The attack on Columbia university by the Trump administration and attendant organizations has quickly become so existential that one must start imagining Manhattan without its Ivy League institution. Even with its $13 billion endowment, it seems that over a quarter of Columbia's year-to-year funding is directly provided by federal grants, and perhaps half is dependent or connected to federal sources. Suddenly this strikes everyone as a massive risk that hasn’t been priced into their insurance portfolio.
Columbia's response, craven and unavoidable, has been instant capitulation, a quick compromise of every principle they ever purported to hold dear. "Academic freedom," always a somewhat amorphous value, and one not exactly enshrined in the Constitution, turned out not to be such a serious commitment after all. At least, it’s a mere bauble as compared with $400 million in federal grants.
If it means anything, "academic freedom" indicates that faculty and students are free to express opinions on questions within their disciplines and on the questions facing their society. But two weeks ago, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters the school refused to help the administration identify people “engaged in pro-Hamas activities.” Leavitt’s message was stern: “We expect all America’s colleges and universities to comply with this administration’s policy.”
In its amazing new dedication to political compliance, Columbia has pledged to create a new "internal security force," empowered to make arrests on political grounds and to share information, for example, with ICE. Meanwhile, deportations of Columbia's students on grounds of their political speech has begun. The direct annexation of a university's administration to the gathering mass deportation program focused on dissidents: it’s hard to imagine a more compromised position for a college administration.
When Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia's journalism school, spoke last year to his school's master's graduates (my daughter Jane among them), he was foursquare for freedom of speech and indicated that the school had semi-surreptitiously helped reporters cover campus protests and encouraged student journalists to continue to report on them objectively. This year he’s hitting a different tone. After a lawyer told students assembled in Pulitzer Hall that students who weren’t U.S. citizens should avoid publishing work on Gaza, Ukraine and protests related to Mahmoud Khalil's arrest even on social media, Cobb added that "nobody can protect you."
At the behest of the administration, Columbia has put its own Middle Eastern Studies department "under investigation."
Guardian columnist and former Washington Post media writer Margaret Sullivan runs the center for journalistic ethics at Columbia. Her degree of outrage is extreme, but proportionate to the outrages perpetrated on American academia and journalism, the worst encroachments in American history. Sullivan counsels "holding fast," refusing to collude in these astounding ways with the end of the institution's purposes. If necessary, she hints, close the university.
This is easy to say, but would be hard, well-nigh impossible to do. If you’re the (interim) president Katrina Armstrong, you watched your predecessor get destroyed. You’re charged with helping the university thrive, which at a minimum demands that it survive. That the survival of Columbia could be at stake never would’ve occurred to any sensible person five years ago. But threatening $5 billion in grant commitments gets everyone's attention. I don't know anything about Columbia's board of trustees, but I imagine that no one wants to preside over the dissolution of Columbia or its extreme sudden downsizing.
I agree with Sullivan. Because what Columbia’s doing and saying right now compromise the most fundamental justifications of its existence.
When I think about Columbia, it’s not about the protests of 1968 or 2024, or even about Jelani Cobb, but about visiting the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto in his office in Philosophy Hall in the early-1990s. And about Danto's predecessor, the great pragmatist John Dewey, who held that education in a democratic society must be based on the freedom of the teachers and the learners. It's a long way from there to "we cannot protect you."
I argued a few weeks ago that one of the quick lessons of Trump 2 is that whomever you may be, you should think long and hard about accepting federal funding, which puts you at extreme moral and financial risk. Ameliorating one sort of risk, as Columbia is showing, may increase the other. What the university administration and board should be asking now isn’t whether we will continue to exist, but whether we should.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinsartWell
