The long-awaited second cave-in by the Columbia trustees to Trump demands was announced yesterday, details here. A few initial comments:
- Columbia law professor David Pozen explains that this is part of a new form of autocratic government in the US:
the agreement grows out of the executive branch’s first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures. Lawyers have been debating the exact circumstances under which the executive branch may freeze particular grants and contracts to particular schools. Yet as far as I’m aware, no lawyer outside the government has even attempted to defend the legality of the initial cutoff that brought Columbia to its knees and, thereafter, to the “negotiating” table.
We’re now governed not by laws and courts, but by a dictator, who can at any moment take illegal actions to try and compel you to do what he wants. Laws and courts are replaced by extorted “agreements” like this one, where the dictator agrees to leave you alone (for now) in return for your agreement to a specific list of demands.
- The deal the trustees have negotiated in order to (for now) get money back and stop further illegal actions is not as bad as expected. It’s mostly a mix of the already agreed to set of policies designed to ruthlessly stop any criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, as well as shutting down past DEI and admission favoritism policies that already were either banned by court decisions or likely to be banned by legitimately legal changes in federal government policies. This is much less than the demands the dictator’s people had been making. The Chronicle story about this has:
“Columbia couldn’t tolerate the administration holding up billions of dollars in current and future grants, so they paid what is essentially ransom,” said Michael C. Dorf, a professor of law at Cornell University. “The ransom that they ended up paying strikes me as a pretty good value if you decide you’re going to pay ransom. But the problem with paying ransom is that it incentivizes the taking of more hostages.”
- The only reason they were able to get these relatively favorable terms was that Harvard decided to go to court and fight the illegality. Harvard has won a series of injunctions stopping illegal actions regarding foreign students, and appears likely to very soon win a summary judgment that the withholding of grant funds was illegal. In late March, Columbia’s initial cave-in (in return for nothing) made it look as if there was no way to stop the exercise of dictatorial powers. While the Columbia trustees adopted a policy of publicly supporting the new dictatorship (telling us that it was all legal, and all necessary to deal with the fact that our community had a terrible “antisemitism” problem), throughout the country luckily other groups and institutions did go to court and fought back. They’ve had mixed success, but have slowed down the onslaught and caused Trump to back off at least for now in some areas.
In early April the trustees were about to sign off on a second cave-in much more onerous than the one announced yesterday, but stopped this when they saw that Harvard was going to fight. They can argue that the set of facts Harvard was facing was different, but there’s no denying that their choice not to fight but to capitulate to extortion by the new dictatorship did damage to US democracy, while Harvard’s decision to fight reversed some of that damage (at least for now).
What Harvard has done has helped Columbia and other institutions a great deal by blunting the dictator’s onslaught. What Columbia has done has hurt all other universities, as the success here of illegal dictatorial action will encourage its use against others. This wider campaign surely is just about to get started, maybe could have been stopped by a Columbia refusal to give in.
- The really big winners here? Those so devoted to supporting the Israeli government slaughter of civilians and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank that they were willing to collaborate with and help a Fascist dictatorship destroy US democracy and seriously damage the university in order to get what they wanted: expulsion of student demonstrators and a campus lockdown that would put a stop to the demonstrations, together with university support for a campaign to characterize opposition to genocide and ethnic cleansing as “antisemitism”.
- A crucial part of what the trustees agreed to is in section 8c:
Nothing in this Agreement prevents the United States (even during the period of the Agreement) from conducting subsequent compliance reviews, investigations, defunding or litigation related to Columbia’s actions occurring after the Effective Date of the this Agreement.
So, the trustees explicitly agree that if Columbia does anything Trump doesn’t like, he can defund the university again. Instead of going to court to fight illegality, the agreement explicitly acknowledges that the illegality is a tactic that can be used against Columbia at any time it offends the dictator. What this means in practice is every university decision from now on will be made through the lens of “will this upset Steven Miller?”
- Sone things to watch for:
Will the university gates be reopened, or will we live in security lockdown forever?
Our next president will have to meet with Steven Miller’s approval, and be willing to run the university in a way that will not annoy Steven Miller. Who is that going to be?
As the genocide in Gaza proceeds, will anyone at Columbia be protesting this on campus?
The trustees have agreed to a discipline process designed to achieve the expulsion of anti-genocide demonstrators. This requires the participation of the provost, some administrators, deans and faculty. Will we be told who has agreed to do this dirty work?
There’s a lot of good commentary about this coming out. The NYT published this piece by Suresh Naidu. Some people at CUIMC have created a wonderful satirical version of Columbia Spectator, call The Specter. They’re covering the cave-in with Columbia Buys Back Its Federal Grants and Sells Off Its Spine.
Update: Stand Columbia (Tao Tan) is ecstatic. Illegal dictatorial action has gotten him changes at Columbia he has always wanted. The only problem he sees is that maybe they won’t be as much as he wants. He is creating a Stand Columbia Society Scorecard so that, in the case of insufficient devotion to the new order, Steven Miller will get a heads up that he needs to pull funding again.
Lawrence Summers is also very happy that extortion by the dictatorship is getting him what he wants. “the best day higher education has had in the last year.”!!
Update: In case anyone was thinking that the “agreement” meant reopening of the campus and a less repressive security environment, there’s this from the Free Press:
A senior Trump administration official familiar with the negotiations said that “this is just step one.” The official added: “In late August, the kids and faculty come back to campus, and many of them believe they—and not the board or administration—are in charge of Columbia. . . . The substantive challenge is resetting the balance of power and reasserting the leadership of the school and letting the students and faculty know that for the first time in many decades, there will be order on campus and consequences for breaking the rules.”
If that doesn’t happen, “the administration is not going to let Columbia embarrass us,” the senior Trump administration official added. “We’ll be watching you.”
So, if you’re a Columbia student or faculty member, and all those photos of dead, emaciated children in Gaza are getting you upset about the genocide there, don’t even think of saying or thinking anything about this on the Columbia campus. A senior Trump administration official says “we’ll be watching you”, and discipline via the Provost’s office will be ready to deal with you.
What the trustees have done is make themselves and the Provost’s office the enforcers for those defending the Israeli genocide. They will have to play this role, or get a letter from the “senior Trump administration official” telling them they have embarrassed him and funding is cutoff again.
Who produced that scrawl for the Trustees at the end of the agreement?
Art,
Yes, odd that the name of no person at Columbia appears in the document. I’m guessing that the scrawl is the signature of Claire Shipman.
Will the $220 million be distributed among the victims of “antisemitism” as damages for emotional distress?
anon,
\$200 million just goes to the government. \$21 million goes to an “EEOC claims fund”, I don’t know who can make claims to that. Perhaps I can file a claim since what Columbia has done has certainly caused me a huge amount of emotional distress.
The agreement is maybe not as capitulatory as it originally seemed it might be, but still manages to pack in a lot of terrible things. Aside from the hiring of a whole host of new admin and faculty to focus on maintaining Israel’s reputation (interesting how the campus financing issues magically disappear here…meanwhile, we need months of waiting and huge chains of approval to renew undergrad hires), the agreement also attacks trans members of the Columbia community via promising “single-sex” dorms and sports teams. Columbia also promised to hand over disciplinary data on international students to the government, and to probe all international applicants on why they want to enter the US specifically.
The whole thing points to the standard right-wing agenda of destroying access to public spaces for transgender people and anyone not born in the US, all conveniently hidden behind the optics of fake antisemitism (which basically everyone on this campus knows is completely contrived). so, nothing new to see here, but nothing good.
Thanks as always for your continued blogging on the subject. Appreciate your perspective and those of the other commenters!
I’m gonna leave this rant by a left-wing progressive Cenk Uygur, who went to Columbia Law school, about how disgusted he feels by Columbia’s capitulation (I presume that this is not a singular sentiment of a single person; so will faculty with a conscience start looking for jobs elsewhere too?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF2uoBbOJ0Y&ab_channel=TheYoungTurks
At the end of the video, he says that one day these trustees will be named as accomplices to a genocide, and people will read their names in a museum.
I wish to live long enough to see not just these trustees, but also the likes of Scott Aaronson named in such a dossier in a public museum, so that everyone in our coming generations get to know who in western societies provided intellectual cover for a genocide.
Has there been a noticeable decline in the quality of the students who have chosen to enroll for Fall 2025? Even though funding has now been temporarily restored, under these conditions, one would expect the quality of the faculty to slowly but surely decline. Then the fascists will have succeeded in destroying a great university.
a former Columbia physics student,
We still don’t know which students will enroll and show up in September. The most likely big change will be in foreign students, because of the US extreme anti-immigrant policies. Even if they can get a visa, do you really want to pay a premium price to send your son or daughter to study somewhere where they may get picked up and sent to alligator Alcatraz in the Florida swamp? There may be a significant decline in the size and/or quality of the foreign student population. This though is going to affect all US universities.
The Columbia specific situation is partly about suppressing anti-genocide protests here. If you’re anti-genocide and care about this, you’ll be much less likely to come to Columbia, but the pro-genocide crowd will be much more likely to come. Most students/faculty/staff don’t care very much about this one way or another so I don’t think that the effects of this on students/faculty will be large.
The overall intent of the Trump extortion and the Trustees going along with it is to make the university unwelcoming to the woke and welcoming to the MAGA, so we’ll see some change in the mix of students and people working here. I don’t think this will be large though. Most people here just don’t care much one way or the other.
Peter,
What I worry about is that nonchalant normies may have gotten the perception (rightly so) that Columbia is a toxic environment and may not come just to avoid the hassle. There are historical precedents for this. Post-war West German mathematics was stigmatized for decades and did not recover until possibly only recently.
a former Columbia physics student,
While now calling Columbia “Vichy on the Hudson” has some validity, the German case is pretty different. German mathematics was destroyed by having the best mathematicians leave, and they left to save their lives, not because of disliking the immoral policies of the Nazis running the universities. All of German society had problems recovering from Naziism after the war.
One of the worst things the trustees did by caving was to effectively argue that illegal dictatorial tactics cannot be resisted, so the same thing can be done to all US universities. Because of this, most US universities are already taking whatever measures they can to stop anti-genocide protests, and likely many will be entering into the same sorts of “agreements”, or caving-in preemptively. We may end up with not just Vichy on the Hudson, but also Vichy on the Charles, etc. Then at least Columbia can boast that we were first.