The Situation at Columbia XXIV

Now back on the Columbia campus after nearly two weeks away traveling. It is extremely quiet here, just some summer classes going on. Security remains intense: you have to go through one of a small number of checkpoints to get on campus. Once you are on the nearly deserted campus, there’s extra security at the door of the math building to look you over and check that your ID card is swiped to get access to the building. I’ve asked lots of people, including deans, why the building level of security checkpoint is there, on top of the main checkpoints. No one knows, speculation is that the building security guard is there in case a group of anti-genocide protestors materializes out of nowhere and tries to storm the math building.

As has been true for a while, no one has any idea what the trustees are up to. There’s an ominous report in the Spectator with:

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon confirmed Tuesday that the Department of Education has “discussed a consent decree” with Columbia and has “made great progress” with the University after the agency notified Columbia’s accreditor on Wednesday that the University failed to meet accreditation standards.

For many reasons one would think that the Columbia trustees would by now have realized that a further cave-in to Trump would buy them nothing but humiliation, but there’s also plenty of evidence that this is what they are intent on. There’s an ongoing plan to change university governance, arranged on an expedited basis over the summer while no one is here, which seems to have the goal of neutralizing the supposed “antisemites in the Senate”, quite possibly as a part of a new cave-in. As noted above, the security here now makes no rational sense, unless the trustees want to for some reason maintain the illusion that we’re under intense threat from violent antisemites and they are taking extraordinary measures to protect us from this threat.

There’s a new article by Atul Dev at Prospect Magazine about the Columbia story, When students protested, Columbia capitulated. I talked to him for the article and am quoted in a couple places. Reading through this story reminded me of exactly how I lost confidence in the Columbia trustees, due to a couple of specific things they have done which to me violate basic moral values in an inexplicable way:

• While I can understand the pressure to “do something” to address the bogus “antisemitism” accusations, up to and including agreeing to the list of things the trustees agreed to in the cave-in, I was shocked when I understood that the trustees were not going to court to challenge the illegal cancellation of grants. No one had an understandable explanation of this when it first happened, and I still haven’t heard an understandable explanation of why the university hasn’t gone to court and refuses even to join an amicus brief for the Harvard lawsuit. If a Fascist dictator has come to power and illegally takes away funds from an institution you are responsible for, as long as there is a functioning court system, I don’t see how you can shirk your moral responsibility to fight this in those courts.
• When the news came in about the Khalil arrest, various people told me the university had decided not to do anything, since he technically was no longer a student. This was hard to understand. If masked men show up at a Columbia building and drag someone away to prison on illegal grounds, deciding this is not your problem seemed to me a major moral failure. Once I later realized the trustees had decided on a firm policy of not even saying or writing Khalil’s name I was shocked. This goes way beyond what I could even imagine anyone deciding to do in the face of Gestapo-like arrests happening in their community.

The trustees later changed this policy, but it was clear they had originally done this to try and appease Trump (see here):

Top Trump officials are closely monitoring the words and actions of
university leaders. Columbia University interim President Claire Shipman
in her recent commencement speech mentioned the absence of
pro-Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, who is the custody of the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His detention has drawn protests.

The following day, the university received a notice of civil-rights
violation. McMahon said the notice was in the works before Shipman’s speech.

“President Shipman is trying to balance different factions, but I was
disappointed,” McMahon said. Naming Khalil wasn’t “necessary for her to
say, considering all of the campus unrest that had happened,” McMahon said.

This change in policy though may not have had anything to do with getting better moral values. Foreign students are a huge part of Columbia’s finances, and when they are under attack by Trump, taking the extreme stance of refusing to even say the name of anyone who gets arrested is not only immoral, but bad for business.

On a happier note, yesterday a judge ruled that Khalil can not be held as “a threat to foreign policy”. Hopefully he’ll soon be released (with no help from the Columbia trustees…).

At Harvard, not Columbia, but very relevant to the whole story the Prospect article covers, a group of 27 Jewish scholars of Jewish studies have filed an amicus brief for the Harvard lawsuit, arguing that identifying Jewishness with support for the state of Israel is itself a violation of Title VI.

Update: I don’t think the president and trustees are reading this blog, but about a half hour after I posted this, an email from Shipman came in, with a video of her reading something that sure sounds like an apologia for an imminent capitulation to Trump (there’s a webpage now here). The only encouraging part is:

Our red lines remain the same and are defined by who we are and what we stand for. We must maintain our autonomy and independent governance. We decide who teaches at our institution, what they teach, and which students we admit. Any agreement we might reach must align with those values.

The problem with this is that “who we are and what we stand for” is not defined, and we have already seen disturbing evidence of who the trustees are and what they stand for. What they stand for so far is promoting bogus accusations of antisemitism, capitulating to Trump, refusing to go to court to fight the dictatorship and abandoning anyone dragged away by the new Gestapo.

The main argument seems to be that we cannot afford to give up federal funding, and

The government has the ability to regulate us, and we are committed to following the law.

I’m finding it hard to interpret this statement in a way that isn’t inexcusably awful. The removal of funding was done illegally, and not going to court to challenge it showed a commitment not to following the law but to signing on as a partner in the illegalities of a Fascist dictatorship on the march. If the trustees were “following the law”, they would be in court fighting for exactly that.

Not only does Shipman not challenge the obviously bogus nature of Trump’s “antisemitism” accusations, she backs them to the hilt and declares that our community is guilty and needs to do more Trump-enforced penance. Two layers of security checkpoints are not enough to stop the anti-genocide protestors, we must do more:

It is simply a fact that antisemitic incidents surged on our campus after October 7th, and that is unacceptable. I’ve seen too many students, faculty members, and staff in absolute anguish. We engaged in conversations with the government about their concerns—which were and continue to be our concerns and our community’s concerns. We’ve committed to change, we’ve made progress, but we have more to do.

The best evidence that capitulation is coming is this:

I’d like to say, however, that following the law and attempting to resolve a complaint is not capitulation. That narrative is incorrect. As a former journalist, I would encourage anyone covering Columbia to look closer and do better.

In the faculty meeting where Shipman refused to say Khalil’s name, she was also challenged for promoting untrue accusations that anti-genocide protests were “antisemitism”. In her response, she also invoked her experience as a former journalist, saying what she had learned from that was that there were many “truths”, that different people had different “truths”. In today’s statement she’s making it clear that she and the trustees are signing up the university on the side of the “truths” of a Fascist dictatorship built on a mountain of lies.

Update: I never go on Instagram, but Google sent me to the Columbia Instagram account reel of Shipman’s video. The comments are pretty uniformly brutal in their condemnation of what she and the trustees are doing. The motivation for this video and statement seems to be that the trustees realize they are getting destroyed in the court of public opinion and this is their idea of how to fix that. It’s not going to work.

Update: The Spectator has a long article on the changes to the student disciplinary process which the president and trustees pushed through as part of the cave-in to Trump. I confess to not following all the details of this complicated story, but it appears that the trustee’s interpretation of “following the law” doesn’t include following the university statutes that specify the role of the Senate in making such changes.