-I am trying to separate morality, motivations, and legality. Morally I agree with most everything of what you have posted here about the need to stand and fight. But this thread started with a discussion of the motivations of those making decisions, Zionist donors, etc. Because you seem to not have a grasp of the history, it is pointing you in more complicated directions about motivations. The reality is much simpler than you seem to be implying. The government has exerted pressures on universities for 60 years (I am not talking about the politics of this or the degree). Universities, as risk-averse enterprises will assess if the demands are ones they actually agree with, ones they are uncomfortable with, and ones they simply cannot abide. They will then try to walk that line. That is what is happening with all universities now, including Columbia. Could they be more comfortable with some things than you and I would [They=leadership+trustees]? Of course, but probably not by as much as you think. As for the legality of it all-yes much of what Trump is doing is illegal but the history here is important and informs decision making. In this regard-you might be interested in the off-topic fact that it was Jimmy Carter who enacted the largest visa cancellation and deportation operation for speech he didn’t like targeting Iranian students (https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/indifferent-to-the-fate-of-freedom-elsewhere). Bad then. Bad now. Borderline illegal. Borderline being the operative word.
Dave,
Thanks for providing the different perspective. I’m still not convinced by the 1971 precedent. There are since then over 50 years of legislative history and court decisions about what the government can and can’t do to enforce civil rights legislation. I’m finding it extremely hard to believe that the Trump actions are not in violation of these and that the university has no legal recourse. I remain mystified by the motivations of the trustees.
If Columbia did go to court, how would they deal with Department of Education v. California? It seems like a very risky strategy.
Remember what Learned Hand said: “I should dread a lawsuit beyond almost anything short of sickness and death.” Courts are often reasonably responsive (i.e., weeks not years) when people’s personal freedom from physical confinement is at stake, but lawsuits between very rich entities involving only money can drag on for years, and the result is never guaranteed.
Willard Moore,
Again, I’m not a lawyer. The Supreme Court decision in that case was procedural, about the issue of whether a lower court could force the Trump administration to keep paying while the issue was being decided. Losing that obviously is not good, and in general the Supreme Court is Trump-friendly. Because of the obvious illegality, it seems to me likely that lower courts will rule against Trump, the Supreme Court a question mark. The huge amount of illegality engaged in by Trump will likely mean many cases getting to them. Will they rule that Fascist dictatorship is consistent with an original intent reading of the US constitution? I certainly don’t know.
But I just don’t think Columbia has any choice. If you look at the McMahon letter to Harvard, that is direct from Trump’s office. and it makes clear the choice: you get the money back only if you become MAGA-U under our control. And, in any case, the intention is to largely defund for everyone the main grant-providing agencies, so the grants won’t be available anyway.
Columbia thought that by agreeing to the original demands, they would get the money back. Instead, they got nothing, except a further round of grant cancellations. Whatever they are supposedly negotiating about now, what conceivable reason is there to believe this is being done in good faith? If they agree to a new cave-in and do more of what the Trump people want, they may or may not get some money back. But by accepting the principle that Trump can just remove all your funding whenever he’s not happy with something you’re doing, what they will have done is to have put the university under his direct control. Harvard realizes this and is acting accordingly. I’m guessing we’ll find out the next chapter in the Columbia story only after graduation (May 21) is over.
The Republicans control Congress. If the law doesn’t allow them to cut funding, they can change the law – there’s no filibuster on budget items – now or next year. They likely don’t need that. A determined admin can do a lot of bureaucratic stunts, and the Courts are overloaded anyway.
This isn’t about antisemitism or universities not resisting enough. Ultimately, you cannot escape the poor relations of the US academy with at least half of America, likely more. Trump is ruthless enough to just do it, but when he’s gone, someone else will eventually follow. The universities cannot force others to grant them budgets. Without repairing this relationship, trouble will always follow.
Y.,
If the law changes, the universities will have to follow the law. But it’s driving me crazy that so many people seem to think it’s not worth any effort to try and preserve a nation of laws. I’m not saying going to court is going to solve the university’s problem, I’m saying that not doing it to appease a new dictator is a moral failing of the highest order.
Peter,
Dave expended my point about why we cannot be sure what the reasons the trustees do not apply to court. Of course there might be other reasons which neither I or you or Dave think about.
Regarding your assumption about why most of the students that participate in the protest do so, I think we do not have enough information to say that (ironically, partially because of the face masking). However, we do know that some (many?) of the participants (either Americans or not) belong to particular groups in which antisemitism prevails. So the assumptions that most of them are not antisemitic seems to me quite doubtful.
Finally, similarly to Y, I think universities will have to win in the court of public opinion. Essentially, this is how democracy is suppose to work. However, as I was trying to point out in my third point, universities currently are doing the wrong things. Moreover, I don’t see much effort to actually fight on public opinion. It feels to me very similar to the reasons (in my opinion) that the left is loosing elections all over the world: they are so convinced they are right that they do not bother to engage with anyone who disagree with them. (At least now I see some democratic politicians in the USA trying to engage with people outside their camp.)
Yiftach,
I’ve been here at Columbia for 36 years, and at this one or very similar other such institutions (Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley) for 50 years. The best aspects of Jewish culture and intellectual traditions are well-represented and valued at these places. During these 50 years I’ve not seen evidence of anti-Semitism. I have seen a lot of criticism of the actions of the current Israeli government, which is widely unpopular here.
What I’ve also seen among the students for 50 years, starting with the Spartacist Youth League at Harvard in the 1970s is a small number of students with a reductive view that the problems of the world are “imperialism” or some such, and a naive view that “revolutionary action” is needed to fight this. This is not anti-Semitism (many such students are Jewish).
Given the appalling news from Gaza and the West Bank, and everything I know from 50 years of interacting with students and faculty, the conjecture that students at Butler were doing what they were doing not to protest the actions of the Israeli government, but because they were anti-Semites is just absurd. If you’ve been around a place like this and know anything about the students here, it’s obvious who they were and what they thought they were doing.
Universities like Columbia have some very real problems and there are some valid reasons they have bad PR. That they are full of antisemites is not one of them, but a lie, one of the mountain of lies that has wrecked this country.
Y-
I don’t think the left is losing elections around the world-what is happing is there are now election-to-electron swings back and forth in a very unstable way. 2024 was the first year on record where every incumbent party in a major election lost vote shares-that includes right and left. And we just saw what happened in Canada and Australia-this is just a sign of political instability and people around the world dissatisfied with how things are going overall but not finding an outlet.
I agree with Peter that there are genuine causes for the plummeting opinion of higher education, but he is right that the high degree of political polarization and the vector of social media engenders outrage farming that has also painted an inaccurate picture of things leading to this as well. In that regard you might be interested to read this old time capsule from way back (not that it’s viewpoints are ones I ascribe to, but just as a historical benchmark: https://www.commentary.org/articles/paul-seabury/hew-the-universities/). In it you will find a discussion of everything we are grappling with now: Defunding universities, affirmative action, viewport diversity…everything new is old in fact. I think it is important to try to separate what is right in terms of making changes to higher education from the politics of it all.
Peter,
Regarding antisemitism, it is a term used by different people to mean quite different things. Firstly, it is used to mean the classical meaning of hating all jews. The origin of this is often within religion beliefs (in more than one religion). Very few people in the western world will openly admit to it, so even if they hold this attitude they will hide it.
Secondly, anyone that object to the Israeli government is often being labelled antisemitic by right wing jews and right wing American politicians who use it for their political gain.
The third meaning, is the more subtle one that is of people who are against Israeli jews. These are people that are against Israeli jews and this includes Jewish people. This is essentially racism. Usually such people frame their objection to Israel within the objection to colonialism or more generally nationalism. But, they always seem to start with protesting against Israel. We never see them protesting against what China does. We never see them protesting against slavery in the Middle East. They never protest against various wars in Africa. Somehow, it is crucial to start the campaign against colonialism with Israel. Unfortunately, I don’t have another good term for it. You could call it anti-Israeli, but unfortunately this is being mixed (deliberately by such people) with the second term to hide the racist aspect of it.
Regarding universities, I never claimed antisemitism is the an important reason that large part of the public is against universities. On the contrary, I think it is an excuse used by Trump supporters. Most people who actually care about it are jews. Similarly, I doubt many people care about DEI in universities. It is used as a focal point for existing resentment. As I said, I believe the main issue is the fact that universities stopped functioning as a tool for social mobility. There are other issues, like the general arrogant often presented by academics towards justifying the funding of their research and the corruption of academic standards where academics cheat, but are not being punished.
There are several separate issues, and I feel the disagreement here isn’t actually wide. No one here is a fan of Trump or antisemitism, and we can’t really effect Middle East issues can we?
Trump should be resisted. Fighting this in the courts may be tactically useful (I’m not competent to judge), but ultimately what makes him back off is public opinion and economic damage. This may work quicker – and is also the more useful long term strategy. There’s a critical need to explain to the voters and to corporations how bad this is for them.
It is notable how little public backlash Trump is getting on his academic policies, and how little political opposition he gets for this even from the Left. Eventually some ‘liberal’ pol will become President and they might restore saner policies, but they won’t hold power forever either. An on/off revenue stream isn’t very useful. There’s a need for public support and a funding model not so dependent on the whims of government.
Dave – Right/Left paradigm is useful but up to a point. The Right used to be angry at radical students, not the academy as a whole, and the silence from the Left is notable.
Y-you should read God and Man at Yale