Not Even Wrong

Note: I’ve moved content from the previous post to this separate post, about the events today at Butler library. For early comments, see the last post, for newer ones on this topic please comment here.

Around 3:15pm, some students started a protest in a room in Butler library, and many are still there. I went over there to take a look (first heard about this from a blog commenter here…). Three helicopters hovering over the campus, otherwise everything normal except around the entrance to the library. A crowd has gathered there, including a small number of protestors, with the usual “Free Palestine” shouts. Someone with a bullhorn at a window in the room was saying that students were trapped in the library, public safety would not let them out. A few people in the crowd chanted “Let them out!”. When I got back, here’s the email sent out to the university:

Unfortunately, the University is dealing with a disruption in reading room 301 of Butler Library. Columbia’s Public Safety Team is responding and working to mitigate the situation. Individuals have been asked for identification, which will be recorded, and asked to disperse. They have been told that failure to comply will result in violations of our rules and policies and possible arrest. No individuals who have been protesting in the reading room have chosen, at this point, to identify themselves and depart. Individuals who were not involved in the protest have been allowed to leave. While this is isolated to one room in the library, it is completely unacceptable that some individuals are choosing to disrupt academic activities as our students are studying and preparing for final exams. These disruptions of our campus and academic activities will not be tolerated. Individuals found to be in violation of University Rules and policies will face disciplinary consequences. We ask our community members to please avoid the immediate area near Butler Library in the near term.

No idea what is going on in the library. There’s a crowd with cell-phones out trying to film what is going on inside. Every so often someone comes out, but no one going in. Sounds like the students are not occupying the library (they say they are trying to get out), but that public safety won’t let them out unless they identify themselves.

There’s reporting at the Columbia Spectator, which says that starting at 3:55

a Public Safety officer inside the reading room said over a speaker that protesters must present their IDs or would be subject to arrest for trespass.

A message from the acting president:

I want to update the community on the latest information regarding the disruption at Butler Library. The individuals who disrupted activities in Butler Reading Room 301 still refuse to identify themselves and leave the building. Due to the number of individuals participating in the disruption inside and outside of the building, a large group of people attempting to force their way into Butler Library creating a safety hazard, and what we believe to be the significant presence of individuals not affiliated with the University, Columbia has taken the necessary step of requesting the presence of NYPD to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community.

Sadly, during the course of this disruption, two of our Columbia Public Safety Officers sustained injuries during a crowd surge when individuals attempted to force their way into the building and into Room 301. These actions are outrageous.

Individuals participating in the Reading Room 301 disruption were repeatedly asked for identification and to leave, and were repeatedly told that failure to comply would result in violations of our rules and policies and possible arrest for trespassing. We have been clear from the outset about applying our protocols and advising participants of the potential consequences of not complying. Requesting the presence of the NYPD is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community.

Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies; this is especially unacceptable while our students study and prepare for final exams. Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today. We are resolute that calls for violence or harm have no place at our University. We will continue to keep our community apprised as the situation evolves.

Sincerely,

Claire Shipman
Acting President, Columbia University in the City of New York

I’ve written some more about what I saw in the comments. I was outside the entrance to the library around the time of the “crowd surge” that is said to have injured two of the public safety officers. From what I could see, the group of people pushing towards the building entrance included many journalists with cameras, as well as people who appeared to be just trying to push forward to try and get a better shot on their cell-phone. These people mostly did not seem to be protestors (e.g. no keffiyehs). I also doubt the claim above that these were people not affiliated with the university (the security here remains tight, and they looked like Columbia students).

In retrospect, I think a mistake the security people were making was that there were none of them outside the entrance. If a couple people had been politely asking people to stay back and not push towards the entrance, for everyone’s safety, that would have been helpful.

Update: On my walk home, the campus was completely peaceful, very few people now at the Butler entrance. Nothing happening at the campus entrance at 116th, but the NYPD had closed off much of 114th street, which is the south boundary of campus and has entrances from the back to Butler library. At the time they were clearly preparing for going into the library and arresting for trespassing those students who refused to identify themselves to campus security. Some protestors and a lot of lookers-on had gathered at 114th and Broadway. The most reliable outside protestors were there: the group of anti-Zionist Hasids. Somebody with a camera at 114th and Broadway (while I was walking past him) took a full trashcan, dumped all the trash into the street and turned over the trashcan so he could stand on it and get a better shot of what the NYPD were doing.

This morning we received a long message from the acting president, entitled Preserving Columbia’s Critical Research Capabilities. Here’s a summary:

• It’s a complete mystery to me, but the trustees still refuse to go to court to challenge the defunding of research grants, somehow because they think they are negotiating this, even though it has for a long time been clear that negotiating with Trump is not going to lead to anything but humiliation. The message has:
  

  As many of you are aware, the University is engaged in a two-pronged effort related to grants terminated by the federal government. The first prong focuses on our continued efforts to restore our partnerships with government agencies that support critical research… Columbia’s leadership continues discussions with the federal government in support of resuming activity on these research awards and additional other awards that have remained active, but unpaid.

  The Wall Street Journal has an “Exclusive” article claiming that Trump’s people are negotiating a consent decree with Columbia:

  Columbia leaders are negotiating with the government and weighing what to do, the people said. The university’s board is undecided on whether to accept a consent decree, they said. For a consent decree to take effect, Columbia would have to agree to enter it.

  The government has told the school that it can either negotiate and accept a consent decree, or face a court battle that could end up with the school facing more public scrutiny and in the end the same kind of legal agreement to make changes, perhaps with worse terms, they said.

  With a consent decree, the government is seeking viewpoint diversity among Columbia’s faculty and that the school not consider race in admissions, the people said.

  The article also includes:

  A Columbia spokesperson said: “This story is based entirely on hearsay and does not hold merit.” She pointed to a statement issued last month from acting university president Claire Shipman, who said that Columbia would reject any agreement that would require relinquishing its independence.

  The article is the latest of many “Exclusive”s by two WSJ journalists, Douglas Belkin and Liz Essley White, who have been simply putting out as “news” delusional statements trying to pressure Columbia from one of Trump’s people, very likely Sean Keveney, the lawyer responsible for the “mistake” letter sent to Harvard. This is actually the second bogus “Exclusive” news about a consent decree, the first was here nearly a month ago.

• Much of the message is concerned with what the university is now doing to contend with the reality that grant funding is gone for now (and will be until they go to court and get a court judgement…):
  

  Separately and in parallel, our Deans have carefully reviewed and prioritized our research activity to develop a plan for managing the affected research. We asked each principal investigator of a terminated award to develop a Research Action Plan (RAP) for review at the school level and to inform a school-based approach. During this review period, the University continued to fund those individuals whose salaries and stipends were previously funded with federal support on now-terminated awards…

  Moving forward, we will be running lighter footprints of research infrastructure in some areas and, in others, maintaining a level of research continuity as we pursue alternate funding sources. In some cases, schools and departments are winding down activity but remain prepared to reestablish capabilities if support is restored. Across the research portfolio we have had to make difficult choices and unfortunately, today, nearly 180 of our colleagues who have been working, in whole or in part, on impacted federal grants, will receive notices of non-renewal or termination. This represents about 20% of the individuals who are funded in some manner by the terminated grants…

  As schools and departments moved through the process of reviewing priorities related to terminated awards, it became clear that we need to be prepared to make additional investments to secure the strength of our research enterprise as we navigate future periods of uncertainty and change. Additional complexities and risks include the process and funding for obtaining new awards and continuations of existing research projects. To that end, the University has established a Research Stabilization Fund to navigate these future funding risks and lend support to our scientific community in multiple forms. These resources will be made available through an application process for internal grants to scientists to support their work for a limited time as they seek alternate sources of funding or complete the components of their research to enable publication of results. In addition, the University will contribute funds to schools over the next year to support our commitments to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows on terminated training grants, an area that has been severely impacted by terminations of federal support. The Stabilization Fund and Other Resources webpage developed by the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research provides more details about these funds and other resources on funding opportunities for the research community.

• The message also explains that the university now faces serious budget problems going forward, and announces various steps being taken to deal with it, including a salary freeze:
  

  We will continue to make prudent budget decisions that will ensure long-term financial stability across the University, including making significant budget reductions within the University’s central administration. Across the University, we have set parameters to keep most salaries at their current level, without increases for the next fiscal year, with some schools and units providing a modest pool for employees at the lower end of their salary distribution. We have also developed programs to further streamline our workforce through attrition and are preparing to launch a voluntary retirement incentive program, the details of which will be shared next week.

In case anyone is still tempted to believe that the Trump people are negotiating in good faith and seriously addressing real issues, Harvard yesterday received an absurd illiterate letter from Linda McMahon, the World Wrestling Entertainment executive now responsible for education in the US. The first accusation against Harvard is that it has a course to help students with weak math backgrounds:

Where do many of these “students” come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country — and why is there so much HATE? These are questions that must be answered, among many more, but the biggest question of all is, why will Harvard not give straightforward answers to the American public?

Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus. In every way, Harvard has failed to abide by its legal obligations, its ethical and fiduciary duties, its transparency responsibilities, and any semblance of academic rigor. It had scrapped standardized testing requirements and a normalized grading system. This year Harvard was forced to adopt an embarrassing “remedial math” program for undergraduates. Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics, when it is supposedly so hard to get into this “acclaimed university”? Who is getting in under such a low standard when others, with fabulous grades and a great understanding of the highest levels of mathematics, are being rejected?

Update: New from the Columbia Journalism Review, a disturbing story about student disciplinary procedures at Barnard.

Update: New from the New York Times, a story about how Columbia was taken in by a crooked game of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

A few weeks ago, several prominent American universities and law firms found themselves in what seemed to be a classic prisoner’s dilemma, courtesy of President Trump…

Columbia University made a deal with the administration. So did some of the largest law firms in the country. Recent changes, however, suggest that the dilemma is starting to look very different…

But crucially, one assumption in the prisoner’s dilemma is that the jailer is trustworthy. There is an explicit promise that confessing will allow prisoners to avoid the longest sentence.

In the real world, however, instead of rewarding those who capitulated early, the Trump administration pressured them even more.

Columbia University, for example, agreed to concessions that included imposing new oversight over its Middle Eastern studies department and creating a security force empowered to make arrests. But that was not enough to restore the more than $400 million in grants that the Trump administration had canceled, or to prevent the administration from making even more demands.

The Times story also addresses another problem created by behavior like Columbia’s:

Lynn Pasquerella, the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said she has observed “burgeoning moral distress” among her membership in recent months. “Campus leaders feel like they’re being coerced into making decisions they believe are unethical, but they feel they have no choice,” she said. “In many instances, that moral distress has morphed into a moral injury that results from the continual erosion of a moral compass.”

Update: In recent days the security checkpoint at the gate nearest the math building has become more difficult to get through, as people have to pass through two different devices with their ids. No one knows (including the people working the security checkpoint) why this new security layer has been introduced. We’re seeing lines of students waiting to get in, people who can’t get in this gate, have to go around to the main gate to get access. Only protest activity on campus in recent weeks a small vigil for our imprisoned students.

Update: Yet another NYT article about Columbia today, this time about the campaign by the trustees to revamp the university senate, which some of them see as “antisemitic” and responsible for obstructing the necessary rigorous discipline of students involved in last year’s protests and building occupation. From the article:

There also appears to be at least some agreement between Columbia’s trustees and those in Washington who feel that support for the student protests was antisemitic, a position that angers university senators, who feel they are being slurred.

Since the administration has a lot going on right now (see above…), it’s odd that the trustees are making it a priority to deal with obscure long-term governance issues like that of how the senate works. The only way I see to understand this is that this is part of the ongoing negotiation about “antisemitism”, which now appears to be a 3-way one involving the Trump people, powerful pro-Israel trustees and donors, and the rest of the university. Last year Jonathan Lavine, now co-chair of the presidential search committee, sent a text message to David Greenwald, co-chair of the board, about “the antisemites on the Senate”.

I’m finding it very difficult to understand why the trustees are still refusing to go to court to stop grant cancellations, supposedly because this would interfere with negotiations with Trump. Given everything happening, why would anyone in their right mind still think that Trump was someone you could sensibly negotiate with? The only reason I can think of is that some of the trustees and donors still find the pressure from the Fascist dictatorship useful to make progress on their own agenda of getting rid of problems at Columbia like “the antisemites on the Senate”.

Update: Josh Marshall has an informative story about how the NIH grant cancellations are being implemented. There’s no stop work order or notification, the university just finds out at the end of the month that it won’t be paid. All universities except Harvard haven’t gone to court, hoping there is something they can do which will keep Trump happy and get the payments restarted. They are telling the researchers involved not to say anything, so the public isn’t hearing about the impacts of these cancellations. Only in the Columbia case has the university been presented with a set of demands. For the others, they’re in the dark even about when they’ll hear what might cause funds to flow again.

It looks like the obvious thing they should all be doing (if they weren’t too paralyzed, fearful and hopeful there is some way to sell out to the dictatorship) is join forces and all go to court together.

Update: There’s a new statement from the Trustees about their plan to revamp the Senate. Nothing in the statement is particularly objectionable (the Senate has been ineffective and maybe needs reform), but there’s no explanation why this obscure governance issue seems to be the highest priority of the trustees at a time the university is facing financial disaster and an existential threat from outside. That some trustees see the Senate (and in particular the chair of its Executive Committee) as a bunch of “antisemites” may or may not be the explanation. For some comments about all this, see here.

This article at the Atlantic points out the obvious: that “antisemitism” was always a bogus pretext is confirmed by the new crazy letter from McMahon (written by Trump?) which drops the pretext completely.

More is coming out about the awful implications of the ongoing refusal by the trustees to in any way challenge the Trump administration’s funding cancellations. See this open letter in the Columbia Spectator, which begins:

On March 10, the federal grant funding the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study was terminated by the National Institutes of Health as part of the federal government’s response to alleged Title VI infractions at Columbia. Although Columbia is considered the primary recipient of this grant, 90 percent of the funds were being spent outside of Columbia through subcontracts to 30 Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study centers located in 21 states. However, as the central financial grantee, only Columbia can appeal the termination of the grant, and to date, it has been reluctant to do so. Without funding, the DPPOS, which is almost 30 years old, will die.

and continues:

Since March 10, the DPPOS leadership has sought to have the funding restored by highlighting our innocent bystander status in the press and appealing to members of the Congressional Diabetes Caucus, the largest caucus in Congress. Thus far, Columbia has not submitted a formal appeal of the termination to the NIH on our behalf; instead, it has required us to wait while it negotiates a University wide appeal. Unfortunately, this places our study in grave peril. Staff at the 30 clinical sites are already being laid off, and clinics are preparing to close.

The failure of Columbia to file a timely appeal on behalf of the DPPOS is damaging the DPPOS infrastructure irreversibly. We cannot wait any longer to submit the appeal, which may be our only hope. Further, Columbia has prevented us from submitting an application to the NIH for a supplement that would allow us to conduct an orderly close-out, protect the data, and honorably conclude the relationship with study participants. The loss of the DPPOS would mean that important public health questions related to diabetes and dementia may never be answered: the almost 30 years of data it has collected from its 1,700 current participants is unique and cannot be replicated.

I was shocked when I first found out that the trustees were refusing to go to court to challenge the illegal funding cancellations by a new administration that was trying out the exercise of dictatorial powers. The details explained in the open letter of the ongoing implications of their decision are appalling. This decision needs to be immediately reversed, although waiting two months to do anything may turn out to have had a huge destructive effect on important biomedical research.

In contrast to what is happening at Columbia, the news from elsewhere about what happens when illegal actions of our new dictator are challenged has been encouraging. Mohsen Mahdawi’s lawyers won his release from jail. The law firm Perkins Coie conclusively won its case. The state of Maine won its case and got its funding back.

Why are the Columbia trustees refusing to go to court and to appeal the illegal funding cancellations???? All I’m hearing publicly from them is the ridiculous claim that Trump is negotiating “in good faith”, and privately that many people involved in this think this is a good opportunity to make changes they favor.

Update: The trustees have announced that Jeh Johnson will be the new co-chair. Johnson has been at Paul Weiss, the first law firm to cave-in to Trump on March 20, the day before the March 21 Columbia cave-in (he says he will be retiring from his position at that firm).

Update: Rise Up, Columbia reminds me I should have linked to this New York Times story, which explains that law firms are finding out that caving-in may not be good for business. They also have this from a partner at one of the law firms fighting Trump:

If Trump came into your kitchen and said, “Take out the garbage,” you wouldn’t say, “OK, I was going to take it out anyway.” You’d say, “Get the fuck out of my kitchen!”

Of course, there are other possibilities. You might like having Donald Trump in your kitchen. If you’re in an ongoing battle with your spouse over how to deal with the garbage, and Trump is on your side in this fight, you might be fine with having him there to make your spouse cave-in.

Update: More Columbia news, as in Columbia Broadcasting System. Trump’s FCC chair is threatening to revoke the CBS broadcast license because of news programming Trump doesn’t like. Probably within CBS there are people now arguing for how they need to “bend the knee”, but if the national news media cave-in to Trump, we’re in even worse trouble than if the universities cave. All parts of US society need to intensively resist and not cave-in to Fascist dictatorship.

Still no news about the status of negotiations for a possible further cave-in to autocracy by the Columbia board of trustees. In the meantime, a few items:

• It’s becoming unclear whether there will be any scientific research funding to get back with a cave-in, since such research is getting shut down throughout the various federal government agencies that fund it. According to Nature, the NSF has stopped awarding new grants, as well as stopping continuing funding of existing ones. They had been terminating awards, see more at this page. One target for defunding was anything related to studying and stopping misinformation. They’ve just announced that as of May 5, ICR rates will be capped at 15%. I believe this was also done at NIH, then DOE, with lawsuits filed in both cases, successful at stopping this at least temporarily in the NIH case.
• Last year something called the Stand Columbia Society was started, putting out regular newsletters. Once the Trump administration withdrew funding and started making demands of Columbia, the newsletters became much more about “Bend the knee, Columbia”, rather than Stand Columbia. The arguments for why Columbia should bend the knee turn out to not just be financial. The group has just completed a major effort they call The Sunlight Report. It’s a 469 page critique of the 335 page Sundial Report produced by a group associated with the University Senate.

  Personally, I skimmed the Sundial Report and decided the last thing I wanted to spend my life on was an extended account of the exact details of what happened here last year (produced with no input or insight from the administrators involved). Skimming the Sunlight report, the bulk is a copy of the Sundial report, with what is supposedly wrong with it highlighted and explained. The first problem they find is that they highlight “Hamas militants” and correct it to “Hamas terrorists” with the explanation:

  Bias: Terrorists. Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization, a status first designated by the U.S. Department of State in 1997 during the presidency of Bill Clinton, maintained by every subsequent administration, and continuing to have broad bipartisan support.

  If you’re a glutton for punishment and have read the entire Sundial Report, I suppose you should read this one too.

• The New York Times today has an article about the Justice department’s unusual attempt to investigate a Columbia pro-Palestinian student group.
• Scott Bok was chairman of the board of trustees at Penn when the controversies over student protests started. He and the university president (M. Elizabeth Magill) ended up getting forced out of their positions by university donors and other trustees. He has written a book that is about to appear, about his life in the finance industry, with two final chapters about what happened at Penn. There’s an article at the Chronicle here, an interview with him at the Daily Pennsylvanian here. I may try and get a copy of the book when it comes out.

  The account of what happened at Penn explains the behind-the-scenes dynamics of how the fight over pro-Palestinian demonstrations played out amongst the trustees, major donors and the president. I’m guessing there’s a similar story to be told some day about what went on at Columbia last year. This story about Penn helps to understand what is going on now, as universities like Columbia face the question of whether to resist the exercise of illegal dictatorial powers or whether to cave-in to them. A big part of the argument for a cave-in coming from some quarters is “what we’re being asked to do is largely things I think should be done anyway”. The Bok account provides details of the people and forces at work at Penn, but here at Columbia we’re basically all in the dark about the analogous group of people making decisions about our future and what they are doing.

Excellent news from Vermont: Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi was released on orders of the judge in his case. This is yet another positive indication that resistance to the new dictatorship is possible, with the US judicial system still functional enough to often stop the illegal exercise of dictatorial powers. Unfortunately the Columbia trustees still have not realized they need to resist and try going to the courts like Harvard.

In local resistance news, at Rise Up, Columbia you can read some of the texts of speeches given at the 25-hour speakout here. In the Spectator, there’s a letter from Jewish students at Columbia and Barnard about the abuse of accusations of antisemitism that is at the root of the current situation here.

Still no news about the ongoing negotiations between Trump’s people and the trustees. Unfortunately it has become much clearer to me why the trustees so far have not decided to go to court to resist illegal demands from the would-be dictator. Besides being afraid of the consequences of confronting the dictator, some likely see this as an opportunity to get changes made here that they want anyway, and would otherwise have great difficulty achieving. Looking at the list of trustees, only one (Victor Mendelson) regularly donates to Republican candidates, recently to Elise Stefanik. But many of the others (and major donors like Robert Kraft) are strong supporters of the Israeli government and see pro-Palestinian protests or sympathies here as a major problem that needs action. From their point of view, the demands they have agreed to so far are not a cave-in to Trump that has ruined the reputation of the university but a positive step in fixing the ruining of the university’s reputation caused by the pro-Palestinian protests. Given the clownish incoherent behavior of those around Trump, it’s hard to guess what their current demands are, but as long as they’re careful to cater to bogus accusations of “antisemitism”, they may very well be able to convince the trustees to not resist by going to court, but to a further cave-in of some form.

In relevant news from elsewhere, Harvard has released reports about antisemitism and Islamophobia. I believe the situation at Harvard is very much like the one here at Columbia. Bringing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to these campuses has caused a lot of fear, but is hitting one side a lot harder: the reports show that 15 percent of Jewish students feel unsafe on campus, while more than three times as many (47 percent) Muslim students feel unsafe. While 61 percent of Jewish students are worried about expressing their views, 92 percent of the Muslim students felt this way.

Update: Multiple people have assured me that the reason Columbia is not suing the Trump administration over illegal grant cancellations is that it’s not possible to do this while negotiating, and that for now Columbia is negotiating. Harvard however seems to have shown that this is not true. They have gone to court over the illegal government actions, and publicly refused Trump’s demands. What is the Trump administration reaction? According to a new story from CNN, the Trump people are still trying to negotiate with Harvard:

“What we’re seeing is not enough, and there’s actually probably going to be additional funding being cut. So we’re not having a conversation of what is, you know, releasing the spigot again. We’re not. The spigot is closed, if anything, getting tighter right now,” a White House official told CNN when asked about Harvard’s recent actions.

“But there is an avenue, a very clear avenue, a very real situation in where, you know, they can commit to what we’re asking – reasonable asks. This isn’t something like not reasonable, where we could have a conversation about funding,” they told CNN…

The Trump administration is expected to formally communicate with Harvard again in the coming days…

“It’s a positive step in acknowledging the truth and acknowledging that civil rights need to be prioritized,” the White House official said. “By no means is this the final step that they need to take to address all the things that they need to change in their campus. But if this is their way of giving a good faith effort, we’ll be here to monitor and make sure that this is something that’s followed through on.”

Hoping the Columbia trustees are reading this, kicking themselves for the time they’ve wasted (they could have filed a lawsuit nearly two months ago when the illegal actions started), and telling the university’s lawyers to go to court now.

An article at the Observer with the title How Columbia University is tearing itself apart to please Trump claims Columbia’s problems really have been coming from within the house

According to two well-informed sources, members of the board of trustees were in direct communication with Republicans in Congress and, later, the Trump administration, offering information and advice on what demands to make and how to present them. The State Department’s justification for arresting Mahdawi is one of a few examples where a government document ended up closely resembling ideas that originated at Columbia.

One senior administrator, who did not wish to be named, blamed both sides for allowing their passions about the Middle East to sap the university’s ability to stand up to the Trump onslaught. “Whether it was faculty or students or board members who were pursuing their own political agendas,” the administrator said, “they just didn’t care about tarnishing Columbia’s reputation… and it gave Trump so much ammunition. That is the most heartbreaking thing about this whole story.”

The Columbia campus today is a diminished and demoralised place, ringed by security gates and patrolled by large numbers of uniformed police. Professors and students talk about the fear they experience in class, either because a student is reporting to an outside watchdog such as Canary Mission or Accuracy in Media, or they worry someone might. International students tend to say little, if they come to class at all. One long-time humanities professor said she and her colleagues were regularly subjected to doxxing, hate mail and death threats. At the sight of a camera pointed in her direction, she turned around and encouraged others to do the same, for fear that the pictures would end up on some website and lead to further harassment. She did not want to be named for similar reasons.

I don’t know how how accurate the information about the trustees is, but it unfortunately supports my suspicions that a significant part of the story of the cave-in may be Columbia trustees or top administrators who decided to collaborate with the Fascist dictatorship, as a means to pursue their personal agendas. What happened to Katrina Armstrong is hard to understand without this same sort of behavior being involved. I don’t see how the university community can now trust the current president and board of trustees to be negotiating the university’s fate with the Trump panel. The board needs to investigate these accusations, remove any trustees involved, and join Harvard in going to court to resist the attempted illegal exercise of dictatorial powers by the Trump administration instead of negotiating a new cave-in.

Update: You might want to follow the Rise Up, Columbia substack for more about what is happening here. Starting now, at the gate by the math building, is a 25 hour Speakout event.

Update: There’s a new statement out from Acting President Shipman about Supporting Our International Community. Evidently this still does not include any support for those like Khalil and Mahdawi who have been arrested and jailed. The university has maintained a steadfast and rigorous policy of never publicly mentioning their names or what has happened to them. The latest statement addresses this only with “Every individual in this country, citizen and non-citizen alike, deserves the due process rights afforded them by law.” My mistake, apologies to Acting President Shipman. I just read the statement more carefully and it’s very encouraging that her message includes “I also want to say that we continue to be deeply concerned about Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, members of our community who have been detained, and other current and former students who have been directly affected by current government actions.”

Update: The Jerusalem Post today has an article about how Pro-Palestine protests at Columbia show a deep threat for Jewish students. You can read the account there of one of the few pro-Palestine protests here recently (April 21), by someone who explains they were prevented from entering the university at a gate because it was obstructed by student protestors. Since I walked by the same protest and went through the security checkpoint there without any problem, I was curious what actually happened. It turns out there’s this long video online, you can watch it and make up your own mind about the protest situation at Columbia. Note that as far as I know, what you’re looking at is the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration here in recent months.

To orient yourself, this is the gate at 116th and Amsterdam, which has one of the three current security checkpoints to get onto the main campus. The students were at the central part of the gate, which has been kept locked all the time for the past year. The security checkpoint is at the left-hand side of the gate: you go through the metal barriers, place your ID against a gadget on the blue table that blinks red or green depending on whether you are allowed access. You do this with the picture up, so one of the security guards can look at the picture and check it against your face. If you look at 7:52 of the video, you’ll see students going through the security checkpoint and through the gate. This gives a good idea of what things are like here normally.

If you look later in the video and catch a glimpse of the left gate, you’ll see that it has been closed, there are security people standing in front of it and not letting people through. Note that it is the security people who have closed the gate and are keeping people from going through it, the protesting students are not at this part of the gate. I don’t know how long the security people kept the gate closed.

If you want a detailed look at what the largest recent demonstration looks like, to hear exactly what the protestors are chanting, to see exactly how much they are obstructing entrances and disrupting the university, watch the video. Is the Jerusalem Post headline describing this as a “deep threat for Jewish students” accurate? I won’t host here an argument about this, will delete any comments that try to do so. You can read the article, watch the video, and make up your own mind. We report, you decide.

There was a Senate Town Hall held here at Columbia last night, which I should have attended, but didn’t (I thought it would be pointless debate about possible reform of the Senate, my mistake). The Columbia Spectator has an article about what happened, and I’m going by that (happy to hear any different perspective from someone else who was there).

The Town Hall was the first time that any of the trustees have publicly answered questions about what they are doing, and the questions put to them were very much the ones that have been bothering me. Evidently one of the two trustees, Dean Dakolias, was only there for 15 minutes, but another, Keith Goggin, answered questions for an hour.

I’ve met Goggin socially a couple times (he’s the only one of the trustees I’ve ever talked to), and he struck me as a smart, decent and thoroughly reasonable person, intensely devoted to working in the best interest of the university. In a conversation last summer, he described his point of view on what had happened over the past year as the university struggled to deal with the protests and the opposing forces they had unleashed. From everything I’d seen and from this conversation with him, I thought the university administration at all levels, up to and including the trustees, had done the best it could to deal with an extremely difficult set of problems.

As Columbia’s struggle with the Trump administration began early this year, I was fairly confident that the trustees could be relied on to deal with the new set of difficulties. The evening of March 21 was a huge shock, as the news came in that the president and trustees had caved in to the demands of the Trump panel. When I got back to the office a few days later, my attempt to understand what had happened led to my starting this series of blog postings. Over the next few days what I learned made me more and more concerned, and seriously shook my earlier trust in the judgment of the trustees. In particular I was shocked and appalled to learn that the trustees had decided not to go to court in response to the illegal cancellation of university scientific research grants. I also was disturbed by the refusal of the trustees to support in any way pro-Palestinian students who were arrested and face deportation.

These two concerns are very widely shared, and were the main questions raised at the Senate Town Hall. On the topic of the pro-Palestinian students, nothing was said that indicates the trustees would support them in any way. On the cave-in and refusal to go to court:

Several audience members asked Dakolias and Goggin about the University’s decision to not legally challenge the federal government’s oversight and demands. Many compared Columbia’s response to that of Harvard University, which sued the Trump administration on Monday after it froze over $2 billion in grants.

Dakolias was first to respond to a question on that topic, saying that Columbia has “obligations” because the federal government is the University’s regulator.

“That said, we’re always looking at … all of our options,” he said. “But you can’t expect us not to talk to the regulators that monitor, that oversee this University.”

When audience members asked why exactly Columbia has not taken the same actions as Harvard, Goggin urged them to compare the respective letters Columbia and Harvard received from the Trump administration. He said that “our letter was not nearly as absolute as the letter that was sent to Harvard.”

Columbia indicated it was complying with several of the Trump administration’s demands in a March 21 document sent to federal agencies. Harvard rejected the Trump administration’s demands on April 11.

“Many of the things that are in the letter to Columbia University were things that we have been working very hard on, in some cases with the senate,” Goggin said. He specifically cited disciplinary action for participants of the April 2024 “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and Hamilton Hall occupation, which the Trump administration letter demanded. Columbia completed those disciplinary proceedings the day it received the letter….

“We have engaged with lawyers. We’ve done substantial analysis on the litigation position,” Goggin said. “If we can do something that we were going to do anyway, without having to litigate, and restore the things that we care about here, that is … in my opinion, our best path.”

More attendees asked about the fact that the Trump administration has not restored the $400 million it cut from Columbia, and whether that has pushed the University to reconsider not raising a legal challenge.

Goggin stated that, although an agreement has not yet been reached, the University is still negotiating with the federal government. He added that “the fact that we haven’t initiated a lawsuit yet doesn’t impede our ability to initiate a lawsuit.”

While I understand the point of view Goggin is expressing, it sees this as just a business negotiation. The response by anyone to a president of the US taking power and trying to exercise unconstitutional dictatorial powers should be to try to stop the descent into dictatorship in any way possible, especially through the courts. Yes, you need to talk to the regulators, but you also need to go to court to stop the illegal behavior (grant cancellations) being used to try and force you to do what they want.

Goggin gave no indication what the university is still negotiating about. Some things that were already agreed to in the cave-in (e.g. hiring new pro-Israel professors) only qualify as “something that we were going to do anyway” if a cave-in to demands of pro-Israel groups was already a done deal. It’s hard to have confidence in whatever judgments the trustees are making in what they are willing to do to get the research funds back.

There appear to be two ways this can now go:

• Negotiations break down and Columbia joins Harvard in going to court.
• A deal is made with the Trump panel, with the university not challenging the exercise of dictatorial powers and agreeing to some list of demands.

The actions of the trustees so far have done a huge amount of damage to the reputation of the university. If they take the first route, they may be able to start on fixing this. If they take the second, their place and that of the university as a historically momentous disgraceful appeasement of Fascism are assured. Already, people are painting “Vichy-on-the-Hudson” signs nearby. The trustees need to take action to not make this the permanent perception of this institution.

Update: Supposedly Columbia canceled a speaking invitation recently for Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leftist French politician, because of fear of reprisals by Trump. I’m wondering what the true story is about this. I would have thought it unlikely that Columbia would do that, and if they had, that it would have gotten so little attention. These days though, it seems anything is possible…

Melenchon’s blog describing his US visit is here, and a video of his talk at CUNY here.

Update: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal today have rather content-free articles about universities organizing to resist Trump. Nothing really about who is doing something or what they are doing. Better this than similar articles about universities planning to cave-in to Trump.

Harvard has gone ahead and done what Columbia should have done a month and a half ago: filed a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s illegal cutoff of funding for grants hosted at the university. The statement from Harvard about this is here, the complaint itself is here. Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but it’s impossible for me to believe that under the US constitutional system the president can legally issue an order to remove funding from an institution either because he thinks (see point 67 in the complaint) “Wouldn’t that be cool?” or because he wishes to take control of an institution he doesn’t like and remake it to his liking.

The acting president of Columbia a few days ago was complaining to the faculty that a way needed to be found to “change the narrative.” Right now, there’s an obvious way to get started on that: Columbia needs to file a similar lawsuit or take part in a joint lawsuit on this issue with Harvard and other institutions. I’m hoping we’ll hear encouraging news about this soon.

In the day’s local news, some students have chained themselves to one of the university gates to protest the arrest and imprisonment of Khalid and Mahdawi. Note that the gate the students locked themselves to is a gate that already is locked and not in use, so by doing this they are in no way interfering with anyone in any way. If acting president Shipman really wants to change the narrative, she could speak out against the treatment of Khalil and Mahdawi on behalf of the university.

Update: First response from the Trump administration here. It’s not about anti-semitism, it’s about defunding science at research universities because of their “grossly overpaid bureaucrats”:

“The gravy train of federal assistance to institutions like Harvard, which enrich their grossly overpaid bureaucrats with tax dollars from struggling American families is coming to an end,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, wrote in an emailed statement in response to the lawsuit.

He added: “Taxpayer funds are a privilege, and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege.”

About the “grossly overpaid bureaucrats” argument, while I don’t think that’s going to help the Trump side win in court, at least it’s finally something on which some faculty will agree with Trump…

Update: 200 presidents of US universities and colleges have signed a Call for Constructive Engagement

As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.

One name conspicuously missing is Claire Shipman’s. When will the Columbia trustees stop trying to appease the Fascists trying to destroy their institution and start fighting back, even if just to the extent of signing a statement like this?

Update: Columbia has now signed, Shipman’s name is in the latest list of names here.

Update: The New York Times has a long article about what has been going on behind the scenes at Harvard. It gives a good idea of what likely has been going on at a similar level here at Columbia. I had been thinking of these discussions as happening just between the trustees, but the NYT story makes clear that large donors can wield significantly more influence than most of the trustees. What Columbia is doing unfortunately makes a lot more sense looking at things this way.

Update: It’s important to emphasize to those not here at Columbia the extent to which we are living in an unusual security environment which has been very successful in achieving its goal of suppressing any anti-Israel protest. On Monday some protesters tethered themselves to a campus gate (one that has been locked for the past year for security reasons). In the past the university generally left protestors who were not obstructing anything alone, but the current policy is very different: they were taken into custody by the NYPD. On Tuesday, Trump official Linda McMahon said she was “very pleased” with this. Still, Columbia hasn’t gotten any of its cancelled grant funds back yet. She also said she was pleased with how negotiations with Columbia are going, which is disturbing to hear, since it indicates Columbia is showing no signs of joining Harvard and others in fighting the Fascist dictatorship.

A story from NBC News reports a super-secret plan to try to start a new encampment at the Columbia campus. The super-secret plan and meeting was described by three people to NBC News, and a recording of the meeting was provided to their reporters. In response, the university has clamped down even harder on security, and issued a statement saying there would be no tolerance for encampments.

Over at Barnard, the Trump administration is helping Jewish faculty and staff feel more safe by sending them texts to their private phones asking them about whether they are Jewish and their practice of Judaism.

I’m encouraged by Scott Aaronson’s latest post, telling Harvard to “Fight Fiercely” against the Trump Administration’s illegal effort to make Harvard do what it wants by cutting off research funding. This is quite a change from his attitude when Columbia first came under this kind of attack from the country’s new dictator. In Columbia’s case, he was looking forward to having this exact sort of attack improve the horrible problem of “antisemitism” here. Many people tried to point out to him at the time, with little effect, that this wasn’t about antisemitism at all, and he should instead have been calling for Columbia not to give in, but to “fight fiercely”. I hope he and others will join the effort to get the Columbia trustees and donors to understand that they need to fight, and that collaborating with the Fascist dictatorship in hopes of furthering one’s personal agenda is not a good idea.

Update: NASA has just announced that as of the end of May it is terminating the lease of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences which operates out of a Columbia-owned building at 112th and Broadway (above Tom’s Restaurant, of Seinfeld fame). GISS has a long and distinguished history in space science, going back to 1961 (see here). After next month, employees will be working remotely, unclear what the future is. Also unclear if this has anything to do with the Trump administration’s continuing effort to apply pressure to Columbia, or if this is some DOGE-thing of just canceling all leases of office space to supposedly save money.

Update: More on the “Are you a Jew?” texts here. They also went to people at Columbia, not just Barnard. Columbia says they only gave out people’s personal contact information in response to a subpoena, and warned those affected in advance that this had happened (Barnard did not do this).

A new detail about the Khalil case is that his arrest was even more Gestapo-style than previously thought: the ICE people who dragged him away from his apartment building did so without any kind of warrant.

The playing fields in the center of campus are now occupied by hundreds and hundreds of students. It’s a really nice spring day and they’re enjoying laying around on the grass and having a good time. As long as they don’t say anything about Palestine, they should be fine.

There was a standing room only Arts and Sciences faculty meeting today here at Columbia, in which the acting president Claire Shipman spoke for a while and then took questions from faculty members. The questions on the whole were challenging her on exactly the issues I’ve been repeatedly bringing up in these blog entries (why the lies about “antisemitism”? why won’t you go to court to challenge the illegal use of dictatorial powers? why won’t you do what Tufts did to support its student who was grabbed off the street?). Shipman did not provide much of an answer to these questions, or any new information about what is going on in the struggle between the university and the Trump administration, but at least she heard these questions loud and clear.

Several questioners very directly confronted her about why the university will not in any way support pro-Palestinian students like Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, unlike the way Tufts has gone to court to support Rumeysa Ozturk. She was directly challenged to say the names of these students and wouldn’t do so (interestingly, the provost, who spoke afterwards, did make a point of saying their names). The only answer she gave as to why she and the trustees won’t say anything was that Columbia is under a lot more scrutiny than Tufts and they felt they were protecting Columbia’s students by doing what they are doing.

Given what has happened to these students, it’s hard to see how support from Columbia would make their situation worse, so I guess one must interpret the “protecting students” claim as an argument that if they supported Khalil or Mahdawi, ICE would be arresting even more people. It’s hard not to look at this and conclude that the true motivations are that expressing any support for any particular individual with pro-Palestinian views would enrage both the internal and external pro-Israeli forces attacking the university, as well as the Trump panel they are trying to negotiate with (Shipman repeated her earlier public characterization of that panel as acting in good faith). Unfortunately another possibility is that at least some of the trustees won’t defend Khalil and Mahdawi because they’re happy to have them disappeared.

There was a lot of discussion about “changing the narrative”, since everyone here is well aware that Columbia is now the most reviled educational institution on the planet. Some faculty pointed out to Shipman that the way to change the narrative would be to change the way the leadership is speaking and acting.

In related “everyone hates Columbia” news, the New York Times published today I’m a Columbia Professor. Here’s the Really Disheartening Part of This Mess by Matthew Connelly. Connelly tries to defend the university and its faculty against a lot of the accusations being made, specifically by the current campaign to boycott the university. He accurately points to a lot of ways in which such accusations have been unfair, but I think he does make one big mistake, writing

Boycott organizers insisted Columbia was “fully capitulating to the conditions imposed by the Trump administration.” In fact, many of the actions the Columbia administration announced on March 21 are similar to those originally proposed last August by more than 200 faculty members.

I don’t know what August 2024 proposal he’s referring to. There is a February 2025 letter from about 200 faculty calling for specific pro-Israel changes in policy very similar to the Trump panel demands. There are about 7,000 faculty at Columbia of which likely only a small minority agree with the cave-in to these demands. Associating the faculty here with the bad decisions of the trustees is not going to “change the narrative” for the faculty here but make it worse.

In happier news, Harvard’s decision to fight back and not go the Columbia route is very much “changing the narrative”. Rupert Murdoch’s editorial board at the Wall Street Journal has always been relentlessly devoted to attacking Democrats and liberals and defending the Republican side of all issues, even as this side descends into MAGA craziness. Today their main editorial is Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard: Many of his demands on the school exceed his power under the Constitution. It ends with exactly the argument the Columbia administration has been unwilling to make publicly for fear of alienating the Trump people they are negotiating with:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing by demanding Harvard accede to “viewpoint diversity.”

The Administration is also overstepping its authority by imposing sweeping conditions on funds that weren’t spelled out by Congress. The Justices held in Cummings (2022) that “if Congress intends to impose a condition on the grant of federal moneys, it must do so unambiguously” to ensure the recipient “voluntarily and knowingly accept[ed] the terms.”

Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose.

Also supporting Harvard today is Scott Aaronson who was fine with the Trump administration taking Columbia’s grants away to force the university to adopt the policies he favors. Quoted on Scott’s blog is something everyone should be thinking about:

“If you ever wondered what you would do in Germany in February of 1933, you’re doing it now.”

In particular, Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for the Communists…” accurately described the situation in 1933, as the new dictator came into the universities and removed the Communists (since they were “terrorists”, analogs of current-day pro-Palestinian protestors) and their supposed influence. In 1933, anti-Communists were generally happy to see someone come in and rid their institution of the Communist problem, even if they didn’t otherwise support the new dictatorship.

The difference with 1933 is that we know what happened next, and for us the future is not yet determined.

Update: Today it’s an attack by the Fascists on Harvard from several directions at once: the IRS, international students and civil rights laws. I’m hoping that they’ve made a tactical mistake, by putting the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world in a position such that it had to fight for its survival. Going in to this, Harvard has the support of even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

Update: This website has a story about communications between Mohsen Mahdawi and the Columbia administration in the weeks and months before his arrest. From what I hear, the university is taking some actions to try and help international students whose visas are being canceled, but from everything I have heard (including at the recent faculty meeting) it appears to be university policy not to help in any way pro-Palestinian students facing possible arrest and detention. I’d like to be wrong about this, happy to hear from anyone who knows of any help the administration has given students like Khalid and Mahdawi who are targets of the government.

Update: The absurd letter the Trump “task force” sent to Harvard is now claimed to be a mistake, “unauthorized”, premature, or something. That this time around the Fascists are complete clowns gives some hope we’re in something different than 1933.

Update: More Sunday from the WSJ journalists who are acting as press agents for the Trump “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”. According to the latest press release, the NYT article about this was wrong and the letter was not a mistake. Instead:

The Trump administration has grown so furious with Harvard University after a week of escalating dispute between the two sides that it is planning to pull an additional $1 billion of the school’s funding for health research, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump administration officials, the people said, thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations.

They were surprised on Monday when Harvard released the letter to the public. Before Monday, the administration was planning to treat Harvard more leniently than Columbia University, but now officials want to apply even more pressure to the nation’s most prominent university, according to the people…

The letter wasn’t marked private, but task force members say that they had made clear in weeks prior that they wanted to keep their discussions private. Harvard disputes that there was any agreement about confidentiality.

Trump administration officials now doubt Harvard ever meant to negotiate and suspect the school aimed to fight the entire time, people familiar with the matter said.

The government’s set of demands was mistakenly sent a day earlier than the task force intended, but its contents weren’t an error, people familiar with the task force said. The administration stands behind the letter with the demands, a White House spokesman said. The New York Times earlier reported that a government official said the letter was sent mistakenly.

“Instead of grandstanding, Harvard should focus on rebuilding confidence among all students, particularly Jewish students,” the spokesman said. “The White House remains open to dialogue, but serious changes are needed at Harvard.

This is completely nutty. The Trump Fascist clowns were “treating Harvard more leniently” than Columbia by making ridiculous demands that they take over the university and impose “viewpoint diversity”? If this is true, I’m wondering what their demand letters to Columbia look like. The one thing that does ring true is that the clowns are outraged that Harvard publicly released their clownish letter, which humiliated them by making them look like clowns.