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.
