Not Even Wrong

Two pieces of news this evening:

1. A week or so ago the interim president of Columbia was removed by the trustees, seemingly to appease the Trump panel she was negotiating with. At the time we were told she would be returning to her position running the medical center. Tonight the news is that she’s been replaced there, will go on sabbatical. This appears to be because of this news story, which is based on a transcript of a deposition by Armstrong. I haven’t yet read the deposition, but the story accuses her of not being aware of the details of incidents of supposed antisemitism at Columbia.

2. Just received the following email from the provost:

Dear members of the Columbia community,

As many of you may have seen in various media reports, the federal government has begun taking action to terminate visa eligibility for international students across the country for alleged incidents including minor traffic violations. Over the past two days, the University has learned that four current international students have had their visas revoked and participation in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program terminated by the federal government. The University was not notified of these status terminations and only became aware of them through proactive daily checks in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) database by our International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO).

ISSO is monitoring the situation closely, notifying students as we become aware of any change in their SEVIS status, and connecting them with resources, including external legal assistance that the University has made available.

ISSO is also standing by to provide support resources to any international student or scholar who may have questions or concerns. ISSO (Morningside/Manhattanville and CUIMC) offers advising appointments in person, via Zoom, or phone (212-854-3587). ISSO advisors are here to support you. The ISSO e-mail (isso@columbia.edu) is continuously monitored. Please immediately notify ISSO of any pressing concerns and an advisor will reach out to set up a same-day appointment.

The University deeply values our international scholars and students. Our international community is essential to driving excellence in scholarship and research at Columbia and we are committed to supporting all members of our community.

Sincerely,

Angela V. Olinto
Provost

Professor of Astronomy and of Physics

It’s very unclear what is going on here. Were these some of the students being pursued by pro-Israeli groups? People with traffic tickets? Something else? What happens to a student who loses their visa in this way? Will Columbia join any legal actions of the students the way Tufts did?

Update: Just read through the transcript. Very odd, a Trump administration lawyer brow-beating Armstrong about her supposedly insufficient dedication to fighting antisemitism, after she was forced out. Also very odd, the transcript is cut off exactly where it gets interesting, when she is asked “why did you step down as interim president?” Maybe the answer to that didn’t fit the agenda of the person who leaked the deposition.

Update: The Wall Street Journal has a story. Reporters Liz Essley Whyte and Douglas Belkin have now written a string of stories based on confidential information provided them by one or more sources hostile to the university. This time, like the far-right Washington Free Beacon, they were provided the partial transcript of the Armstrong April 1 deposition, and used that to make Armstrong and Columbia look bad. On top of helping execute this anonymous attack, they’re also helping their anonymous sources put out threats:

The government called Armstrong in for questioning to send a message to higher-education officials broadly beyond Columbia that they will have to answer for their words and actions under oath, people familiar with the matter said.

Update: Excellent analysis and advice: Why Universities Must Start Litigating — and How, from 3 law professors (Columbia’s David Pozen, Harvard’s Ryan Doerfler, and Michigan’s Samuel Bagenstos.

Update: There are now two dueling documentaries out there about the protests here last year. In one, the Columbia administration is anti-semitic, supportive of the Palestinian cause and won’t protect its pro-Israel students. In the other the Columbia administration is firmly pro-Israel and won’t protect its pro-Palestinian students. Stephen Silver has watched both and discusses here.

Inside Higher Ed has a story about an event discussing the Trump administration’s plans for higher education. Besides shutting down Columbia University, the article features Grand Canyon University, which is a model for what the Trump administration wants higher ed to look like. It’s a for-profit operation, run out of a variety of locations throughout the West. They are proud that “a biblical worldview is incorporated across all academic subjects at GCU.” and argue that:

“The media, higher ed and Hollywood has tried to convince most of America that what is being taught at 95 percent of our universities is what Americans want, and that is absolutely untrue,” Mueller said. “The majority of Americans don’t want what’s being taught from a worldview perspective in most of these institutions. It wants what we’re teaching in our institutions.”

This kind of for-profit non-truth-based operation has had problems with accreditation, so changing the accrediting system is one of the main goals of the Trump people.

Not much news from Columbia this week, the Fascist dictatorship was successful at getting the president of Columbia removed and has now moved on to Harvard, Princeton and Brown. Hopefully the leadership of those institutions is more willing to fight Fascism than Columbia’s. Or, at least, they may have noticed that if you do what Columbia did you’ll bring shame on your institution, and still not get your money back.

During the past week I’ve been trying without success to find anyone who knows anything about what is going on with Columbia’s leadership and its dealings with the Trump administration. The acting president of Columbia has just issued a statement, entitled Listening, Learning and Starting the Conversation, video here. In this posting I’ll try and do a close reading of the statement. Shipman’s text is the part in italics, my interpretation of what she’s saying follows.

First, the commitments the University made to address antisemitism, harassment, and discrimination, which were outlined on March 21, are now my commitments, and work is underway to continue their implementation. We are not changing course. I believe the plans, many of which were already underway, are the right thing to do, and good for our institution.

The previous president (Katrina Armstrong) was fired for insufficient dedication to implementing the cave-in to Trump. I’m not going to make her mistake. We should all be enthusiastic about the cave-in, which is “good for our institution”.

Second, we are proceeding, with integrity and care, in our discussions with the federal government about restoring our research funding.

Even with the cave-in, they still won’t give us the money back. They’re continuing to illegally use the money to try and force us to do more things against our principles, but we have to be really careful not to annoy them by resisting. We’re still too afraid to try and deal with their illegal behavior by going to court.

Third, I also want to acknowledge the deep fear and uncertainty being felt at this moment in our international community. I see you, and I hear you, and the University administration is, and I am, deeply concerned for all our international students and scholars…

We are committed to supporting our international community in any way possible for us. I’ve asked our team to substantially increase our funding and hours for our International Student and Scholars Office (ISSO), so that our advisors are more readily available to help…

Let me also make this clear—Columbia doesn’t have the ultimate authority, and we’re committed to following the law.

We are not going to do anything like what Tufts is doing for its imprisoned student. We’re not going to help any of our students who get dragged out of their dorms or off the streets, we’re not even going to mention their names. As far as we’re concerned, using bogus accusations that our students are terrorists to arrest, imprison and deport them is perfectly legal.

I’ll also take this moment to put some rumors to rest. No member of the leadership team or the Board of Trustees ever notified ICE about any members of our community. Full stop.

There was a March 10 Forward article with the text:

“Ross Glick, a pro-Israel activist who previously shared a list of campus protesters with federal immigration authorities, said that he was in Washington, D.C., for meetings with members of Congress during the Barnard library demonstration and discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to “escalate” the issue. He said that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.

“This unfolded very quickly because it was obvious,” Glick said in an interview Monday. “Everybody was upset,” he recalled of his meetings on the Hill. “The guy was making it too easy for us.”

Here I’m going with a non-denial denial. I won’t deny this, instead I’ll vigorously deny something different (trustees reported Khalil to ICE).

Update: Two Harvard Law professors argue in the Boston Globe that Harvard should not do what Columbia did, but go to court.

Update: The New York Times Editorial Board has advice for the Columbia trustees.

Update: My colleague Michael Harris puts the current attack on Columbia and other universities in perspective, including the role of “the billiard ball-headed billionaire bros.”

The interim president of Columbia was forced out last night from her position, it appears as a demand of the “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”, see here. This indicates that the trustees continue to believe that they have to do whatever they are told, including firing the university president and replacing her with someone more compliant.

A commenter here pointed to a Wall Street Journal article from a while back which explains where the demands being made by the Trump administration are coming from: Columbia’s own faculty:

Last month, seven faculty members and the co-founder of the school’s Jewish alumni association went to the interim president, Katrina Armstrong, with nearly the same requests as the Trump administration.

They called on Columbia to fight discrimination and encourage inclusivity. They asked the president to ban masks, adopt a stricter definition of what constitutes antisemitism, and discipline members of the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department. Most of the recommendations haven’t been acted on.

“I was shocked when I saw” the Trump administration letter, said Larisa Geskin, a professor in the medical school and an author of a faculty letter to the interim president. “I was like, ‘Am I reading my letter?’ This is what I was talking about.”

Geskin, a cancer researcher, is critical of university leadership. “When there is a war, somebody has to make a decision, and decisions are not being made, at least that we can see,” Geskin said.

We’ve been told over the past week that the trustees are not going to court, but agreeing to all demands because they believe that if they don’t do so, the university will lose not just the \$400 million, but also all Federal grants (in the billions), as well as Pell Grants and other student loans, and visas for its foreign students. Their belief is that the Trump administration has the power to effectively destroy the university if they don’t cave-in to everything (or even if they try and go to court).

The demands being made clearly are not coming from Trump, it appears that they are coming from this group of seven Columbia faculty members. Geskin and the six others who are behind this need to immediately call off the attack on their university, or take responsibility and make clear publicly that they are willing to destroy the university if they don’t get what they want.

Update: The bogus “antisemitism” attack has been such a success at damaging Columbia and giving Trump’s people control of the institution that they’re now moving on to doing the same thing to Harvard. Hopefully the trustees at Harvard have more willingness to stand up for principle and go to court to fight Fascism than the ones at Columbia.

Update: For a detailed discussion of the events at Columbia I’ve been covering, see this blog posting from Columbia Law Professor David Pozen.

Update: I’ve tracked down the story of the group that met with Armstrong and presented her a list of demands similar to the Trump task force demands. Evidently there was a meeting on Jan. 17 where a group of 9 people (medical school, law school, business school, engineering, alumni, no arts and sciences) presented Armstrong a list of demands. This group then circulated a letter for signatures, got about 200 signatures. The letter published Feb. 3 is here, coverage in the Spectator is here.

The WSJ referred in March to a meeting the month before, so there presumably was another meeting in February with Armstrong of much the same group of people. The March 13 letter from the Trump task force has many similarities (and some differences) with that Feb. 3 letter.

So, when Armstrong got the March 13 demands, this was presumably just the latest in a back and forth of demands, which started with the internal Columbia group and later became demands from the government. This goes a long way to explaining why the university caved-in to the demands from the outside: for a while they had been dealing with similar demands from a large group inside the university. It seems possible that some of the trustees supported these demands, explaining why the trustees decided not to go to court to challenge the version of the demands coming from outside.

Update: The University Senate has published a 335 page report on the events at Columbia from Oct.7, 2023 to the end of 2024. It contains an exhaustive description of what exactly happened here during that period.

Update: Worth following is political scientist Adam Przeworski’s ongoing diary of our descent into Fascism. From his March 25 entry:

Here is an excerpt from Adventures of a Bystander, by Peter Drucker, without a comment because it speaks for itself:

“[S]everal weeks after the Nazis had come to power, was the first Nazi-led faculty meeting at the University. Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia altogether. So did everyone at the University. Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist of Nobel Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar for Frankfurt was announced around February 25 of that year and when not only every teacher but also every graduate assistant at the University was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear his new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. … The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities…. [He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said: ‘You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.’ There was dead silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said: ‘Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating. But one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?’ The meeting broke up shortly thereafter with the commissar assuring the scholars that indeed there would be plenty of money for ‘racially pure science’.”

To update the situation at Columbia, first of all, the weather is sunny and nice and the campus is very quiet. As has been the case since the police were brought in to clear Hamilton Hall and the encampments nearly a year ago, demonstrations of any kind have been rare and small. The only way to get on campus is through tight security at only two gates. On campus, lots and lots of Columbia security staff, at the gates NYPD and news cameras. Down the street, reports of marked ICE vehicles, unknown number of unmarked ones. There’s a reason the place is quiet: most people are terrified of what will happen to them if they say the wrong thing. The university puts out statements explaining that “At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.”

After talking to a lot of people over the past couple days, what the administration is doing has started to become a lot clearer to me. One thing that helped make things clear is the story of what happened over this past weekend, which I’ve pieced together from various sources. It goes as follows:

Late Friday the president sent an email out announcing the cave-in to the Trump demands. The decision to do this appears to have been done with little to no consultation outside of the president and trustees. Deans only heard about this at the same time as anyone else. On Saturday morning there was a Zoom session organized where the president met with deans, department chairs and some others. What happened on this Zoom is reported here:

… a transcript of the meeting [was made], which seems to have been created because Columbia administrators were unable to disable the Zoom function that generates an audio transcript. The transcript itself captures administrators struggling to prevent the software from creating a transcript and then moving forward without success.

“I am unable to turn it off, for technical reasons, so we’re all just going to have to understand,” an unnamed administrator said at the outset. “This meeting is being transcribed. If you are the requester of this, I would ask you to turn it off.”

“Yeah, that seems to be the default. I keep telling my people to stop this thing,” Olinto, the provost, responded.

The transcript was evidently requested by one of the participants, who then sent it to the Free Press, who wrote about it and appear to have shared it with the Trump “Antisemitism Task Force”.

The Free Press is Bari Weiss’s organization, and she’s been at this for twenty years, since her student days at Columbia when she led a campaign to try and get a Palestinian professor fired. What’s going on now is a continuation of this decades-long fight to tar the university as antisemitic and get pro-Palestinian students and faculty removed. The big difference now is that she and her allies (which clearly include at least one of the people on the Zoom) have carte-blanche from Trump to use his dictatorial powers to get them what they want.

Until I heard this story, while I could understand why the university felt it had to as much as possible try to cave-in to the Trump people’s demands, I couldn’t understand why they had decided not to go to court to challenge the obvious illegal confiscation of their funds. I also could not understand why they did not publicly support in any way the multiple students here and elsewhere who were being grabbed off the streets and flown to a prison in Louisiana. Whenever I asked anyone connected with the administration about this, they said that the answer they were hearing to this question was that there was fear that much worse things would happen if they crossed the Trump people. At first I couldn’t understand this, it just appeared to be unusual cravenness.

After hearing about the transcript story, it became clear to me how central feelings about Israel are to what is going on. There have always been people like Bari Weiss who feel that supporters of the Palestinians are a threat to Israel and to the lives of the Jewish people everywhere, a terrifying situation that justifies extreme measures. Starting after Oct. 7, demonstrations at Columbia made the university a target of their ire, and began a process of the university trying to appease them by agreeing with their claims about pro-Palestinian demonstrations as dangerous antisemitism. These appeasement efforts were unsuccessful, and through Trump they now have gotten ahold of the reins of dictatorial power. The Columbia administration has decided it has no choice but to do whatever they ask.

I can’t begin to guess how this will play out over the coming days and weeks. The only thing clear now is that, given the Zoom transcript story, the president and trustees are even less likely than before to inform or consult with deans and department chairs, much less any of the faculty. I can understand why people are organizing boycotts of Columbia, but do keep in mind what the source of the problem is (the Trump dictatorship and those who are using it for their ends).

While the Columbia administration won’t go to court (although it is telling people it might still do so in the future), the AAUP and AFT have now done so, on behalf of affected faculty. The complaint is here.

Update: News last Friday evening from the Columbia president and trustees was that they had agreed to cave-in to the ransom note from the “Antisemitism Task Force”. News this Friday evening is that the Columbia president is now ex-president. No idea what this means, guessing that events of this week have made clear to the trustees that they and the now ex-president made a terrible mistake last week.

When I left for spring break 10 days ago, I was intending to write something continuing along the lines of my last blog post. The idea was to try and fight the campaign of lies about the university and support the Columbia administration’s fight against Trump’s attempt to take control of the university by cutting off federal grants.

This weekend on my way back to New York, it became clear that the situation here is now very different. The administration appears to have caved in to all of Trump’s demands in hopes of restoring grant funding, ushering in a new era of Fascist control of the university. In addition, they appear to have decided to not support Mahmoud Khalil or other university community members facing imprisonment and deportation. Trump is now governing the US by decree as a dictator, with the full support of the legislative branch. While attempts are being made to go to the courts to try and stop this, the Columbia administration seems to have decided that route was hopeless and they had no choice but to give in.

The only communications I’ve gotten from anyone this weekend have been the President’s announcement of the cave-in and an email from the Trustees supporting “her principled and courageous leadership.” This is outrageous. As Fascism takes over US institutions, the one thing I’m seeing almost nowhere is principled or courageous resistance.

If anyone has reliable information about what is going on or helpful suggestions about how to resist what is happening, please use the comment section or contact me by email (I’ve now a non-Columbia email address where I can be contacted, peterwoit@gmail.com).

I plan to update this posting later.

Update: To get an idea of the thinking behind the cave-in to Trump, see the end of this New York Times article, which has:

Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of Columbia’s department of biological sciences, said that many people “simply do not understand that a modern research institution cannot exist without federal funding.” He pointed to the importance of research in the sciences and its potential to produce medical breakthroughs and improvements to the lives of everyday Americans.

“There is no scenario in which Columbia can exist in any way in its current form if the government funding is completely withdrawn,” he said. “Is having a dialogue a capitulation? I would say it is not.”

Dr. Stockwell added: “It is frustrating to me that people at other academic institutions who are not subject to these pressures are saying, ‘Columbia should fight the good fight.’ They are happy to give up our funding for their values.”

Katrina Armstrong, the interim university president is a biomedical researcher and head of the Medical Center, so she has much the same point of view: risking federal funding is not an option. She and Stockwell would like to claim that agreeing to Trump’s demands is not capitulation but just “having a dialogue”, but describing what is going on as “having a dialogue” makes about as much sense as describing Armstrong as “principled and courageous”. Unfortunately they are making it clear that there is pretty much nothing they won’t do in order to preserve this funding.

Stockwell is quite right to point out that there has been zero support of any kind from other institutions. We’re seeing the standard story of how Fascist dictatorship works: first make an example of one person or institution, that will cow the others who will keep their mouths shut and hope they won’t become the next target. What Columbia is doing is deeply shameful, but so is the silence of its peer institutions.

Only thing happening on campus that I’m hearing about is a “vigil” at noon today. The general attitude seems to be that this is a done deal, there’s nothing that can be done about it other than to give the University’s reputation a decent burial. At 4pm there’s supposedly a “Town Hall” where Armstrong will explain her point of view to the faculty.

Update: It’s unclear if what is going on here is that the current president and those around her are unusually craven and unprincipled. Lee Bollinger, who was president until 2023 has this to say:

We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orbán and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.

We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.

Jonathan Cole was provost for many years and has this in the New York Times:

I have spent almost 65 years at Columbia. I entered as an undergraduate in 1960, received my doctorate there, and never left. Yes, universities are contentious places, but they are supposed to be places where criticism takes place — whether political, humanistic or scientific disputes. When I became provost and dean of faculties, serving 14 years as Columbia’s chief academic officer, I dealt, alongside my colleagues, with student protests almost every year. When the federal government threatened Columbia with arrests or withdrawal of federal funds after the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, we defended academic freedom and free inquiry.

Today, the stakes are higher. We are in a fight for survival and appeasement never works. Despite platitudes to the contrary, Columbia’s leaders have weakened our community and our leadership among the greatest educational institutions in the world. This is not the way to fight Mr. Trump’s efforts at silencing our great American universities. If we don’t resist collectively by all legal means, and by social influence and legislative pressure, we are apt to see the destruction of our most revered institutions and the enormous benefits they accrue to America.

Update: Didn’t make it to the “Vigil”, which was not on the campus today. At the main gate there were no demonstrators, but to get in you needed to get past a line of 20-30 NYPD. I seem to be mistaken about the “Town Hall”, maybe it’s a Business School thing. On Wednesday there will be an Arts and Sciences faculty meeting at noon.

Someone sent a list of canceled Columbia grants.

Update: A reaction from Lubos Motl to current events.

Update: What Fascism looks like.

The Trump administration has announced a cutoff of $400 million in funding to Columbia University, supposedly because of its failure to take action against anti-semitism on the campus. Two months ago one would have assumed that the idea that the US president had the power to rule by decree and defund any institution he wanted to was absurd. All children in the US are taught in school about the checks and balances of the US constitutional system, which are designed to make this kind of thing impossible. We’re now learning every day something very different, how Fascist dictatorship can come to power, even in a constitutional democracy.

One thing we’re learning about the mechanism of Fascism is the central role of lies. The accusations of anti-semitism against Columbia are lies and much of what you may have read about what is happening here is lies. The current situation at Columbia is no different than that at any other university in the US: there are strong feelings on both sides about the Gaza war, and the administration has been doing its best to manage the conflict and taking extreme measures to protect people from harm.

One of the most privileged aspects of my rather privileged life is that I have an office that overlooks the northern part of the central campus. Most days I come in to work there, several times a day going through the main gates and the center of campus. Since last fall the campus has been extremely quiet. There have been rare and small peaceful protests by student groups. Outside the main gates, on a small number of occasions small groups have gathered to peacefully protest there, with such protests restricted to behind metal barriers and supervised by the NYPD.

The Columbia campus traditionally has been open: anyone could come on campus anytime and enter the academic buildings during the day. For many months now that has changed dramatically. Many gates have been closed and those still open have multiple security guards who demand to see a university ID, check that the picture on it is you and scan it on a device that checks to see if you are allowed on campus (if so, there’s a green light and you can go through). When you get to the math building it’s now always locked and you have to use your ID to unlock the door (for a while there was also a security guard stationed at the door).

When asked why we have to live with this new invasive security presence, the administration explains that it has been put in place mainly to protect people from anti-semitism. It is just one part of an intensive effort by the administration to try and address concerns about anti-semitic threats. The idea seems to have been that this effort would stop the Trump administration from taking action against the university.

I’m not allowing comments here. Beyond the usual reason that I don’t want to waste my time on moderating the kind of discussion this would attract, there’s something new going on. Administrators have been fired for saying the wrong thing and I hear Title VI investigations can be opened if there’s an accusation against you. What I’m seeing from my office is a lot of quiet.

In other news, our Fascist dictator has now explicitly allied the US with the Russian Fascist dictator and has removed the protections it was providing for Ukrainians being slaughtered by the Russians. This is deeply shameful for the people of the US. I think I’m allowed to say that, for now.

Update: This is extremely depressing.

Update: Plainclothes ICE officers are in the Columbia neighborhood, arresting at least one green-card holding pro-Palestinian activist outside his university residence and taking him to prison. Such officers do not have judicial warrants, are acting at the instruction of Trump’s DOJ. The university-provided guidance about such agents is here. I guess the security presence at the gates now has a good reason for being there.