Columbia’s new policies intended to stop and punish any on-campus criticism of the Gaza genocide by characterizing it as “antisemitism” have made it impossible for Rashid Khalidi to teach his planned fall course. See his explanation here, which ends with:
Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an-anti university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.
Update: The Knight First Amendment Institute here at Columbia has put up on its website a document What the Columbia Settlement Really Means, which explains in detail many of the problemw with what the trustees have committed the institution to. Some extracts:
The settlement is an astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to the government—and not just to the government, but to an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day. It will have far-reaching implications for free speech and academic freedom at Columbia—even if we assume that the provisions that are susceptible to more than one interpretation will be construed narrowly, as the settlement itself says they should be (¶ 5). We also doubt that the Trump administration will be satisfied with the territory it has won. The settlement does not foreclose the Trump administration from demanding more from Columbia on the basis of the university’s real or imagined failure to comply with the settlement’s terms, or on the basis of purported transgressions that are new or newly discovered. Indeed, the settlement itself gives the administration an array of new tools to use in the service of its coercive campaign…
The July 23 settlement also limits Columbia’s authority over the hiring of faculty and administrators. It obliges Columbia to appoint new faculty members “with joint positions in both the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the departments or fields of economics, political science, or [public policy]”—faculty members who will (the settlement says, without explaining) “contribute to a robust and intellectually diverse academic environment” (¶ 13). We know of no precedent for the federal government compelling a private university to hire faculty in specific fields, let alone dictating the specific institutes and departments to which they must be appointed…
The cumulative effect of these terms will be, again, to subject Columbia’s administrators, faculty, and students to a regime of intense surveillance. The surveillance is a significant incursion into the university’s autonomy and will inevitably deter faculty and students in their exercise of constitutionally protected freedoms. It may also provide the Trump administration with pretexts to make new demands of the university…
Columbia has been the target of a months-long campaign of extortion by a presidential administration that is contemptuous of legal constraint and deeply hostile to the values that universities exist to promote. We are not convinced the settlement will put this behind us. What we can say with confidence is that the settlement comes at a very steep price to Columbia’s autonomy and to the constitutional freedoms of Columbia’s faculty, staff, and students. All of us affiliated with Columbia should understand this—and administrators, faculty, and students at other universities should know how much is at stake in their own institutions’ negotiations with the Trump administration.
Update: Another open letter to Claire Shipman, this one from Marianne Hirsch.
Thanks for keeping me informed Peter, of the descent of my alma mater (General Studies ’82, School of Journalism ’83). The bitter irony of course is that while Columbia has suppressed all criticism of Israel, even Trump and Marjorie Greene are acknowledging that Israel has gone too far.
Peter, you may want to look into this new FAQ that Columbia released on the resolution: https://president.columbia.edu/content/resolution-agreement-frequently-asked-questions
More people have been and are being killed in Ukraine, Sudan and Syria. No Arab state or any other state will take the Palestinians as refugees. Your singular focus on crimes against the Palestinians created by Hamas’s previous and planned attacks belies your rationality.
Rashid Khalidi is the current holder of the Edward Said chair at Columbia.
I suspect Professor Edward Said (1935-2003) is the reason Columbia was specifically targeted for “antisemitism” . He basically founded the field of post-colonial studies which called into question the Euro-centric lens used to study “the Orient”. The idea spread, but Columbia remains quite important.
Amit,
The campaign to target critics of Israel at Columbia as “antisemites” goes way, way back, To a large extent what has happened at Columbia this year is that this campaign has had a huge success by allying itself with a Fascist dictator adopting illegal tactics. They’ve done this just as the Israeli government’s genocidal slaughter of civilians is in reach of its goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza.
Besides Said’s legacy, Columbia has a very distinguished Middle Eastern studies department, which includes faculty critical of Israel. One of the initial demands made (clearly with input from local pro-genocide people at Columbia) was to put this department in receivership. The trustees quickly agreed to a version of this, going even farther by announcing the hiring of several new pro-Israel faculty. The reason they so quickly agreed was not just the threats they were under, but that they were heavily influenced by those (faculty, students, alums, donors) in the community that had always hated seeing any criticism of Israel’s genocide here and were ecstatic at the opening that Trump provided them with.
Charles Weis,
When those killing innocent civilians in Ukraine, Syria and Sudan ally with Fascists to shutdown scientific research at Columbia, get control of its board of trustees and implement a security lockdown here to be able to keep the killing going, I’ll start blogging about those situations.
” The trustees quickly agreed to a version of this, going even farther by announcing the hiring of several new pro-Israel faculty.”
Peter – what is the direct downside of hiring pro-Israel faculty? I think reasonable people should not have any objection to this (assuming Columbia had not accepted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which makes teaching the pro-Palestine POV impossible). Presumably these pro-Israel faculty would have taught courses where the course material will focus on the Israeli POV. Ok, so what? Students can attend these classes and also other classes where the pro-Palestine POV is taught, and decide what is true and what is false. Given the support for Palestine among the under 30s, these pro-Israel classes would probably only be attended by pro-Israel students (a group that has already been indoctrinated into the pro-Israel camp since childhood by their parents), and so these pro-Israel faculty will achieve very little in their intended goal of indoctrinating students who have not already been indoctrinated.
Of course I realise that the adoption of IHRA definition of antisemitism by Columbia renders my argument moot, as the pro-Palestine POV cannot be presented on an equal footing with pro-Israel POV.
Also Prof. Khalidi gave an interview on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman (will leave this here for everyone): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUrG6mce_-4&ab_channel=DemocracyNow%21
Tony,
For one thing, the university essentially now has a hiring freeze (due to financial problems caused by the attack on us as “antisemites”). We’re being told there’s no money, so we can’t even hire replacements for people leaving who perform essential functions here. But, somehow, there is money to hire new faculty, as long as they are in a specific area and have a specific point of view.
Our president and trustees like to go on about how they have defended the independence of the university, that the cave-in does not mean they have succumbed to pressure as to who we hire and who we don’t hire. Clearly this is bullshit.
Tony,
To be clear about what the trustees did in this case, arguably they did not succumb to pressure from the Trump administration (hiring pro-Israel faculty wasn’t even in the extortion note demands). What they did succumb to was pressure from the pro-genocide contingent within the university community and within their own ranks.
Hi Peter,
Here is a new article about the agreement affecting international students:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/08/03/trump-and-miller-compel-colleges-not-to-enroll-international-students/
This could have a major impact on academia in general, considering that a large percentage of physics and math graduate students in U.S. institutions are foreign-born.