Donald Trump is trying to cow higher education institutions into submission using the power of the purse. The administration has withheld $400m in federal funds from Columbia University and has vowed to remove even more if its demands are not met.
Columbia has an endowment of $14.8bn and an annual operating budget of $6.6bn. The cuts amount to roughly 6% of its annual budget – a non-trivial share. In order to keep it, Columbia was instructed to adopt a number of illiberal measures: it must put its Middle East, South Asia and Africa Studies department into academic receivership; change its admissions policies to reduce admits of people from those regions and admit more Jewish students; and grant campus police more power to surveil, detain and remove people from campus without following the usual due process. It must accept permanently heightened restrictions on campus protest and speech and comply with unlawful federal orders to arrest and expel green card holders who have committed no crime, such as Mahmoud Khalil.
I have previously stressed, and I maintain, that the tumult at Columbia University and other elite schools about Middle East policy is of little consequence to the people struggling in the Middle East. However, what Columbia does is of immense consequence to the overall landscape of higher education in the United States because of a phenomenon sociologists describe as “institutional isomorphism”.
In conditions of genuine uncertainty, with competing tradeoffs and high apparent stakes, institutional leaders often try to defer decision-making as long as possible. But circumstances often force someone to make the first move. If that first mover also happens to be an institution others look up to, then those other institutions often rapidly follow suit – assuming that a school such as Harvard, for instance, must know what it’s doing. Few university leaders would be faulted for emulating Harvard. Consequently, its policy ends up becoming the de facto policy of most other schools too – starting with elite peer institutions and then trickling down.
We can see this dynamic at work in university hiring. A couple of non-elite state schools announced a freeze in the wake of budget uncertainty. Then Stanford adopted the policy, and it promptly exploded throughout elite private universities and “public Ivies” such as the UC system. Similar patterns are likely to play out here, too. Other universities are desperate to avoid falling into the Trump administration’s crosshairs, and they’re closely watching how Columbia navigates this situation. This is distressing because, as the Wall Street Journal first reported, Columbia University has conceded to most of the Trump administration’s demands without resistance.
The “America First” president seems poised to successfully suppress criticism of a foreign country and its policies nationwide under the auspices of fighting antisemitism – a scourge that, while very real and pernicious, is demonstrably less pronounced or accepted on college and university campuses than almost anywhere else in American society. Antisemitism is certainly far less accepted at Columbia than, say, in the GOP, where our sitting president casually decreed that Chuck Schumer is not Jewish any more because he doesn’t accept all of Trump’s policies – and proceeded to call the Senate minority leader “Palestinian” (another semitic population) as a slur.
This is not a partisan political point. Virtually every aspect of the Trump administration’s posture rests on track laid by the Biden administration and the Democratic party.
For instance, the reason Trump could plausibly refer to Gaza a “demolition site” is because, for more than a year prior to his re-election, his Democratic predecessor (urged on by Schumer and others) supplied unlimited weapons to Israel to carry out a campaign of destruction that has few modern equivalents – a campaign that was not just restricted to Gaza, but also extended to the West Bank, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. Biden’s planned successor, Kamala Harris, and her surrogates repeatedly stressed to voters that these policies would continue largely unchanged under her watch.
Even before Trump had a chance to weigh in, Joe Biden immediately characterized the protests at Columbia as “antisemitic” and declared that “order must prevail” on college campuses. Democratic lawmakers put aggressive pressure on the former Columbia University president Minouche Shafik to crush the protests. She ultimately did so with the assistance of New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams (who justified his clampdown via evidence-free statements that the protests were driven primarily by “outside agitators”). Trump celebrated the pictures and videos of students getting roughed up by the NYPDand, upon Trump’s reclaiming the White House, the justice department interceded on behalf of Adams – making his criminal investigation go away in apparent exchange for the mayor adopting a more aggressive posture on immigration – a move that critics claim is a quid pro quo.
In a similar vein, it was Biden who enshrined the IHRA definition of antisemitism into federal guidance, despite the definition’s author repeatedly describing it as a “travesty” to use this definition to regulate speech and behavior. Building on Biden’s introduction, Trump is poised to sign a bill that would implement this same definition into federal anti-discrimination law – and in the meantime, he’s insisting Columbia and other schools adopt this definition in their own codes of conduct. NYU and Harvard have already taken this step, overriding concerns by civil rights and civil liberties organizations – from the ACLU, to Fire and the AAUP, to Israeli civil rights groups – who stressed that IHRA’s definition is extremely vague and provides strong leeway for institutional stakeholders to censor most critical discussion of Israel, Zionism or Judaism more broadly, by Jews and non-Jews alike.
Likewise, before Trump called upon Columbia to put its Middle East studies programs into receivership, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, took the extraordinary step of demanding that the City University of New York eliminate a job posting for scholars who study Palestine. This is the same type of overreach Trump is exercising at Columbia – politicians setting the agenda for what can be taught and who can be hired – justified on the same grounds.
The Democrats will not save colleges and universities. They have been key partners and pioneers for all of the actions currently being undertaken by the Trump administration in this domain.
If universities are to be saved, they will have to save themselves. And if a desire to preserve academic freedom and institutional autonomy isn’t enough for Columbia University’s leadership, they should perhaps look to its own recent past to see what the wages of compliance are likely to be.
Shafik did everything the hardliners asked of her: she threw her faculty under the bus at a congressional hearing, while offering absolutely no defense of her institution and its value. She suspended student groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. She unleashed administrative punishments on protestors, and then siced the cops on them. The school has been turned into a veritable fortress – it’s more secure than a typical military base, as I learned first-hand when I did a series of recent talks there (and I’m speaking as a military brat).
What did all this capitulation yield? Still more demands for capitulation! Shafik was driven out. The demonization of the campus has continued apace, and the punishments have ramped up further. The same can be expected for all others who adopt this subservient posture. University leaders should understand that there will be no point at which their compliance is “enough.” The Trump administration seems committed to executing a set of punishments on colleges and universities and espousing particular narratives about institutions of higher learning independent of what colleges and universities say and do in the meantime. The institutions can debase and betray themselves ad infinitum and get the same outcome as if they did nothing. Indeed, even though Columbia has agreed to all of Trump’s demands without contest, the administration has not released any funds, and administration officials suggest still more demands will be made in the near future of Columbia and other universities.
I saw similar dynamics play out after I was dismissed from the University of Arizona following a Fox News smear campaign. I was far from the only scholar who lost a job because of a witch-hunt. Whether the attacks came from the left or the right, university leaders consistently think that if they just give the mob a head it will go away. In fact, it just makes more mobs hungry for more heads. Demonstrating to the mobs that these pile-ons work is a strategy for virtually guaranteeing subsequent pressure campaigns.
This desire for peace, order, and non-confrontation dominates the academy. Higher ed institutions, in general, are full of people who are risk averse and conformist. People who fall into “leadership” roles are often the most quiescent of all – allowing themselves to get steamrolled by PR teams and lawyers into servile postures, offering limp and half-hearted defenses of the academy and its mission, when defenses are offered at all. To universities’ credit, they recognize this about themselves: most university presidents acknowledge they have done a poor job responding to declining faith in their institutions and the accompanying efforts to impose reforms from the outside.
Small wonder the public doesn’t trust academia. Not only are we apparently unable or unwilling to address their concerns; we also seem incapable of effectively communicating our own value in society in the face of adversaries out to gut our institutions.
Now is the time to dispense with both of these tendencies. We need to be more explicit about addressing ways our institutions are not, in fact, representing and serving large swaths of the US. However, we also need to be more muscular about pushing back against false narratives, asserting our value to society, and defending our institutions from inappropriate forms of political interference.
Institutional neutrality, now the rage, is no shield for cowardice. The Kalven Report, the foundational document of this institutional neutrality movement, emphasizes: “From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”
We find ourselves in such a moment now.
If, in this moment, faculty refuse to make use of the rights and freedoms we have, then it doesn’t matter if they’re stripped away, and they will be. If “academic freedom”, “free speech”, and “viewpoint diversity” organizations have nothing to say to this illiberalism, or even support these moves, they’re worse than useless. If university leaders cannot muster the strength or conviction to decline to follow unlawful and unethical orders and challenge these actions in the courts, then they should resign in disgrace or be pushed out. If we, as a collective, cannot and will not stand against this overreach and defend ourselves in public – then we deserve what we get. But others do not deserve to suffer from our failure. And so, we must not fail.
Critically, any resistance to the administration’s illiberal policies, or defense of our institutions and their mission, must not be framed in banal partisan terms. This is not just a matter of effective praxis (to prevent further polarization and resentment), it’s also a matter of respecting the truth. We got here through bipartisan political actions. Moreover, the chronic failures of our own professions and institutional leaders provided fodder for the “populist” forces now aligned against us. We’ll only get out of this predicament by engaging with those who are currently skeptical of, or alienated from, our institutions.
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, is out now with Princeton University Press. He is a Guardian US columnist
