The Situation at Columbia XVIII

There’s an excellent New York magazine article out this morning that gets the story of what the Columbia trustees have been doing to the university right, with the brutal title How Trump Defeated Columbia: The inside story of an unconditional surrender. Unfortunately the article doesn’t have any information about what is going on now. I’m guessing the author has good sources informed about what the board was doing through the cave-in and the Armstrong resignation, not so good about what has happened since then.

Here’s the description of how the cave-in happened:

But the idea of a defiant legal response was a fantasy. Columbia’s board was already on the same wavelength as the Trump administration. On several of the task force’s demands — including banning masks, restricting protests, stripping disciplinary powers from the senate, and allowing campus police to arrest demonstrators — the group was ready to concede immediately. On March 21, it sent a letter to the government essentially surrendering. Perhaps reflecting an understanding that the letter would not go over well with the Columbia community, nobody signed it…

Faculty who interacted with Armstrong in this period say she was genuinely shocked that the world believed Columbia had caved. It made a certain sense, from the point of view of someone simply trying to survive minute by minute in a crisis: There had been a gun pointed at Columbia’s head, and to get it lowered, all she had to do was agree to some things her trustees already wanted…

Members of the board of trustees give different accounts of who broke up with whom. Some maintain that Armstrong was forced out; others say there was mutual agreement she could not remain. Either way, she was gone.

Here’s the description of the group of trustees who are driving this and their weak opposition:

Several people with knowledge of the board’s evolution described a dynamic in which a subset of members was convinced that Columbia had a dangerous concentration of antisemites and that strong action was needed to bring the campus back to order. That circle’s most prominent member is Victor Mendelson, part of a four-generation Columbia lineage, whose father was also a trustee. The billionaire Mendelsons run HEICO, a Florida-based aerospace company and defense contractor. There’s also Shoshana Shendelman, whose child is a current student, and to a quieter degree Greenwald, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who spent his career at Fried Frank and Goldman Sachs. A more moderate set includes Mark Gallogly, who co-founded the investment firm Centerbridge Partners and who has given millions to Democratic candidates for office; Kathy Surace-Smith, a lawyer and partial owner of the Seattle Mariners whose husband is the president of Microsoft; Abigail Black Elbaum, who runs a real-estate management firm; and Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Two others were more clearly identified with the liberal-coded position that antisemitism was a concern but one that was being used disingenuously to stifle speech: Wanda Marie Holland Greene, who runs a progressive school for girls in San Francisco, and Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square who became a billionaire investor…

Greene and Li quietly rotated off the board last summer, further tilting the balance. “The board lost two of its strong oppositional voices when they left,” a person who interacts with the group said.

Mendelson is a donor to Elise Stefanik and admits to being in direct communication with the Trump White House:

Mendelson recently visited an undergraduate seminar and told the students that as one of the panel’s few registered Republicans, “I’m the one the White House calls to yell at.”

Discussions amongst the board have been immediately leaked to the Trump administration and published by the Trump mouthpieces at the WSJ:

In a minuted meeting, with colleagues who were whispering to right-wing publications and Republicans in Washington, it was difficult for trustees to take the position that antisemitism was a small or medium-size problem — even if they honestly saw it that way…

During one session, the trustees had a preliminary discussion about granting arrest power to campus security officers. Within hours, it was in The Wall Street Journal — a leak that some interpreted as an effort to lock in that outcome.

It seems to me that it if the board had investigated this it would not have been hard to find out who was responsible. I don’t see how the board can allow people doing this kind of thing to remain in place. Why have they not taken action?

Mendelson clearly continues to have a great deal of influence on the board. He’s both a Vice-Chair and a member of the presidential search committee. That he’s taking calls from the White House to discuss what the board is doing seems to be grounds for his immediate removal from the board.

Also likely influential behind the scenes is board chair emeritus Jonathan Lavine, who is co-chair of the Presidential search committee. In text messages to board co-chair David Greenwald (see here), he referred to “the antisemites on the Senate” and dismissed pro-Palestinian protests as “supporting rape and terrorism”.

I hope this article has an impact with the rest of the current board, making it clear to them the disastrous direction in which they have taken the university, and encouraging them to change course, beginning with removing Victor Mendelson.

There’s a statement being signed by members of the Columbia faculty refusing to attend commencement in protest of the actions of the acting president and board of trustees.

Given that it has become clear that what is behind this Columbia story is what has happened and what is happening in Gaza, I’ll regularly include here some links relevant to the ongoing story of that genocidal campaign. Please do not submit comments arguing about this, I won’t moderate a discussion of whether slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent people is a good thing or not.

Genocide through denial of food and health care.

Ethnic cleansing through the razing of all structures in parts of Gaza.

From Haaretz, ‘People Are Eating Weeds’: Israel’s New Gaza Offensive Intensifies Humanitarian Disaster:

The renewed Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that began on Friday night has already resulted in hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of new refugees, a worsening risk of hunger, spreading disease and the closure of the enclave’s biggest hospitals.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, on Sunday alone, at least 125 Palestinians were killed, bringing the total since the start of the assault on Thursday to about 375…

Palestinian sources say one of the deadliest of the attacks, which have included aerial and artillery strikes, led to a fire in a displaced persons encampment in Mawasi. Footage from the scene showed a fire that had consumed the tents.

Residents, including children, were seen with severe burns while families searched for their loved ones amid the flames. In Deir al-Balah, five children were killed by a missile or shell that hit a street.

The attack on Mawasi was near a field hospital operated with the help of the Kuwaiti government. Following the attack, the hospital announced it was shutting down its surgical department due to damage to the hospital’s generators.

There were also massive attacks in the northern Gaza Strip, in the Jabalya area, where dozens of deaths were reported.

Other footage showed bodies lying on the floor of the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. The Palestinian Health Ministry announced that the hospital was closing. Footage showed patients being led out on beds and in wheelchairs.

The hospital is the second major facility in Gaza to close its doors in recent days after the European Hospital in southern Gaza shut down over the weekend in the face of attacks in the surrounding area, as the Israel Defense Forces sought to kill Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar.

In addition, the Palestinian Civil Defense Organization announced that it had been forced to put out of commission 75 percent of its ambulances due to a lack of gasoline and that within three days, it would have no choice but to do the same to the remainder.

A coalition of humanitarian organizations estimates that more than 63,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in the past three days and that more than 500,000 have done so since Israel renewed the war in Gaza two months ago.

Update: The New York Times has a long article about “Project Esther.” This is a Heritage Foundation-sponsored effort to tar anyone protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza as a pro-Hamas terrorist (along the lines of what I’ve seen here from Scott Aaronson). They have campaigned for exactly the tactics being used by the Trump administration against Columbia and other universities.

The NYT describes the origin of Project Esther after the Hamas attack on Israel as follows:

Soon after, four well-connected, conservative supporters of Israel met virtually to address these events.

Only one was Jewish: Ellie Cohanim, Mr. Trump’s former antisemitism envoy. She said she was grateful when the three men reached out to her and affectionately called them her “Christian friends.” Two were leaders of Christian Zionist groups: Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, and Mario Bramnick, the president of the Latino Coalition for Israel and an evangelical adviser to Mr. Trump. The fourth was James Carafano, senior counselor to the president at the Heritage Foundation.

Some evangelical Christians have increasingly aligned themselves with conservative political forces in Israel, supporting their claims of biblical dominion over contested Palestinian territories. Many feel a kinship with Israel because of shared religious heritage. But some also believe that supporting Israel will hasten biblical end times, or advance Christianity’s global influence.

A large group of American Jewish leaders has recently issued a statement warning about this campaign.