Mathematicians interact with AI, July 2025 update

Posted on July 4, 2025 by Aravind Asok

This is a guest post from Aravind Asok1. If you have comments about this, you can contact him at asok@usc.edu. We’ll see if there’s some way to later post moderated comments here.

Recently, several symposia have been organized in which groups of mathematicians interacted with developers of various AI systems (specifically, reasoning models) in a structured way. We have in mind the Frontier Math Symposium hosted by Epoch AI and the Deepmind/IAS workshop. The first of these events received more coverage in the press than the second. It spawned several articles including pieces in Scientific American and the Financial Times, though both articles are currently behind a paywall.2 Curiously absent from these discussions is any kind of considered opinion of mathematicians regarding these interactions, though hyperbolic quotes from these pieces have made the rounds on social media. Neither of these events was open to the public: participation in both events was limited and by invitation. In both cases the goal was to foster transparent and unguarded interactions.

For context, note that many mathematicians have spent time interacting with reasoning models (Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude among others). While mathematicians were certainly not exempt from the wave of early prompt-based experimentation with initial public models of ChatGPT, they have also explored the behavior of reasoning models on professional aspects of mathematics, testing the models on research mathematics, homework problems, example problems for various classes as well as mathematics competition problems. Anecdotally, reactions run the gamut from dismissal3 to surprise.4 However, a structured group interaction with reasoning models provides a qualitatively different experience than these personal explorations. Since invitation to these events was controlled, their audience was necessarily limited; the Epoch event self-selected for those who expressed specific interest in AI,5 though the IAS/Deepmind event tried to generate a more random cross section of mathematicians.
Much press coverage has a breathless feel, e.g., including coverage of comments by Sam Altman in, say, Fortune.6 It seems fair to say that mathematicians are impressed with the current performance of models, and, furthermore, see interesting avenues for augmenting mathematical research using AI tools. However, many mathematicians view the rhetoric that “math can be solved”, extrapolating from progress on competition-style mathematics viewed as a game, as problematic at best, and at worst presenting a fundamental misunderstanding of the goals of research mathematics as a whole.

Our discussion here will focus on the Epoch AI-sponsored meeting for concreteness, which was not “secret” in any dramatic or clandestine sense, contrary to some reports. The backstory: Epoch AI has been trying to create benchmarks for the performance of various released LLMs7 (a.k.a., chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Deepmind’s Gemini, etc.).8 Frontier Math is a benchmark designed to evaluate the mathematical capabilities of reasoning models. This benchmark consists of tiered lists of problems. Tier 1 problems amount to “mathematical olympiad” level problems, while Tiers 2 and 3 are “more challenging” requiring “specialized knowledge at the graduate level.” Frontier Math sought to build a Tier 4 benchmark of “research
level” problems.

Building the Tier 4 benchmark necessitated involving research mathematicians. Earlier this year, Epoch reached out to mathematicians through varying channels. Initial requests promised some amount of money for delivering a problem of a particular type, but many mathematicians unfamiliar with the source of the communication either dismissed it as not credible or had no interest in the monetary compensation.9 To speed up the collection of Tier 4 problems, Epoch came up with the idea of hosting a symposium. The symposium was advertised on several social media outlets (e.g., Twitter) and various mathematicians were contacted directly by e-mail. Interested participants were sometimes asked to interview with Frontier Math lead mathematician Elliot Glazer and also to produce a prospective problem. Mathematics is a fairly small community so many of the people who attended already knew others who were attending; also the vast majority of attendees came from California. Participants did sign a non-disclosure agreement, but it was limited to information related to the problems that were to be delivered. Symposium participants also had their travel and lodging covered, and were paid a \$1500 stipend for their participation.

Participants were given a list of criteria for problem construction; problems must: 10

  1. Have a definite, verifiable answer (e.g., a large integer, a symbolic real, or a tuple of such objects) that can be checked computationally.
  2. Resist guesswork: Answers should be “guessproof,” meaning random attempts or trivial brute-force approaches have a negligible chance of success. You should be confident that a person or AI who has found the answer has legitimately reasoned through the underlying mathematics.
  3. Be computationally tractable: The solution of a computationally intensive problem must include scripts demonstrating how to find the answer, starting only from standard knowledge of the field. These scripts must cumulatively run less than a hour on standard hardware.

The participants were divided into groups based on field specificity (number theory, analysis, algebraic geometry, topology/geometry and combinatorics) and told to produce suitable problems.

How did participants contextualize this challenge? In mathematics research one frequently does not know in advance the solution to a given problem, nor whether the problem is computationally tractable. In fact, many mathematicians will agree that knowing a problem is soluble can be game-changing.11 Moreover, deciding which problems should be deemed worthy of study can be difficult. As a consequence, by and large, participants did not frame the challenge as one of producing research problems, but rather one of simply producing appropriate problems.

Unsurprisingly, ability to construct such problems varied from subject to subject. For example, one geometer said that it was quite difficult to construct “interesting” problems subject to the constraints. There are also real questions about the extent to which “ability to resist guesswork” truly measures “mathematical understanding”. Many participants were rather open about this: even if AI managed to solve the problems they created, they did not feel that would constitute “understanding” in any real sense.

While most participants had written and submitted problems before the symposium started, few people had an idea at that point of what would be “easy” or “hard” for a model. Most of the first day was spent seeing how models interacted with these preliminary problems, and the subsequent discussions refined participants’ understanding of the stipulation that problems were resistant to guesswork. Along the way, models did manage to “solve” some of the problems, but that statement deserves qualification and a more detailed understanding of what constitutes a “solution”.

One key feature of reasoning models was explicit display of “reasoning traces”, showing the models “thinking”. These traces displayed models searching the web and identifying related papers, but their ability to do so was sensitive to the formulation of the problem in fascinating ways. For example, in algebraic geometry, formulating a problem in terms of commutative ring theory instead of varieties could elicit different responses from a model. However, it is a cornerstone of human algebraic geometry to be able to pass back and forth between the two points of view with relative ease. In geometry/topology, participants noted that models demonstrated no aptitude for geometric reasoning. For example, models could not create simple pictorial models (knot diagrams were specifically mentioned) for problems and manipulate them.12 In algebraic and enumerative combinatorics, models applied standard methods well (e.g., solving linear recurrences, appealing to binomial identities), but if problems required several steps as well as ingenuity models were stymied, even if they were prompted with relevant literature or correct initial steps.

When a model did output a correct answer, examining the reasoning traces sometimes indicated that happened because the problem was constructed in such a way that the answer could be obtained by solving a much simpler but related problem. In terms of the exam solution paradigm, we would probably say such a response was “getting the right
answer for the wrong reason” and assign a failing grade to such a solution!

Participants were routinely told to aim to craft problems that even putative future reasoning models would find difficult. From that standpoint, it was easy to extrapolate that a future model might behave in a more human way, demonstrate “understanding” in a human sense, and isolate the missing key ingredient. This created a pervasive fear that if reasoning traces indicated models seemed “close now”, then one should extrapolate that the problems would be solvable by future models.13 Participants did observe that if literature in a particular domain was suitably saturated, the models could identify lemmas that would be appropriate and generate relevant mathematics. This was certainly impressive, but one wonders to what extent the natural language output affects perception of the coherence of responses: it is easy for things to “look about right” if one does not read too closely! Eventually, participants did converge on problems that were thought to meet the required bar.

The language models that we worked with were definitely good at keyword search, routinely generating useful lists of references. The models also excelled at natural language text generation and could generate non-trivial code, which made them useful in producing examples. However, press-reporting sometimes exaggerated this, suggesting that reasoning models are “faster” or “better” than professional mathematicians. Of course, such statements are very open to interpretation. On the one hand, this could be trivially true, e.g., calculators are routinely faster than professional mathematicians at adding numbers. Less trivially, it could mean automating complicated algebraic computations, but even this would be viewed by most mathematicians as far from the core essence of mathematical discovery.

The participants at the meeting form a rather thin cross-section of mathematicians who have some interest in the interface between AI (broadly construed) and mathematics. The symposium Signal chat became very active after the Scientific American article was posted. Undoubtedly participants felt there were exciting possible uses of AI for the development of mathematics. There are also real questions about whether or when future “reasoning models” will approach “human-level”competence,14 as well as serious and fascinating philosophical questions about what that even means; this is a direct challenge for the mathematics community. What does it mean to competently do research mathematics? What is valuable or important mathematics?

Finally, there are important practical questions about the impact, e.g., environmental or geopolitical, of computing at this level.15 All these questions deserve attention: barring some additional as-yet-unseen theoretical roadblock, reasoning models seem likely to continue improving, underscoring the importance of these questions. As things stand, however—particularly when it comes to mathematical reasoning—caution seems warranted in extrapolating future research proficiency of models.

  1. With the aid of generous input from Ben Antieau, Greta Panova, Kyler Siegel, Ravi Vakil, and Akshay Venkatesh.↩︎
  2. Some discussion of the IAS/Deepmind event is available on Michael Harris’ June 8 substack post.↩︎
  3. It seems many people have a collection of standard mathematical questions for which reasoning models produce only hallucinatory outputs. Some discussion of the disconnect between stated AI benchmark progress on mathematics as opposed to “real” research as of March 2025 can be found in the article The Disconnect Between AI Benchmarks and Math Research.↩︎
  4. The performance of language models on standard exam questions for undergraduate and graduate classes was a routine source of surprise. However, one expects reasoning models should perform better in areas where literature is dense. People are also routinely impressed by the fact that the models have improved so much over time.↩︎
  5. We would be remiss not mention that many mathematicians justifiably have concerns about legitimizing corporate technological endeavors. Such worries are especially important since the companies developing reasoning models plausibly view “mathematical progress”, say in terms of ability of models to solve mathematical problems of various types, as a way to distinguish amongst themselves. The vague statement “our model is good at math” can simultaneously be propaganda or simply false depending on context and audience.↩︎
  6. Altman states: “In some sense AIs are like a top competitive programmer in the world now or AIs can get a top score on the world’s hardest math competitions or AIs can do problems that I’d expect an expert PhD in my field to do”. When Altman makes such a statement, given his role, it’s easy to question his intentions. However, one cannot help but interpret his comments differently if there are also mathematicians making statements that can be construed as “AI systems are good at math”. Even vague statements to this effect by mathematicians could be used to minimize legislative targeting, or avoid scrutiny.↩︎
  7. See Epoch AI’s benchmarking dashboard for a more detailed discussion.↩︎
  8. See here for a blogpost giving some context to math benchmarks, a little bit of background in “reasoning models” as well as discussion of computational
    efforts involved.↩︎
  9. Some discussion of these requests took place at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM), which was held in Seattle in January. According to some comments here, mathematicians expressed skepticism at delivering problems for money
    exposing a fundamental disjunction between academia and industry: pure mathematicians aspire to study mathematics to advance understanding, but industry researchers are required to deliver creations that buoy their supporting institutions.↩︎
  10. See https://epoch.ai/frontiermath/tier-4 for further discussion of Tier 4 problems.↩︎
  11. It is also worth pointing out that formalizing “inherent difficulty of proof discovery”, say in terms of decision problems, led to significant theoretical challenges to previous generation approaches to artificial intelligence. For a recent revision and extension of this notion of difficulty, see Artifical intelligence and inherent mathematical difficulty by W. Dean and A. Naibo. Once again, it is unclear whether such an approach has any bearing on what mathematicians might view as important for mathematics.↩︎
  12. More broadly, the sense was that forthcoming AI systems would be able to navigate the literature, including obscure corners, and would be quite capable at performing “standard”computations. Mathematicians themselves have created plenty of open source computational packages (SnapPy, Regina), which are already integrated
    into Python and hence automatically part of the toolkit to which a model has access. However, models seemingly lacked what mathematicians call geometric intuition.↩︎
  13. There’s a phenomenon alluded to in the Scientific American article as “proof by intimidation” which exposes a relevant phenomenon. If someone asserts boldly that they have solved a problem in a particular research domain, they have sufficient status and the approach they describe includes keywords/techniques that seem like they
    should have bearing on the problem, mathematicians tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, mathematicians will frequently believe the problem has been solved without going through the “solution” in detail. It also routinely happens in mathematical practice that such “solutions” break down under additional scrutiny, e.g., because some subtle part of the argument was not sufficiently well explained. This discussion seems relevant to participants perception of putative “solutions” provided by the models. Moreover, many of the stories of “solutions to problems” travelled between groups, creating a kind of echo effect.↩︎
  14. Recent mathoverflow posts raise the question: Is this a bad moment for a math career in the context of news over AI models. The conversation around AI and jobs also extends to current fears. For example, without being precise yet about what we mean by AI, graduate students, especially at some larger public universities, are being tasked to “use AI” to speed up their workflow, frequently leading to despair.↩︎
  15. Environmental impacts of generative AI include increased electricity demand and water consumption sometimes localized to data center construction. See Michael Harris’s substack for a recent discussion with some links.↩︎
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This Week’s Hype

Posted on July 4, 2025 by woit

Absurd press releases from major universities hyping the idea that “string theorists have finally found a way to test string theory” have been a feature of theoretical physics for decades now. This nonsense is never going to stop. Latest example is here, based on this paper.

If the LHC were to find states such as those discussed in this paper, it would take less than 24 hours for there to be several papers on the arXiv giving a “string phenomenology” explanation for them. As a way to discredit science and the scientific method, this kind of press release is pretty effective.

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The Situation at Columbia XXVII

Posted on July 2, 2025 by woit

I’ll be heading out on vacation tomorrow morning, on a road trip first to Montreal, then Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, back at work on the 21st. While away I’ll try to detox from reading or thinking about the topics of this series of postings. Very much looking forward to being away from Columbia and outside this country for a while.

In non-Columbia news, yesterday Penn bent the knee and caved-in to Trump. The interesting question now is whether this gets them back the \$175 million in grants which was illegally withheld from them based on this Title IX accusation. It may be that they’ve just put themselves in the same position as Columbia, humiliating themselves for no reason and inviting further demands. If they do get the money back, that would provide some encouragement for what the Columbia trustees are trying to do (negotiate a new and better cave-in).

The long outage of Columbia servers last week was due to a hacker (also see here), seemingly with a pro-Trump agenda of stealing data to show the guilty nature of “woke” university policies. In particular this hacker gave the data for 2.5 million applications to Columbia over many years to Bloomberg News. Not sure what this would show of significance other than the already heavily litigated fact that Columbia and most other universities have been practicing affirmative action and giving preference to applications from specific disadvantaged groups since the 1960s-70s. One thing that this could resolve might be the big debate over whether Barron Trump was rejected from Columbia, perhaps explaining Trump’s campaign to destroy the university.

The Trump assault on Columbia via the accreditation system continues. See this and a university statement here. It seems unlikely that the US higher ed accreditation system will go ahead and make itself an effective arm of the Fascist dictator’s illegal attempt to gain control of the universities. But, these days, who knows…

One of the Columbia trustees, Shoshana Shendelman has gone on right-wing media (Fox News, Breitbart) to attack a large part of the Columbia community as “destructive”, effectively supporting the Trump attack on the university. That the trustees allow this indicates that many if not most of them agree with her. This unfortunately seems to be a big part of the explanation for the cave-in, the firing of Armstrong, the failure to support arrested students, etc.

Remarkably, Shipman and other trustees last year were well aware that Shendelman was already then attacking the university community from within. Elise Stefanik and some House Republicans are continuing the assault on Columbia as “antisemitic”. They point to the fact that on January 25,2024 Shipman wrote to others about Shendelman “I just don’t think she should be on the board.” In later text message exchanges with the vice-chair of the board, Shendelman was described as “a mole” and “a fox in the henhouse”. Clearly Shipman and other trustees by 2024 realized that Shendelman was collaborating with Republicans in an attempt to damage the university with “antisemitism” accusations. That they did nothing about this then has put us in the current situation of having a partially MAGA board of trustees devoted to caving-in and unwilling to fight Trump and those who want to destroy us.

Update: Getting ready for vacation, with Columbia craziness level very high. We have a trustee who has been collaborating for a long time with the Republicans trying to destroy Columbia for being “antisemitic”, and is now going on Fox News/Breitbart to attack the university she’s a trustee of. In any other such situation, this would be grounds for immediate removal. Presumably she feels she can do this kind of thing with impunity because Trump has his boot on the necks of the trustees. At other institutions like Harvard, Trump’s people are plotting how to force a settlement that would give them some control, e.g. by having someone on the board. At Columbia, they’re all set, already have their person on the board.

Shipman has sent out a letter abasing herself and saying she didn’t really mean it. Stefanik and Ari Schrage are demanding her resignation. The trustees already did something incredibly stupid last time this happened (Armstrong), if they do it again they will make it crystal clear that the Columbia president serves at the pleasure of Trump and his people.

I really need to get away from this, now…

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Notes on Epistemic Collapse

Posted on June 27, 2025 by woit

For a long time I’ve been having difficulty making sense for myself of a lot of what is going on in the world around me. Recently I’ve found that a useful way of understanding some otherwise baffling things is as products of what is sometimes called “epistemic collapse”. By “epistemic collapse” I mean the collapse of a shared reality, caused by the loss of reliable sources for distinguishing what is true from what is false.

Someone I’ve found to have a very insightful take on this is Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins. Some of his best explanations of the problem are at threads on his Bluesky feed, for example here and this recent one, which includes:

The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities become locked into belief systems that can’t be challenged, where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t just distort truth, it breaks trust.

When this happens at scale, it’s not just bad information, it’s a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable. That’s what disordered discourse really is, a collapse in collective reasoning.

And when debate collapses, power doesn’t disappear, it just becomes unaccountable. Truth becomes tribal. Institutions become hollow. People are left shouting across a void, each group certain the others are insane or evil…

So the real question isn’t “who decides what’s true.” The question is, do we still have the ability to decide anything together at all? Because once we lose that, democracy isn’t under threat. It’s already gone.

I find thinking in these terms helps to make sense of the bizarre and disturbing new political situation in the US and elsewhere, with a new form of Fascism on the march. Autocrats are coming to power on a wave of lies and the destruction of institutions that can provide the facts needed for a shared reality. Efforts to fight this by just coming up with better policy proposals are doomed, what is needed is some way to bring back reality to our information environment. Absent this, we’re looking at a future dominated by autocrats governing through lies and a system of client oligarchs who work with them. The US is now well on its way there.

I don’t have any idea of how to deal with the epistemic collapse problem, other than a hope that if it becomes more widely recognized, people will somehow start finding answers. Thinking in these terms has made me realize that a lot of what I’ve been doing on this blog has been motivated by wanting to provide a source of reality-based information about topics that I have first-hand knowledge of but where at the same time I see the mainstream information environment as dominated by lies.

The situation in fundamental physics

The motivation for starting this blog was the situation in fundamental physical theory over twenty years ago. At the time, popular discussion of the subject was dominated by untruths about string theory, with for instance endless press articles claiming “physicists have finally found a way to test string theory!”. There’s a lot less of this now, and I hope some of that is due to the influence of this blog and the book that I wrote. Within physics departments, string theory was pursued in a very tribal manner, with the main conflict pitting the string theory tribe against the phenomenology and loop quantum gravity tribes.

Nowadays the situation is somewhat different, with the string theory tribe still dominant in formal theory, but mostly no longer doing string theory. The failed string theory ideology is now in the background, but publicly acknowledging its failure will still get you in big trouble with the tribe. Students are still being trained in the ideology (this fall here at Columbia the physics department is again offering an undergraduate course in string theory), but the mainstream research agenda is now elsewhere.

The problem of epistemic collapse in particle theory now goes way, way back. What kept the subject tightly tethered to reality was experiment, but from the 1980s on the main open questions lost useful experimental input. From then until now, the subject has been dominated by an evolving set of “hot topics”, Lacking any shared agreement about whether they were connecting in any useful way to reality, these were often driven more by tribal considerations than anything else. The tribal structure is now complicated, but well-understood to those working in the subject. One very over-simplified way to understand it is as subtribes governed by an oligarchy dominated by figures at Harvard and the IAS. These days if you want a career in the subject, you need to join a tribe, with your choice the Swampland (Vafa), celestial holography (Strominger), amplitudes (Arkani-Hamed), generalized symmetries (Seiberg) or black holes/information (Maldacena/Witten).

Yes, this is a caricature. Also worth noting is that the whole subject is facing a different sort of collapse, as physics departments and US federal funding agencies stop funding theoretical particle physics at all. The latest hep-th US faculty hiring rumor mill has only 8 people getting tenure track jobs this year, about half from the formal theory subtribes.

The situation at Columbia

I started writing about what is happening here at Columbia very specifically to counter lies being widely spread about the subject, which I often know to be lies based on first-hand information. That there is a serious antisemitism problem at Columbia is a lie, heavily promoted by those upset by criticism of the ongoing genocidal and ethnic cleansing policies of the Israeli government. About the truth of what is happening here and now locally, I’m mainly relying on my own eyes and conversations with others who are also here and have first-hand information. What’s going on is very much tribal warfare with on the ground massive killings of civilians happening in Gaza and here a campaign to deny this and paint anti-genocide protest as antisemitic terrorism.

About what’s happening in Gaza I don’t have first-hand information. There I have to rely on a long lifetime of reading various news sources and getting some idea of their reliability. If you don’t believe genocide and ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza, you need to explain why this story from today’s Haaretz headlined

‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid

is not true. I don’t see how “genocide” is not the right word for starving 2 million people and firing on them when they try and get food. As for “ethnic cleansing”, Israeli policy in Gaza appears to be to destroy all structures there, shooting civilians who get too close to the operation

“Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives 5,000 [roughly $1,500] shekels for every house they demolish,” said a veteran fighter. “They’re making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they don’t demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish wherever they want along the entire front.”

As a result, the fighter added, the contractors’ demolition campaign brings them, along with their relatively small security details, close to distribution points or along the routes used by aid trucks.

In order [for the contractors] to protect themselves, a shooting incident breaks out, and people are killed,” he said. “These are areas where Palestinians are allowed to be – we’re the ones who moved closer and decided [they] endangered us. So, for a contractor to make another 5,000 shekels and take down a house, it’s deemed acceptable to kill people who are only looking for food.”

What next?

My problem these days is that I’d really like to be spending my time on something very different, continuing to make slow progress on some ideas I find very promising, and getting the results written up. About the situation in fundamental physical theory, for a while I’ve been writing less and less. It’s a depressing topic, nothing is happening, epistemic collapse has led to intellectual collapse, and I’ve long ago said whatever I have to say about it.

About the situation at Columbia, it is changing and evolving. The bogus “antisemitism” campaign continues in force and I still believe it’s worth the time to try and challenge it with accurate information about what is really happening here, so I’ll keep blogging about it to some extent.

I have very limited time to moderate discussion in the comment section, so in particular no time to deal with those who want to conduct tribal warfare here. While I hope the notes on “epistemic collapse” are helpful to others, unfortunately I also don’t have the time to moderate a general discussion of that topic, outside it’s specific application to the subjects I’m trying to write about on the blog.

Update: Some thoughts caused by reading the latest from Stand Columbia explaining why Columbia must immediately make a deal with Trump.

Another aspect of epistemic collapse is collapse of the legal system, which depends on being able to distinguish truth from falsehood, and whether a law is being followed or not. The legal system can collapse if judges start accepting falsehoods as truth, or if the executive finds it can just ignore what a judge says about what is true and what is false. It can also collapse because people and institutions give up on it, decide it cannot provide any recourse against dictatorial power.

The trustees describe what they are doing as negotiating a “settlement”. I’ve been thinking of my disagreement with the decision of the trustees to not go to court, to not challenge the obvious illegality of what Trump is doing, as a disagreement about values and morality. But it actually is much more practical than that, and I suspect the trustees either have or will find this out.

Harvard has challenged the Trump illegalities in court through lawsuits. Like most lawsuits, they may some day decide to settle them out of court. If so, this will be a conventional “settlement” of differences within the legal system. What Columbia is doing though is very different. It is starting by accepting illegalities as valid governmental actions. They’ve abandoned the legal system, deciding that they’re better off outside of it, that we’re now in a dictatorship where legality is irrelevant. All that matters is the will of the dictator. If Columbia “settles” with Trump, it will be nothing more than a statement that “we give in to the dictator’s will by doing X”. Any thing they think they’re getting in return for this will have no legal basis, it’s just the current will of the dictator, which may change.

We’ll see how this works out, but my impression is that the Trump people understand this very well. They want the Columbia trustees to publicly humiliate themselves and the institution, by bowing down to dictatorial will and publicly supporting a new regime which operates outside the law. They have an agenda of defunding research universities and will pursue that separately. So, in opposition to Stand Columbia, I’d argue that, even if the trustees don’t believe anymore in the court system, they should not “settle”. Signing another “we give in to the dictator’s will” document will get them nothing but more humiliation.

Update: More lies about “antisemitism” from Trump. The idea that Harvard is currently “in violent violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin” is an absurdity. The threat to take away all federal funding if Harvard doesn’t do something about this is ridiculous. All federal funding already has been taken away, and since the accusations are lies, there’s nothing Harvard can do to answer them. These lies are a tactic to force Harvard to agree to the dictator’s will in the way Columbia did in the past, but we don’t know what actions the dictator is explicitly trying to force on Harvard or Columbia.

I hope Harvard will continue its policy of fighting this kind of thing in court.

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The Situation at Columbia XXVI

Posted on June 25, 2025 by woit

There are some unusual things going on here today. The central university computer system has been having outages since Monday night. No news on the source of these, but this just came in:

CUIT has been working around the clock to restore services following yesterday’s widespread IT outage. As of this morning, many UNI-authenticated services have been restored, and teaching and learning tools are operational, including Courseworks, Zoom, Lionmail, and Google Drive. Additional systems will continue to come back online throughout the day. We will continue to update you with additional information as it becomes available.

In a comment, Alessandro Strumia points to this Twitter post claiming hackers have broken in the Columbia admissions department computers. Just about everything on that site is nonsense, so no reason to believe this, but we’ll see…

I don’t want to try and moderate a discussion here of NYC politics, but will just point out that for the past few weeks, much of the campaign to stop Zohran Mamdani was based on the same kind of attacks as those leveled at Columbia anti-genocide protesters. Shai Davidai is leading an effort to have the IRS go after the student newspaper because it endorsed Mamdani. This kind of thing doesn’t seem to be working, with Mamdani last night decisively winning the NYC Democratic mayoral primary.

Recently I’ve been getting better insight into the point of view of the Columbia trustees. The depressing conclusion I’m drawing is that the reason they’re not fighting Trump is that many of them don’t want to. What I see as a Fascist dictator acting illegally they see as someone governing very much in the interests of the well-to-do, so no threat to them personally. Much of what he’s doing they have no problem with, so why not just go along with it? The taking of grant funding is a big problem for them, but they don’t see any easy way to get it back through the legal system and don’t want to fight with Trump, so they’re focused purely on reaching some sort of settlement with his people (which in practice may be Stephen Miller).

Fox News today has a remarkable opinion piece by one of the trustees, Shoshana Shendelman. It contains a version of various MAGA talking points about how terrible Columbia and other universities are:

Higher education is at a crossroads. As a scientist and a trustee of Columbia University, I have witnessed firsthand how an institution once hailed as a pillar of intellectual progress can be threatened not only by enemies from without, but also by an ideology from within—one that celebrates chaos over creation, grievance over growth, and destruction over discourse…

However, in the spring of 2024, my home was filled with students (my children and many of their classmates) who no longer felt safe on Columbia’s campus. Their fears didn’t stem from intellectual challenge or debate—it stemmed from intimidation. Protesters, many masked, others emboldened by institutional tolerance, took control of the physical environment of the university. They shut down classrooms, buildings and libraries…

The real Columbia—my Columbia—is a monument of advancement shaped by generations of human endeavor. Monuments, however, can be vandalized and dismantled. And these ongoing campaigns have not been acts of civil dialogue; they have been acts of desecration. Of blaming rather than solving. Of tearing apart instead of sewing together. The world is full of destroyers. Their work is quick, loud, and rarely lasting…

Let’s rebuild institutions like Columbia together to ensure that hatred and chaos do not dominate, and everyone feels included and respected. This is our generation’s moment to lead. Building necessitates bravery, and in turn our courage will spread across America. Let’s build again.

Shendelman was the target of this article at the Intercept describing her role at Columbia and problems at her company, Applied Therapeutics. Much of the opinion piece is a personal complaint about this:

After voicing my concerns regarding antisemitism on campus, I became a target of certain media voices determined to erase decades of my work, service, and scholarship with a few calculated, malevolent strokes of a pen.

Up until now, the Columbia trustees have acted in private, keeping discussions of what they are doing confidential. It’s disturbing that one of them is now going on Fox News, presumably with the approval of the rest (I’m finding it hard to believe she would do this without checking with the board) and putting out a picture of the university as threatened from within by antisemitism and an evil ideology, thus needing a house-cleaning and a campaign to make Columbia great again. Yes, there has been an ongoing campaign to destroy a great institution, but going on Fox News with accusations like hers is to join that right-wing campaign. The trustees should make clear that this is not their agenda.

Update: Realizing I didn’t understand what Shendelman sees as the main problem with Columbia now, I reread her piece carefully. Here’s what she says is the main problem facing the university now:

Do we permit this new form of campus intimidation to silence those with opposing views and destroy educational opportunities for an entire generation?

This is very weird. The Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the scientific research enterprise at Columbia, thus destroying educational opportunities in science for years to come. It also has launched a campaign to intimidate anti-genocide protesters, with threats of jail, deportation, suspension, etc. So, as an argument that Columbia needs to fight the Trump administration this makes perfect sense. But from context, the “campus intimidation” she is worried about is not from Trump, but from anti-genocide protesters and their supposed antisemitism, which makes her an ally of the Trump campaign against Columbia. I end up completely mystified by who is supposedly silencing who and who is destroying educational opportunities not just for today’s students, but for “an entire generation”. It sounds like it’s the protesters, but the only educational opportunity they’ve destroyed this semester is a few hours of study time in a library.

Since Shendelman says she is writing as a trustee of Columbia university, the trustees really should clarify who it is who is “silenc[ing] those with opposing views and destroy[ing] educational opportunities for an entire generation?” and what they intend to do about it.

Update: What the Columbia trustees should be reading.

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Various and Sundry

Posted on June 23, 2025 by woit

First of all, three new books of interest:

  • Jesper Grimstrup has written a book titled The Ant Mill: how theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism, and mass production of research. There’s a lot more about the book at his substack. I’ve contributed a foreword.

    Grimstrup has spent a lot of time thinking about what is going on in the fundamental theoretical physics research community, partly based on his own experiences, together with looking at some data he has gathered and analyzed (with Jarl Sidelmann, see here). Twenty years ago Lee Smolin and I drew attention to these problems, which in many ways have gotten significantly worse since then. I hope Grimstrup’s book gets some people thinking seriously about what can be done.

  • Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper have a new book out, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins. If you’re in London this week you can hear them talk about it in person.

    The book covers a huge range of speculative ideas about the Big Bang, including a lot of stories based on Afshordi’s experiences as a researcher in the field. This is a subject I’ve never paid that close attention to, so I learned quite a bit from the book. It’s not a superficial overview, but fairly dense with information.

    While going through all this was interesting, it did leave me reminded of why I’ve never spent much time on these topics. There’s no real role for deep mathematics and the whole business has stayed unfortunately divorced from any successful confrontation with experiment. The situation is kind of like that in particle theory and Afshordi recognizes some of the same problems Grimstrup discusses. There’s a successful standard model of cosmology, but nobody has had any success in going beyond it. One is in danger of doing something more like religion than science in a way that makes me queasy. Afshordi has a lot of discussion of this in the book, and see some slides of his from a talk here.

  • A fascinating book about mathematics and thinking, Mathematica by David Bessis, is now available in paperback. For more about this, I’ll refer you to a review by Michael Harris of the original French edition.

In positive news about science funding, there’s yet another new theory center, the Max Planck-IAS-NTU Center for Particle Physics, Cosmology, and Geometry. This is the second new IAS theory center in the past month, last one was the Leinweber Forum for Theoretical and Quantum Physics at IAS.

With US federal science research funding in the process of being drastically cut, an increasingly large fraction of funding for such research will be coming from the Simons Foundation. Their 2024 report is now out, with financial information here. In 2024 they were spending about $300 million in grants (there’s also more grants from the Simons Foundation International).

Update: For an interesting recent review that answers a lot of the questions about cosmology that have always bothered me (and provides a good supplement to the Afshordi/Halper book), see here.

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Professional Update

Posted on June 22, 2025 by woit

News from here is that as of July 1 I’ll be on a one-semester sabbatical, then will officially retire at the end of the year. This won’t affect that much what I’m actually doing with my time. I’m not moving out of New York and will continue to spend most of my time coming in to the math department to work, but will from now on not be regularly teaching and will mostly give up the administrative things I have been doing for the department having to do with the computer system. In the future I do expect to at some point teach some more courses, but probably not until spring 2027.

In September I’ll be 68, and have always intended to not keep my current position past the age of 70. The reasons for retiring at the end of the year include wanting to focus full-time for a while on research, not wanting to be committed to teaching a course here for now given the disturbing things that have happened (with more likely to come) and the university announcing a financial incentive program for those willing to retire by the end of the year. I’m quite happy with the way this is working out.

I’ll be on vacation in Canada July 3-19. The rest of the summer will be working on trying to write up the progress I’ve been making on the ideas I’ve been pursuing the past few years. The latest version of such a paper focuses not on the twistor stuff but on explaining exactly how “Wick rotation” does something quite unexpected in the case of spinors, opening up new possibilities for unified theories. As always, the problem with writing the paper is that as I write my perspective on the subject changes and I keep changing the conception of the paper. Hopefully this process will converge on a finished version of some kind soon.

During the next academic year I won’t be teaching, look forward to spending a fair amount of time traveling. If you’d like to hear more about the ideas I’ve been working on in person, let me know since I might be near your town sometime during the coming year.

Blogging will continue in some form or other. Much of my recent blogging has been driven by trying to understand what’s going on at Columbia. Unfortunately at this point I’m starting to feel that I understand this all too well, so will continue to report on what’s happening, but spend less time thinking about (and getting disturbed by) it. Will try to find news worth writing about on the math and physics fronts, something that is becoming especially hard to do in physics.

Update: Maybe I should emphasize that, while I’m “retiring” in the sense that Columbia will no longer be paying me a salary and I won’t be teaching a course every semester, I’ll still be spending my time in much the same way as in recent years. The main difference I’m hoping for is to concentrate more on making progress on the research program I’ve been pursuing, so very much not “retiring” from that, quite the opposite.

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

The Situation at Columbia XXV

Posted on June 18, 2025 by woit

There are a couple reports out very recently that NIH is lifting its block on paying grant funds to Columbia, see here and here. According to one of these reports, this applies only to Columbia, not to Brown/Northwestern/Cornell/Harvard.

Presumably Columbia has done something to make Trump happy, maybe we’ll find out soon.

There was a Zoom briefing yesterday for Columbia people explaining the current financial and grant situation. Columbia’s biggest financial exposure by far is the NIH grants, which are a large fraction of all grant income. What Trump had done starting in March with these grants was particularly egregious. The way they work, the university incurs costs payable under the grant, then gets reimbursed. What had happened was that the NIH stopped paying these reimbursements (there also were grant cancellations, non-renewals, no new grants, etc.). One would think this was so obviously illegal that one could easily get a court judgement, no one seems to have an explanation why Columbia did not sue at least on the specific issue of not getting paid for expenses incurred under a valid contract.

Max Kozlov, journalist at Nature, reports:

‪Several NIH staffers tell me they are beyond thrilled to finally process award notices and outlays that have been sitting idle for months. But they are concerned about what Columbia may have conceded.

Aren’t we all..

More about this later as there is further information.

Update: Good news! It looks like Columbia didn’t cave yet (or, not enough yet…). Latest from Kozlov:

Well, that was short-lived: NIH staff received instructions to HOLD funds to Columbia again.

Speculation on what happened per NIH staffer: the White House found out and blew a gasket.

As they “negotiate” the trustees should probably be thinking about the fact that, besides Trump himself, there are quite a few clowns with different agendas involved in this on the Trump side, some of whom are quite devoted to the project of completely destroying Columbia. I don’t see how they can ever reasonably expect to make a deal with these people.

Article at Science magazine here

In an email sent this morning to NIH grants staff across the agency and first described on Bluesky by Nature, Michelle Bulls, director of the agency’s Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, writes: “Great news, we have been told that we can resume funding awards to Columbia (funding pause has been lifted).”

It’s not clear from the email how the policy change will affect terminated grants. Bulls writes that her office is awaiting guidance from Jon Lorsch, acting director of NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, on “whether we should reinstate” awards that “were terminated for ‘antisemitism.’”

A spokesperson for Columbia said the university “is aware of the renewal and continuance of some government grants. We remain in discussions with the government and are deeply committed to our broader efforts to advance our critical medical and scientific research and all it provides to the world.”

Looks like this was written before the latest reversal, described here by:

Grants at Columbia unfrozen at 9:30 this morning…

Refrozen at 2:30 this afternoon with instructions to undo all of the releases done earlier.

It like the 7th graders in detention broke into the Principal’s Office…

Official statement from one of the clowns:

There is no Federal funding for unvetted woke ‘research’ at Columbia. Any minimal disbursements that presently exist are for specific measures, including to wind down the grant entirely.

Update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has Columbia Got Some NIH Funding Back. Then It Didn’t.

Update: Can anyone tell me what this is about? Asha Jadeja Motwani appears to be a MAGA tech mogul, widow of a husband involved early on with Google. She somehow is now, together with Elise Stefanik, coming after Columbia:

As i start playing a more active role at Columbia University in New York, I expect to work very closely with representative Elise Stefanik in creating a healthier campus environment.

Along with like-minded faculty and student bodies, we will nurture a true diversity of viewpoint, respect the rights of everyone to free speech and create a safe space for Jewish students. These kids have borne the brunt of hate from campus “protesters” over the last few months since October 7, 2023.

Watch as we reboot the American University system (mostly the Ivy League) from the ground up, one university at a time. The groundswell of support that we are getting from every corner and every last mile is staggering. Humbled and energized.

Elise is the tigress responsible for historic congressional hearings that enabled the firing of three university presidents for their stance on campus antisemitism.

What “active role at Columbia” will she be playing???

Update: Just got a message in my email from the acting president, about release of a new report from the Task Force on Antisemitism. It’s hard not to be suspicious that this has something to do with the news from earlier today about Columbia’s funds being unfrozen. Perhaps this is part of some package of “fighting antisemitism” actions that was supposed to get Columbia’s money back (but then, like the last cave-in, didn’t).

The release of the report now is kind of odd. It surveyed students a year ago, at the end of a difficult year with a lot of attention to contentious pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The idea seemed to be to use this to understand problems experienced by Jewish and Muslim students in 2023-24, make positive changes, and then do a new survey this year. Unclear why it took since last September to analyze the survey data, also unclear why there’s been no talk of a new survey. The environment of 2024-25 has been completely different than that of 2023-24, with an intense new security system and successful nearly complete crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The past year has been dominated not by annoying pro-Palestinian chants, but by pro-Palestinian protestors being dragged off to prison by masked men. There’s a lot of fear among people here, but it’s fear of the new dictatorship which has demonized and made public enemies of critics of the ongoing and worsening genocidal military campaign in Gaza.

If you look at the numbers in the survey about 2023-24, one striking thing is that they’re very similar for Jewish and Muslim students. Both groups report problems due to their religious identity in very similar numbers. The only place where they were significantly different was in the opinion about the encampments. 60% of Muslim students strongly supported them, 57% of Jewish student students strongly opposed them. Also, very few (5%) Muslim students opposed the encampments, while a significant fraction (26%) of the Jewish students supported them.

There’s lots of numbers in the report, those who want to use them to argue that Columbia has a terrible antisemitism problem will surely find some things they can use. I do hope the university is preparing another such survey for 2024-25, asking the community how it feels about this academic year spent living under an oppressive security apparatus, at an institution that quickly caved in to a Fascist dictator and would do nothing to support students dragged away to prison or forced to flee.

Update: Some other numbers from the “antisemitism” report. Overall, 30% of students opposed the encampments, 49% supported them.

The New Yorker has a piece by Alistair Kitchen explaining what now happens to any non-US citizen who reported positively about the encampments.

The Columbia Spectator reports on what Shipman said last Friday at the Senate plenary:

“I really don’t think we would want to be at war for four years, or could afford it, with the federal government,” Shipman said. She added that “we are in a different position from Harvard. We did not receive the same sort of demands that Harvard did.”

The trustee’s attitude seems to be that going to court to try to get back the money Trump illegally took would be going to “war” with the dictator. They refuse to do this, especially since the demands made of them are mostly ones that many of them want to happen anyway. The idea that the different demand letters mean Columbia is not facing the same campaign from the same people as Harvard seems to me extremely naive.

Update: Various good news today. Judge orders Khalil released, will Trump follow the judge’s order? Another judge issues preliminary injunction stopping the Trump attempt to shutdown student visas at Harvard. From same article, something very strange from Trump today:

Many people have been asking what is going on with Harvard University and their largescale improprieties that we have been addressing, looking for a solution. We have been working closely with Harvard, and it is very possible that a Deal will be announced over the next week or so. They have acted extremely appropriately during these negotiations, and appear to be committed to doing what is right. If a Settlement is made on the basis that is currently being discussed, it will be ‘mindbogglingly’ HISTORIC, and very good for our Country.

Nonsense with no relation to reality? A big Trump TACO? Harvard has decided to go MAGA? Who knows…

Update: Khalil is released. The New York Times reports on the Trump negotiations with Harvard. Unclear what has actually happened, beyond Harvard explaining things it has already done to address issues raised by the Trump people:

The discussions began again this week at a meeting in the White House. At the meeting, Harvard representatives showed White House officials a PowerPoint presentation that laid out measures the school has taken on antisemitism, viewpoint diversity and admissions.

In turn, the White House signaled other steps it would like for Harvard to take on those subjects and later sent a letter laying out conditions that could resolve the conflict, according to one of the people.

It is unclear how Harvard plans to respond to the letter.

As usual, what Trump says is nonsense:

It is unclear how close both sides are to a potential deal and the exact terms any final agreement would entail. In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said it was “very possible that a Deal will be announced over the next week or so.”

Two people briefed on the discussions said it was highly unlikely a deal would be reached in the next week.

The people involved in this on the Trump side are clowns, no way to guess what idiotic thing they will do next. Presumably Harvard and its lawyers are well aware of this, so know that promises from the Trump side are meaningless, likely are offering meaningless things in exchange.

Whenever I’ve asked people at Columbia why the university can go to court about the Trump illegality, while still negotiating with his people, I’ve been assured that this is not the way negotiations work, that if you went to court, you couldn’t negotiate. What Harvard is doing shows that this is nonsense (like every other explanation I’ve heard for why Columbia won’t go to court, except the “we want to do this stuff anyway” one).

Update: Yet more weirdness.

Posted in The Situation at Columbia | 29 Comments

The Situation at Columbia XXIV

Posted on June 12, 2025 by woit

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.

Update: Latest news from the administration is that new grant awards at Columbia are down by 77% this year, as well as noting that the proposed federal budget has overall 50% budget cuts in science funding agencies. We’ve been told that Columbia’s plan to appease Trump is based on the fact that the university can’t survive in its present form without grant funding. It looks though that there won’t be much of a possible reward for the ongoing appeasement effort and any more extensive capitulation.

The New York Times has an article about one piece of the earlier cave-in. The initial demand from Trump (or his allies at Columbia) was to put the Middle Eastern studies department in receivership. Instead the cave-in agreed to hiring 3 new pro-Israel faculty and appointing a new vice-provost to review the department (and others).

The Times article is backward-looking, explains what happened back in March, nothing about what is happening now or where this is going. In return for the cave-in the university got nothing but further punishment. It is now negotiating under all sorts of threats (foreign students, accreditation, Title VI case, further grant cancellations), presumably making offers of further capitulation. There’s no news about what the vice-provost is doing to “evaluate” the department under these intense conditions of threats if he doesn’t come up with an “evaluation” that says that the department has an antisemitism problem. Also no news at all in the article about what the trustees are doing now, just a quote of what one of them said at a Senate meeting back in April.

Update: While Columbia has refused to go to court to challenge the Trump cancellation of grants, the AAUP and AFT did file a lawsuit, on behalf of its affected members. The news today is that the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge (only non-paywalled coverage is at a right-wing propaganda site). The main reason for dismissal is that the AAUP/AFT did not have standing, it was Columbia that was getting the money and needed to file the lawsuit. In addition, the judge noted:

that the university is not a party to the lawsuit and indeed has chosen to negotiate and work with the Trump administration over its concerns.

And she said the evidence before her undercuts claims that the grants were terminated as retaliation for First Amendment-protected speech at Columbia.

Rather, the administration seemed worried about the hostile environment for students spawned by the protests.

This may explain why we’re not hearing anything any more about the possibility of fighting in court from the trustees: by caving-in and negotiating with Trump, saying that by doing so they are following the law (implying he is too) and confessing to bogus accusations of antisemitism, they’ve destroyed any hope of fighting this kind of illegality. They’re now collaborators in the illegality instead.

Back when this first happened, the administration was telling everyone who asked “why no lawsuit?” that nothing they were doing would affect their ability to change tactics and sue. At the time I was contacted by an AAUP attorney working on this case (who told me she had no idea why Columbia was not suing). When I mentioned that we were being told that Columbia’s lawyers said we could cave-in now and reserve the right to sue later, she seemed skeptical. At the time a lot of what we were being told didn’t make sense to me then, and it has become clear that the excuses for it we were being given were nonsense.

The judge’s ruling is now available here.

Update: Not about Columbia, but this WSJ article about what is happening at Northwestern is worth reading. Despite intense efforts to placate those accusing Northwestern of “antisemitism” (including making everyone take anti-antisemitism training), Trump’s people took away most of their research funding on grounds of “antisemitism”. Strikingly, even one of their well-known scientists supports this. The new feature at Northwestern is that there’s no way for them to get the funding back, no matter what they do, making the overall game plan clear: defund the liberal research universities, with bogus “antisemitism” accusations just an excuse. Making the universities grovel, but keeping the money is the plan. I hope the Columbia trustees are reading the WSJ.

Posted in The Situation at Columbia | 14 Comments

The Situation at Columbia XXIII

Posted on June 4, 2025 by woit

This week I’m very happy to not be at Columbia, and not in the US, enjoying spending the week at the Perimeter Institute at a conference in honor of Lee Smolin. Since there’s a little bit of Columbia news and I have some free time, here’s an update.

The Trump people have just announced that they have sent a letter to Columbia’s accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, accusing Columbia of being in violation of civil rights law. My initial reaction is that this is good news since it implies both that Columbia hasn’t further caved-in yet and makes clear that the Trump people have run out of ammunition.

The two things they have done that are very damaging are taking away grant funding and causing potential problems with foreign student visas. The Columbia trustees learned from the first cave-in that even if you do what he wants, Trump isn’t going to give the money back (he just took more away after the cave-in). Also, the proposed budget eliminates most such funding in the future anyway. Agreeing to more Trump demands seems unlikely to get the university anything other than more humiliation.

On the student visa front, the threat is to all universities, so nothing in particular Columbia can do about it. We’ll find out over the summer what fraction of foreign students who have accepted admission offers will be able to enroll in the fall.

The other Trump threats have turned out to be empty. He threatened to tell the IRS to take away Harvard’s tax exempt non-profit status, but that seems to be so clearly illegal that it won’t happen. Then he tried to take away Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, but about 15 minutes later Harvard had a restraining order stopping this and should soon have some sort of injunction. Columbia got a letter saying we’re in violation of Title VI based on bogus accusations, but since they’ve already taken funding away, that was not only done illegally, but also had no effect. Sending a letter to an accreditor telling them about the bogus Title VI accusation seems also something with no effect. Maybe there’s a long-term plan to take over the accreditation agencies and use them to gain control of all US colleges and universities, but that’s both a long ways off and likely to be struck down by the courts.

Harvard two days ago went to court asking for a summary judgment on the funding issues. It remains a huge mystery why the Columbia trustees have not done the same thing.

Remember that all of this is based on the supposed terrible antisemitism problems at Columbia and Harvard, meaning that there have been protests against Israel’s ever more obviously genocidal campaign of killing and starving the Palestinians in Gaza. If you want to know the details of how the starvation program is working, see here. The problem with committing genocide against a helpless population is not that they’ll fight back, but that the international community will turn against you and you’ll become a pariah nation. This is happening, and being met with an ever more frantic campaign of collaborating with our Fascist dictatorship in accusing anyone who points out what is happening of “antisemitism”.


Update: New York Times coverage here, which includes:

“This is another semi-random attack against a celebrity institution,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, an association that includes many colleges and universities in its membership. “They are trying once again to skirt due process in order to score political points.”

Antoinette Flores, the director of higher education accountability and quality at New America, a Washington think tank, said she thought the letter was both a threat to Middle States, and to Columbia, about federal aid.

But she said that the Department of Education does not have the authority to determine what violates the accreditation group’s standards. Only the accrediting body can do that, which would require its own review of what is alleged.

The Trump people have this fantasy that they will take control of the accreditation agencies, and through them gain control of the universities. Unlike Columbia, presumably the MSCHE will not just cave-in to Trump, it seems highly unlikely they’ll remove Columbia’s accrediation. The threat is more that Trump may then come after them, but if so, like Harvard, they’ll have no choice but to fight, and likely will do well in court.

Bend the Knee, Columbia as usual is convinced that Columbia must do whatever Trump wants.

Update: The craziness is just endless. No new foreign students at Harvard. A new travel ban. We’ll see what the courts have to say.

Given the travel ban, I hope the IMU has contingency plans for the 2026 ICM, and may even want to start implementing them.

Update: A Forbes article also argues this is really an attack on the accreditor more than on Columbia.

Update: Harvard has amended its complaint about the student visa craziness. I’m betting it won’t be very long before they’ll have an injunction. The courts are not going to rule that nothing can be done about this sort of outrageous attempt to exercise dictatorial powers to try and gain control of or destroy a university.

In any case, Trump seems to have found some other powerful institution to go to war with today, Harvard may just be another TACO.

Update: Again, about 15 minutes for Harvard to get a TRO stopping for now the latest Trump visa illegality. As I’ve written before, one reason I was given for the original Columbia cave-in was that the trustees had legal advice that nothing could be done if Trump went after foreign student visas. I hope the trustees now have some new lawyers…

In addition, Harvard’s lawsuit argues that this is illegal retaliation for their refusal to allow Trump to take over the university. The Columbia cave-in and decision to refuse to go to court but instead to negotiate with the dictator means they don’t have the same grounds for a lawsuit that Harvard has. Columbia needs to change tactics and join Harvard in fighting now.

(Note: the references to “15 minutes” are metaphorical. True times more like a couple hours.)

Update: The Washington Post reports that the State Department has resumed processing visas for Harvard students, so Harvard’s going to court to fight this particular piece of illegality so far is successful.

Update: The mystery continues: why are the trustees do devoted to not fighting with Trump that they won’t even join an amicus brief for the Harvard lawsuit?

Posted in The Situation at Columbia | 17 Comments