Harvard has gone ahead and done what Columbia should have done a month and a half ago: filed a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s illegal cutoff of funding for grants hosted at the university. The statement from Harvard about this is here, the complaint itself is here. Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but it’s impossible for me to believe that under the US constitutional system the president can legally issue an order to remove funding from an institution either because he thinks (see point 67 in the complaint) “Wouldn’t that be cool?” or because he wishes to take control of an institution he doesn’t like and remake it to his liking.
The acting president of Columbia a few days ago was complaining to the faculty that a way needed to be found to “change the narrative.” Right now, there’s an obvious way to get started on that: Columbia needs to file a similar lawsuit or take part in a joint lawsuit on this issue with Harvard and other institutions. I’m hoping we’ll hear encouraging news about this soon.
In the day’s local news, some students have chained themselves to one of the university gates to protest the arrest and imprisonment of Khalid and Mahdawi. Note that the gate the students locked themselves to is a gate that already is locked and not in use, so by doing this they are in no way interfering with anyone in any way. If acting president Shipman really wants to change the narrative, she could speak out against the treatment of Khalil and Mahdawi on behalf of the university.
Update: First response from the Trump administration here. It’s not about anti-semitism, it’s about defunding science at research universities because of their “grossly overpaid bureaucrats”:
“The gravy train of federal assistance to institutions like Harvard, which enrich their grossly overpaid bureaucrats with tax dollars from struggling American families is coming to an end,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, wrote in an emailed statement in response to the lawsuit.
He added: “Taxpayer funds are a privilege, and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege.”
About the “grossly overpaid bureaucrats” argument, while I don’t think that’s going to help the Trump side win in court, at least it’s finally something on which some faculty will agree with Trump…
Update: 200 presidents of US universities and colleges have signed a Call for Constructive Engagement
As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.
One name conspicuously missing is Claire Shipman’s. When will the Columbia trustees stop trying to appease the Fascists trying to destroy their institution and start fighting back, even if just to the extent of signing a statement like this?
Update: Columbia has now signed, Shipman’s name is in the latest list of names here.
Update: The New York Times has a long article about what has been going on behind the scenes at Harvard. It gives a good idea of what likely has been going on at a similar level here at Columbia. I had been thinking of these discussions as happening just between the trustees, but the NYT story makes clear that large donors can wield significantly more influence than most of the trustees. What Columbia is doing unfortunately makes a lot more sense looking at things this way.
Update: It’s important to emphasize to those not here at Columbia the extent to which we are living in an unusual security environment which has been very successful in achieving its goal of suppressing any anti-Israel protest. On Monday some protesters tethered themselves to a campus gate (one that has been locked for the past year for security reasons). In the past the university generally left protestors who were not obstructing anything alone, but the current policy is very different: they were taken into custody by the NYPD. On Tuesday, Trump official Linda McMahon said she was “very pleased” with this. Still, Columbia hasn’t gotten any of its cancelled grant funds back yet. She also said she was pleased with how negotiations with Columbia are going, which is disturbing to hear, since it indicates Columbia is showing no signs of joining Harvard and others in fighting the Fascist dictatorship.
A story from NBC News reports a super-secret plan to try to start a new encampment at the Columbia campus. The super-secret plan and meeting was described by three people to NBC News, and a recording of the meeting was provided to their reporters. In response, the university has clamped down even harder on security, and issued a statement saying there would be no tolerance for encampments.
Over at Barnard, the Trump administration is helping Jewish faculty and staff feel more safe by sending them texts to their private phones asking them about whether they are Jewish and their practice of Judaism.
I’m encouraged by Scott Aaronson’s latest post, telling Harvard to “Fight Fiercely” against the Trump Administration’s illegal effort to make Harvard do what it wants by cutting off research funding. This is quite a change from his attitude when Columbia first came under this kind of attack from the country’s new dictator. In Columbia’s case, he was looking forward to having this exact sort of attack improve the horrible problem of “antisemitism” here. Many people tried to point out to him at the time, with little effect, that this wasn’t about antisemitism at all, and he should instead have been calling for Columbia not to give in, but to “fight fiercely”. I hope he and others will join the effort to get the Columbia trustees and donors to understand that they need to fight, and that collaborating with the Fascist dictatorship in hopes of furthering one’s personal agenda is not a good idea.
Update: NASA has just announced that as of the end of May it is terminating the lease of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences which operates out of a Columbia-owned building at 112th and Broadway (above Tom’s Restaurant, of Seinfeld fame). GISS has a long and distinguished history in space science, going back to 1961 (see here). After next month, employees will be working remotely, unclear what the future is. Also unclear if this has anything to do with the Trump administration’s continuing effort to apply pressure to Columbia, or if this is some DOGE-thing of just canceling all leases of office space to supposedly save money.
Update: More on the “Are you a Jew?” texts here. They also went to people at Columbia, not just Barnard. Columbia says they only gave out people’s personal contact information in response to a subpoena, and warned those affected in advance that this had happened (Barnard did not do this).
A new detail about the Khalil case is that his arrest was even more Gestapo-style than previously thought: the ICE people who dragged him away from his apartment building did so without any kind of warrant.
The playing fields in the center of campus are now occupied by hundreds and hundreds of students. It’s a really nice spring day and they’re enjoying laying around on the grass and having a good time. As long as they don’t say anything about Palestine, they should be fine.
https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/ohio-state-university/ohio-state-faculty-to-vote-on-joining-big-ten-coalition-against-trumps-actions/
Peter,
I’m very sorry to witness what the world has become, and how the Trump administration is actively dismantling the United States—and, to a large extent, the world.
In another World War II parallel, one can be certain that the kind of brain drain Hitler caused in Germany, when many of its top scientists left, is also bound to happen in the U.S.
Here in Europe, we are already talking about it:
https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/professor-us-universities-could-be-coaxed-to-open-campuses-in-sweden
Columbia has now signed.
Dave,
Thanks for the encouraging news, I’ll update the post.
The public statement is open to scholarly societies, it is quite disappointing not to see the President of the AMS amongst the signatories.
And now, Columbia University has given the cell phone numbers of Barnard professors to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. See this NYT article. Did they have a warrant for getting these cell phone numbers? Would any judge in their right mind have approved such a warrant?
Or is Columbia/Barnard once again trying shamelessly to curry favor with the government?
What is “shared Jewish/Israeli ancestry” anyway?
François Loeser,
This public statement is mostly on the part of universities, concerned specifically with the intense attack underway on the research funding, foreign students and anti-Israel protests at universities. Professional societies like the AMS should join the fight, but they need to get their memberships behind this, something they haven’t even started doing.
Peter Shor,
The Barnard administration and board of trustees is separate from Columbia. As far a I know, they are not involved in the current negotiations between Columbia and the government, and the cancellation of research grants is not a big issue there. The large research operations are at the Columbia medical school and in general hosted at Columbia.
What is going on at Barnard is an intense effort to use Title VI and other civil rights laws in a McCarthyite campaign to deter or punish anyone opposed to the actions of the Israeli government. This latest story is part of that effort. The Barnard administration claims that under civil rights laws they had to hand over this personal information. In this ugly part of the current story, one should keep in mind that the people behind it are not just Trump administration officials, but also alumni and others within the college who want to bring down those they consider their enemies.
Yes, so long as there was a possibility that universities could keep their funding by simply taking actions on antisemitism that I genuinely believed pre-Trumpian civil rights law required them to take anyway — I thought that they should try that (as they did). Once it became clear that no such actions would suffice, I switched to saying that universities needed to “fight fiercely” in court (as they are). I was clear about my line. The line was crossed.
I do hope it will peel off some support for MAGA’s crackdown on universities once people understand that they’ve now lost, not merely the academics who flat-out deny the reality of the problems that motivated the crackdown, but even most of the academics who agree about the problems, and who the crackdown was supposedly meant to help.
Scott,
Thanks. I’m glad things are changing. Since the beginning of this I’ve been highly frustrated by the difficulty of getting people (from the Columbia trustees on down…) to focus on what seems to me the simple and obvious issue: it’s a complete collapse of the US constitutional system to allow the executive to just defund an institution that displeases him, with the excuse for this defunding not relevant. If you accept that this is OK, you are accepting that dictatorship is OK.
In another part of the multiverse, Eric Weinstein is head of the NSF, Columbia is defunded and being told that to get funding back they need to start by cutting out the cancer of string theory research. I’d like to think that the Peter Woit in that universe is strongly objecting to Columbia caving in to that demand.
It seems to me that Leviathan now has an incentive to reach a compromise agreement with Columbia: to sow dissension at Harvard. Perhaps the game theorists out there could comment.
Art,
Yes, it seems quite possible the Trump people are now offering Columbia a better deal, because if Columbia caves and refuses to fight, it will help them a lot in their fight with Harvard and attempt to takeover other leading research universities.
I’m hoping against hope that the Columbia trustees and donors both realize this and have some principles. If they cave to get some money back, they are doing so not just at a long-term cost to Columbia’s reputation, but also at a large cost to the nationwide fight against Fascist dictatorship that is now underway.
François Loeser,
The AMS today has issued a call to action, see
https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=7462
Unfortunately it has nothing to do with fighting dictatorial actions, it’s just asking legislators to vote significantly more money for the NSF
“I write today to ask you to submit a programmatic request–to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee–of \$9.9 billion for FY2026 National Science Foundation (NSF) appropriations.”
FY2025 final appropriation was \$9.0 billion.
Peter,
Thank you for the info, let’s hope this is an indication that the AMS will become more combative.
François Loeser,
Unfortunately I’m not so optimistic that the AMS (or other organizations like it) will step up and face the historic challenge of this moment. Besides the usual reasons one doesn’t step up to fight a bully (cowardice, not wanting to get seriously hurt), in this case there are two particular factors that are playing a large role.
1. The tactic being used by Trump is to paint the universities as antisemitic. If you defend the universities, doesn’t that make you an antisemite too?
2. The AMS and other such organizations arguably went too far in 2020, with their presidents putting out statements on events and issues little related to the mission of the organization. For example, I’m thinking of
https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6177
I’m guessing the current leadership of the AMS now sees this as an example of what not to do.
“The playing fields in the center of campus are now occupied by hundreds and hundreds of students. It’s a really nice spring day and they’re enjoying laying around on the grass and having a good time. As long as they don’t say anything about Palestine, they should be fine.”
This is the whole point. The playing fields in the center of campus are not designed to be used for political protests having nothing to do with Columbia, nor should they be.
Diogenes,
You don’t know much about the history of Columbia, which until this academic year had a long tradition of students protesting all sorts of things. The difficult issues with protests in the past typically revolved around protests obstructing classes or other university business, not what they did in the middle of the big lawns at the center of campus.
Even if you’re happy to see a stop put to that tradition, the US until recently had something called the First Amendment, which protected people’s right to say what they want about topics of current relevance such as the war in Gaza. If you try and do that publicly here now, you’re in danger of arrest, or maybe just getting photographed by pro-Israel activists, doxxed, your info sent to the Trump administration for action and, if you’re not a US citizen, ending up in a hole in Louisiana.
This campus is really beautiful right now, and things look very normal. I’m not the only one though who is very aware of the intense security we are living under and the serious danger anyone in this community puts themselves in if they say anything publicly about what is going on in Gaza.
Hi Peter,
as you know I disagree with this. While I agree with your more overarching points about Trump v Columbia, the trustees, the abduction of student protesters, etc. I feel that, while acknowledging that it was presented with a difficult set of circumstances it was not well-prepared to face, last Spring was a very big failure for the university.
1.We need to understand that the taking over of public spaces is a violation of the first amendment in fact. It is one reason you cannot make an encampment in a park (yes Occupy Wall Street was illegal*). It blocks others from voicing their viewpoints on the same space. This is one reason why I always have harped on having proper time, place and manner rules that are laid out beforehand. One can protest, but there have to be guidelines, and punishment for violations of them. This has to be done uniformly and objectively, regardless of the nature of the protest and the political content.
2.Whatever (sometimes disingenuous) glorification of the history of protest we have here, we should acknowledge that the motivation for the protests and the means of protest are two different things. The ’68 protests were incredibly damaging to the university. The lessons learn from that were, in my mind, largely the wrong ones. On the other hand the tactics and approach of the Apartheid protestors in the 80’s were quite different, and the latter group made serious efforts to not disrupt academic life around the protests.
3.We need to also acknowledge that a private university is not bound by the 1st amendment anyway. I for one would like the university to stick as closely to it as possible, and for me that means that indeed we should have pro-Palestinian protests if desired by those groups as long as rules are followed (not taking over buildings, disrupting classes or sleep, making encampments, etc.). However the fact is that Columbia has disciplined several people individually for speech it deems racist or sexist (that in 2 cases, in my mind, are more mild than some of the things said last Spring on campus), and in fact this scrutiny and threat of discipline is still going on. This is obviously hypocritical-free speech can’t have a political litmus test attached to it, but somehow this is still happening.
*The order does not prevent protesters from gathering in the park, but says their First Amendment rights not do include remaining there, “along with their tents, structures, generators, and other installations to the exclusion of the owner’s reasonable rights and duties to maintain Zuccotti Park.”
Dave,
I’m focused on the current situation, don’t really have an opinion on what are the best sets of rules to have governing protest and how to enforce them fairly. Also, questions about what should have been done differently last spring don’t seem much relevant to what is going on now.
I do think one useful thing I can do since I’m on the campus almost every day is just report as fairly as I can what I see actually going on here, and also what is not going on.
What is going on is, in a campus environment of utter peace and quiet, an oppressive level of security. To get to my office I have to pass through two security checkpoints (for the last few weeks they’ve added a security person in front of the math building door, no one knows why). A younger, non-white colleague tells me he now avoids coming into the office because of all the security.
What is not going on here is pro-Palestinian protest (the few small exceptions to this I know about I’ve reported on here), and it’s important that that fact be wider known. This is an absence I don’t know the full explanation of. One part of the explanation is that an established faculty member with a green card tells me he would not participate in any demonstration now because of fear of getting deported. The university has new regulations governing protests which I don’t understand. Is it being in violation of those and getting expelled or arrested what is stopping people? Is it the danger of becoming the target of a Title VI investigation (I’ve had people writing me telling me I’m an anti-Semite, so have thought about this)? Is it the danger of getting doxxed by any one of a number of pro-Israel groups and thus having one’s life and career ruined (or deported if not a citizen)? Or is it that the pro-Palestinian groups self-destructed due to the influence of people who thought that taking over Hamilton Hall was a good idea? I don’t know, all I know is what I see (and don’t see…).
I understand Peter. I am only responding to things like encampments=free speech, or that our history of protest suggests that a blanket approval of protests should be given. One could take that as what you suggest above. I think neither is true. If not, my post was unnecessary.
I don’t really see much evidence that you cannot protest here. What we have instead seen is either students chaining themselves to the gates, or suggestions of restarting encampments. Neither thing should be allowed in my view (although the first one requires some discussion and I could be persuaded otherwise)-not before Trump. Not after Trump. It has nothing to do with Trump. Decades after ’68 Mark Rudd admitted “all of our demands were of course bullshit.” However it is not the depth of conviction in the demands that is important, it is the form of the protest. There are many appropriate ways to protest, and you may be right even those ways would be shut down-I just don’t see evidence this is true.
Dave,
It’s important that people understand what actually is happening, as opposed to what the media coverage suggests. On “new encampments”, the story seems to be that some people met in Brooklyn to discuss doing this, never did anything. On “chaining themselves to the gates”, as far as I know there have been three such incidents,all involving very small numbers of students, and I saw all three. The first was at the Chapel gate, which has been closed forever and is far out of the way of any walkways or anything in use. The second was not at the Earl Hall gate near Math, but the ironwork away from the gate. The students again were not anywhere near obstructing anything, they were sitting on the grass next to the ironwork. And the “chain” was some kind of thin red cable. The last case was at the Amsterdam and 116th entrance to campus, where they were at the central part of the gate which has been been kept closed for the past year (the entrance thru the security checkpoint using the side gate was completely unobstructed and functioning normally).
The “chained” students were removed and taken into custody. Surely they were violating the rules, intentionally to make a point. The also intentionally were going out of their way to not obstruct or interfere with anyone or anything.
In both cases, the media stories I saw had photos from a year ago of the encampment then or large groups of masked students climbing a gate. Anyone who read the headlines and looked at the pictures would have a completely wrong idea about what was actually happening.
Peter-yes but again we are discussing 2 different things. I was only responding to your response above which read to me as I mentioned, not a statement that things are accurately portrayed in the media. My only issue with what the university did regarding the emails sent out was they should not change the rules about visitor passes and the like. If people come in and set up an encampment take it down and remove them. But I don’t see how this is repressive. The chain protests are a bit different. I saw the numbers of students and so on, so I know what happened. It was peaceful and not terribly disruptive as far as I could see. However if they truly had chained themselves to the gates (I have my doubts that they couldn’t just walk away) that is a safety risk to them for which the university is liable. Not so sure that is something any university just allows.
The concept of centers of learning as protest and disruption platforms for one side of the political aisle (whichever side) or even for both sides of the politcal aisle (not historically permitted in the Ivy Leauge) is prima facie a terrible idea. Columbia has run on full tilt to one side for many decades. But that’s not my point. My point is that learning and professional full-time protest don’t mix. It’s wildly obvious when people supposedly teaching kids are obsessed with with having the freedom to run a bullhorn about something happening far away, 24/7 on campus, that has nothing to do with campus. Seeing this correction is a vote in favor of real learning, not scammy protests. And claiming that if you can’t occupy a campus that your voice cannot be heard is ivory tower provincialism at it’s lamest.
Diogenes,
You have absolutely no idea at all what has been going on at Columbia, over decades, last year or now. The idea that Columbia has been a “full tilt to one side protest and disruption platform for many decades” or that we have faculty “obsessed with with having the freedom to run a bullhorn about something happening far away, 24/7 on campus” is just stupid Fox News propaganda.
Don’t you have anything better to do than go on the internet and rant about something you know nothing about?
Dave,
Yes, we are talking about two different things. I understand your interest in discussing the rules governing disruptive protest, but that’s both a complicated subject I’m not well informed about, and irrelevant to what is happening (there is virtually no protest of any kind, certainly not anything disruptive). The problems of the moment are getting the truth out that nothing disruptive is happening here and asking ourselves if a completely quiet situation where people are quiet because they are afraid is what we really want.
Well, when you have to swipe your ID just to enter campus I’d say things don’t seem normal to begin with.
“This is the whole point. The playing fields in the center of campus are not designed to be used for political protests having nothing to do with Columbia, nor should they be.”
what a strange statement. i went to college at a much more peaceful time and occupations and protests were standard
Ironic that legal protections were put in place recognising the value of diversity of thought on college campuses but in fact these protections are now used to defend a uniformity of thought. The pro Gaza protests are regrettable in my view, but defensible, but a system that routinely produces students who have the same uniform view is not defensible.
Faculty members at these elite institutions spontaneously respond to those holding opposing viewpoints as MAGA idiots. It is incredible to me that elite education in the US does not now foster critical thinking and discussion but rather set ideological political positions and simple derogatory labelling..
Please don’t respond to “Outside Looking In”. I normally immediately delete such things, but let that comment through because I happened to notice that the IP address it comes from is located in Russia (Moscow).
Maybe it’s from an earnest muscovite who has deep concerns about freedom of thought at elite US universities (as opposed to the local Russian ones). It seems a lot more likely though that this is part of the very extensive information/opinion war being conducted on the part of the Russian dictatorship in support of the nascent US one. When you read internet comments/tweets/etc., be aware that likely a large number of them are not what they seem to be.
Reading Melenchon’s blog, is it true that Columbia has withdrawn their diploma to some pro-palestinian students ?
martibal,
Last month the university finished its disciplinary process for the students involved in the building takeover (Hamilton Hall) of last spring. There’s a university statement here
https://communications.news.columbia.edu/news/university-statement-regarding-ujb-determinations
and a Columbia Spectator article here:
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/03/13/ujb-issues-expulsions-degree-revocations-and-suspensions-for-hamilton-hall-occupation/
The university refers to “temporary degree revocations” without more detail. That is an unusual punishment, unclear exactly what it means. It’s hard to get completely reliable information about this, because the university claims that privacy laws make it illegal for them to release any specific information about specific cases.
There was a huge amount of pressure on the university to forcefully punish these students, and I never followed the details of how this went. To be honest, I personally felt it hard to have much sympathy for these students, for multiple reasons. Their decision as a small group to break away from the highly successful non-violent encampment tactic to instead occupy a building, confront janitors and keep then from leaving, smash windows on beautiful old doors, etc. was a complete disaster for their own movement.
Thanks for the details, and balancing Melenchon’s affirmation.
This kind of punishment sounds a bit weird. Expelling students because they do not respect the rule of University makes sense, or making them reimburse the offsets. But revocating degrees for non academic reasons (like plagiarism, or faking datas) sounds like ra very political retroactive punishment.
Actually it seems this happened recently in Turkey:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250318-turkey-university-cancels-erdogan-rival-s-university-degree
martibal,
It is pretty weird, and largely symbolic. There’s not much difference between being someone who spent four years here, took courses and satisfied the degree requirements, and got a diploma and the same person/situation, except that the university has “revoked” the diploma. It just occurred to me that the reason the university may have done this, temporarily, is that for now they don’t want the person to have official alumni status, which in particular means that they may be able to get access to the campus.
If the intense security here is ever removed, and whether the person can get access to campus or not becomes a non-issue, perhaps then the temporary revocation will be ended. The university will then treat them like a normal alumnus, including sending regular communications asking for donations.
Peter, I would just like to say that, while it’s logically possible that “Outside Looking In” is some kind of “Russian bot” sowing discord, I think it’s far more likely that they are earnest. Online, I periodically encounter educated Russian emigrants to the West who have no love for Putin, but who also look upon current western academia with total dismay, as being a progressive monoculture whose intellectual standards are in decline. I expect that “Outside” is just someone in Russia who reads this blog for its coverage of physics, but who has some opinions like Alexander Strumia’s.
Mitchell Porter,
What you suggest is possible, the problem is that there’s no way of knowing. Everyone should keep in mind that a sizable fraction of the comments on social media and internet sites now are not what they seem, but either trolling or the product of organized campaigns to further some agenda through misinformation, propaganda or earnest-seeming support for a view that furthers the agenda. Our information environment is a heavily polluted one.
In this case, yes, it’s possible this is an educated person in Moscow, who is ignoring the dictatorship around him and what is happening at universities there, and is devoting his time to earnestly critiquing freedom of speech/thought problems at elite US universities. But if so, this person is a fool, ignoring what they can see with their own eyes and obsessing about something they don’t actually know about. Whether this is from a fool or a malevolent AI, doesn’t really matter, so I’m deleting comments of this kind as they come in.