The Situation at Columbia XV

This morning we received a long message from the acting president, entitled Preserving Columbia’s Critical Research Capabilities. Here’s a summary:

• It’s a complete mystery to me, but the trustees still refuse to go to court to challenge the defunding of research grants, somehow because they think they are negotiating this, even though it has for a long time been clear that negotiating with Trump is not going to lead to anything but humiliation. The message has:
  

  As many of you are aware, the University is engaged in a two-pronged effort related to grants terminated by the federal government. The first prong focuses on our continued efforts to restore our partnerships with government agencies that support critical research… Columbia’s leadership continues discussions with the federal government in support of resuming activity on these research awards and additional other awards that have remained active, but unpaid.

  The Wall Street Journal has an “Exclusive” article claiming that Trump’s people are negotiating a consent decree with Columbia:

  Columbia leaders are negotiating with the government and weighing what to do, the people said. The university’s board is undecided on whether to accept a consent decree, they said. For a consent decree to take effect, Columbia would have to agree to enter it.

  The government has told the school that it can either negotiate and accept a consent decree, or face a court battle that could end up with the school facing more public scrutiny and in the end the same kind of legal agreement to make changes, perhaps with worse terms, they said.

  With a consent decree, the government is seeking viewpoint diversity among Columbia’s faculty and that the school not consider race in admissions, the people said.

  The article also includes:

  A Columbia spokesperson said: “This story is based entirely on hearsay and does not hold merit.” She pointed to a statement issued last month from acting university president Claire Shipman, who said that Columbia would reject any agreement that would require relinquishing its independence.

  The article is the latest of many “Exclusive”s by two WSJ journalists, Douglas Belkin and Liz Essley White, who have been simply putting out as “news” delusional statements trying to pressure Columbia from one of Trump’s people, very likely Sean Keveney, the lawyer responsible for the “mistake” letter sent to Harvard. This is actually the second bogus “Exclusive” news about a consent decree, the first was here nearly a month ago.

• Much of the message is concerned with what the university is now doing to contend with the reality that grant funding is gone for now (and will be until they go to court and get a court judgement…):
  

  Separately and in parallel, our Deans have carefully reviewed and prioritized our research activity to develop a plan for managing the affected research. We asked each principal investigator of a terminated award to develop a Research Action Plan (RAP) for review at the school level and to inform a school-based approach. During this review period, the University continued to fund those individuals whose salaries and stipends were previously funded with federal support on now-terminated awards…

  Moving forward, we will be running lighter footprints of research infrastructure in some areas and, in others, maintaining a level of research continuity as we pursue alternate funding sources. In some cases, schools and departments are winding down activity but remain prepared to reestablish capabilities if support is restored. Across the research portfolio we have had to make difficult choices and unfortunately, today, nearly 180 of our colleagues who have been working, in whole or in part, on impacted federal grants, will receive notices of non-renewal or termination. This represents about 20% of the individuals who are funded in some manner by the terminated grants…
  There also appears to be at least some agreement between Columbia’s trustees and those in Washington who feel that support for the student protests was antisemitic, a position that angers university senators, who feel they are being slurred.
  As schools and departments moved through the process of reviewing priorities related to terminated awards, it became clear that we need to be prepared to make additional investments to secure the strength of our research enterprise as we navigate future periods of uncertainty and change. Additional complexities and risks include the process and funding for obtaining new awards and continuations of existing research projects. To that end, the University has established a Research Stabilization Fund to navigate these future funding risks and lend support to our scientific community in multiple forms. These resources will be made available through an application process for internal grants to scientists to support their work for a limited time as they seek alternate sources of funding or complete the components of their research to enable publication of results. In addition, the University will contribute funds to schools over the next year to support our commitments to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows on terminated training grants, an area that has been severely impacted by terminations of federal support. The Stabilization Fund and Other Resources webpage developed by the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research provides more details about these funds and other resources on funding opportunities for the research community.

• The message also explains that the university now faces serious budget problems going forward, and announces various steps being taken to deal with it, including a salary freeze:
  

  We will continue to make prudent budget decisions that will ensure long-term financial stability across the University, including making significant budget reductions within the University’s central administration. Across the University, we have set parameters to keep most salaries at their current level, without increases for the next fiscal year, with some schools and units providing a modest pool for employees at the lower end of their salary distribution. We have also developed programs to further streamline our workforce through attrition and are preparing to launch a voluntary retirement incentive program, the details of which will be shared next week.

In case anyone is still tempted to believe that the Trump people are negotiating in good faith and seriously addressing real issues, Harvard yesterday received an absurd illiterate letter from Linda McMahon, the World Wrestling Entertainment executive now responsible for education in the US. The first accusation against Harvard is that it has a course to help students with weak math backgrounds:

Where do many of these “students” come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country — and why is there so much HATE? These are questions that must be answered, among many more, but the biggest question of all is, why will Harvard not give straightforward answers to the American public?

Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus. In every way, Harvard has failed to abide by its legal obligations, its ethical and fiduciary duties, its transparency responsibilities, and any semblance of academic rigor. It had scrapped standardized testing requirements and a normalized grading system. This year Harvard was forced to adopt an embarrassing “remedial math” program for undergraduates. Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics, when it is supposedly so hard to get into this “acclaimed university”? Who is getting in under such a low standard when others, with fabulous grades and a great understanding of the highest levels of mathematics, are being rejected?

Update: New from the Columbia Journalism Review, a disturbing story about student disciplinary procedures at Barnard.

Update: New from the New York Times, a story about how Columbia was taken in by a crooked game of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

A few weeks ago, several prominent American universities and law firms found themselves in what seemed to be a classic prisoner’s dilemma, courtesy of President Trump…

Columbia University made a deal with the administration. So did some of the largest law firms in the country. Recent changes, however, suggest that the dilemma is starting to look very different…

But crucially, one assumption in the prisoner’s dilemma is that the jailer is trustworthy. There is an explicit promise that confessing will allow prisoners to avoid the longest sentence.

In the real world, however, instead of rewarding those who capitulated early, the Trump administration pressured them even more.

Columbia University, for example, agreed to concessions that included imposing new oversight over its Middle Eastern studies department and creating a security force empowered to make arrests. But that was not enough to restore the more than $400 million in grants that the Trump administration had canceled, or to prevent the administration from making even more demands.

The Times story also addresses another problem created by behavior like Columbia’s:

Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said she has observed “burgeoning moral distress” among her membership in recent months. “Campus leaders feel like they’re being coerced into making decisions they believe are unethical, but they feel they have no choice,” she said. “In many instances, that moral distress has morphed into a moral injury that results from the continual erosion of a moral compass.”

Update: In recent days the security checkpoint at the gate nearest the math building has become more difficult to get through, as people have to pass through two different devices with their ids. No one knows (including the people working the security checkpoint) why this new security layer has been introduced. We’re seeing lines of students waiting to get in, people who can’t get in this gate, have to go around to the main gate to get access. Only protest activity on campus in recent weeks a small vigil for our imprisoned students.

Update: Yet another NYT article about Columbia today, this time about the campaign by the trustees to revamp the university senate, which some of them see as “antisemitic” and responsible for obstructing the necessary rigorous discipline of students involved in last year’s protests and building occupation. From the article:

There also appears to be at least some agreement between Columbia’s trustees and those in Washington who feel that support for the student protests was antisemitic, a position that angers university senators, who feel they are being slurred.

Since the administration has a lot going on right now (see above…), it’s odd that the trustees are making it a priority to deal with obscure long-term governance issues like that of how the senate works. The only way I see to understand this is that this is part of the ongoing negotiation about “antisemitism”, which now appears to be a 3-way one involving the Trump people, powerful pro-Israel trustees and donors, and the rest of the university. Last year Jonathan Lavine, now co-chair of the presidential search committee, sent a text message to David Greenwald, co-chair of the board, about “the antisemites on the Senate”.

I’m finding it very difficult to understand why the trustees are still refusing to go to court to stop grant cancellations, supposedly because this would interfere with negotiations with Trump. Given everything happening, why would anyone in their right mind still think that Trump was someone you could sensibly negotiate with? The only reason I can think of is that some of the trustees and donors still find the pressure from the Fascist dictatorship useful to make progress on their own agenda of getting rid of problems at Columbia like “the antisemites on the Senate”.

Update: Josh Marshall has an informative story about how the NIH grant cancellations are being implemented. There’s no stop work order or notification, the university just finds out at the end of the month that it won’t be paid. All universities except Harvard haven’t gone to court, hoping there is something they can do which will keep Trump happy and get the payments restarted. They are telling the researchers involved not to say anything, so the public isn’t hearing about the impacts of these cancellations. Only in the Columbia case has the university been presented with a set of demands. For the others, they’re in the dark even about when they’ll hear what might cause funds to flow again.

It looks like the obvious thing they should all be doing (if they weren’t too paralyzed, fearful and hopeful there is some way to sell out to the dictatorship) is join forces and all go to court together.