Not Even Wrong

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.

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.

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?

Nothing much new happening today, a short summary of what is going on follows. I will be traveling the next ten days or so, likely much less posting.

On the visa front, a court stopped Trump from his plan to remove Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students. The Trump people now say they will do “enhanced vetting” of all Harvard visas to look for “histories of anti-Semitic harassment and violence” (and these days criticizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza is often considered “anti-Semitic harassment”). Unable to shut down visas to Harvard, they’re going after all student visas: pausing new appointments for all visa applications and threatening Chinese students in particular, based on connections to the Communist Party or working in certain research areas. For all of this, hard to know at this point if they intend to massively deny student visas or not. Probably they don’t know.

Stand Columbia, as part of its ongoing campaign to make the case that Columbia needs to bend the knee, has a long analysis of the foreign student situation at Columbia.

The current situation of Trump’s war with the universities is described in Universities quietly negotiating with White House aide to try to avoid Harvard’s fate, source says at CNN. Harvard won’t negotiate, so it’s war and the Trump is trying to find every means, legal and illegal, to destroy Harvard. But Harvard has a lot of money, influence and lawyers. May end up with another TACO.

The source familiar with the higher education response questioned the appetite to proceed at an aggressive pace.

“If you go after Harvard, how hard can you keep going? The universities are being played like a yo-yo for weeks and weeks and weeks. My guess is, at some point, the White House will lose interest in that. Once you’ve taken down Harvard, where are you going to go – Emory? They’re just as conscious of the brands as anybody else,” the source said.

Ultimately, the source added, the market rules: “What’s going to happen to Harvard or Columbia? Record applicants, record yield. I would bet you that if you talked to MAGA voters at Charlotte Country Day School or The Westminster Schools – they may have voted for Trump, but are they turning away from the Ivy League? Hell no. The schools are having record demand.”

The overall goal is “We have to bring these universities to their knees”, more specifically

“They want a name-brand university to make a deal like the law firms made a deal that covers not just antisemitism and protests, but DEI and intellectual diversity,”

Columbia has gone part-way with this, caving in on the “antisemitism and protests” front, with one factor influential pro-Israel trustees who were happy with that part of the demands. On the “DEI and intellectual diversity” front though, the Harvard demand letter shows that the Trump people are trying to get control not just of admissions and hiring, but also imposing MAGA students, faculty and staff on an institution. In response to this, supposedly many universities are “negotiating”. This includes Columbia, but our negotiating tactic is described as “playing dead”. For the rest

Asked if any of the schools are inclined to make such a deal, the source said, “Nobody wants to be the first, but the financial pressures are getting real.”

One problem for this effort (besides being completely illegal…) is that there’s now an ongoing campaign to destroy all universities, so it’s very unclear what caving-in to Trump would actually get you. The proposed budget has massive cuts in all grant funding everywhere, so getting your right to apply for grants restored at a time there aren’t any anymore is not much of an inducement. The attack on foreign students is on all of them, the proposed endowment tax is on all of them, etc. By starting on a campaign to destroy all universities, Trump has made it a lot harder to pressure any particular one. Who knows, the universities might even get together, join Harvard, and fight for a TACO.

Update: Why won’t Columbia do this?

Bogus accusations of “antisemitism” continue to be a central feature of the march of Fascism locally and globally. Starting from the local:

There’s an open letter from some of my colleagues which, while I don’t agree with all of it, very much gets the main point right:

Of particular concern is the weaponization and misuse of the charge of “antisemitism,” which has been irresponsibly and repeatedly invoked by the administrations of Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers College against student protests related to the atrocities unfolding in Gaza.

An odd thing about the letter though is that as far as I can tell it is unsigned. It is posted on the AAUP blog by “Guest Blogger” with byline “CONCERNED FACULTY AT COLUMBIA, BARNARD, AND TEACHERS COLLEGE”, but no list of signatories. A main reason why bogus “antisemitism” accusations are so hard to fight is that people are scared. They are rightly concerned that if they say what is true about this they will come under attack from many directions as “antisemites” (if they also say anything about Gaza, it will be “antisemitic piece of shit”).

At the Wall Street Journal, there’s a call for federal criminal prosecutions of the Columbia students involved in the recent pro-Palestinian protest at Butler library:

Attorney General Pam Bondi should instruct the U.S. attorneys for the Southern and Eastern districts of New York to activate a federal law that criminalizes violence directed against the “federally protected activities” of Jewish students at Columbia and Brooklyn College.

Rise Up, Columbia has a law professor’s analysis of the recent Trump administration finding that Columbia is guilty of “antisemitism”:

We asked a member of our law faculty to read the Notice and comment. They found it shoddy, poorly argued, and unconvincing. (Remarkably, for example, the government believes that the cancellation of last year’s Commencement ceremony was… a civil rights violation.) The law professor does not think this Notice would stand up in court.

You can read more details there.

A recent NY Magazine article describes the Columbia board of trustees as having members aware the antisemitism charges are bogus (or at least overblown) but unwilling to stand up to a minority intent on using these to get policies implemented to suppress criticism of Israel. The leaders of this minority are described as Victor Mendelson and Shoshana Shendelman. Mendelson brags of his back-channel contacts with the Trump White House, which seems to me a good reason for him to be removed. No petition for that yet, but there is one for the removal of Shendelman. This is based on the information described in this article.

Moving out from Morningside Heights to the larger city, politically opportunistic bogus “antisemitism” charges are becoming the main topic in the ongoing mayoral campaign, see here. The leading candidate, Andrew Cuomo

recently joined a symbolic “legal team” defending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from war crimes charges

and is forcefully accusing his Jewish opponent Brad Lander of “antisemitism”. The other leading candidate, Eric Adams, is running not as a Democrat but on an independent “EndAntisemitism” ballot line.

In the wider US academic world, having so far lost to Harvard in court, the Trump administration is now pausing all interviews for visas to study in the US. Possibly the stop is just until they get a new system in place to monitor all social media of visa applicants for hostility to Trump and the MAGA agenda, or for “antisemitic” sympathy to what is happening to the Palestinians. If this stop lasts very long, it will mean few foreign students in the US this fall, only those who already have set up an interview in advance.

One might think this is insane and extreme, but two of the pillars of MAGA thought are hatred of foreigners and hatred of universities, so this has a lot of appeal to them as a two-fer. I’ll recommend again following political scientist Adam Przeworski’s ongoing diary of his thoughts on the evolving Fascist dictatorship. In his latest entry, he explains something about how Trump or Mussolini-style dictatorships work:

There is no semblance of law. Yes, there are many temporary restraining order and their number increases by the day. But the government is not restrained. It launches one illegal action after another, against immigrants, against law firms, universities, government agencies, individuals. Some of these actions are announced by executive orders, the legal scope of which is murky. Notably, while all these orders begin with “By the authority vested in me in the Constitution,” some continue to say “and by laws,” which are enumerated, other orders leave it at the Constitution because there are no laws enabling the particular action. The reaction of some people I interact with is often “But this is against the law.” So what? Just consider Columbia: it could legally contest the use of Title VI by the government but processing it in the courts would take years and money. The strategy of the MAGAs is to ignore laws and let any opposition to their actions simmer for an indefinite time in the courts…

Why? Why cut funds for cancer research of universities that have Middle Eastern centers with pro-Palestinian sympathies? Why gut the weather service that provides hurricane warnings? Why withdraw Global Entry privileges of someone who thought Trump lost the 2020 election? Why pursue a specialized medical journal for being “partisan”? Why let the measles epidemic expand? The list of the why’s is endless. These measures will not make Trump richer, so this is not a viable explanation. Some of government’s actions can be explained by its desire to reduce expenditures, some by the anti-elite impetus, some by its instinct to seek revenge. But so many appear to be just stupid, undertaken without a regard for the consequences, whether political or economic. Granted, every government makes mistakes. But I think there is something systematic about dictatorships.

In somewhat stylized terms, what may be happening with the Trump regime goes as follows. There is a Leader (Duce, Führer, Vozdh) who demands absolute loyalty from his subordinates. The subordinates know that they will be rewarded for implementing the will of the Leader. They compete for his attention. Lines demarcating their authority do not matter: the head of HHS Department tries to catch Leader’s attention by doing something that formally can be done only by DoE Department and if the Leader notices and likes this action, the head of the HHS jumps in his approval above the head of DoE. Sometimes the subordinates go farther than the Leader would want; sometimes they do something the Leader does not approve. Such mistakes, however, are not due to a lack of expertise, but only the uncertainty inherent in the impossibility of the Leader to fully articulate his will. Sometimes the Leader has to step in to adjudicate conflicts. Some of his underlings may be pushing tariffs while others may want free trade; some may be concerned about deficits while others believe that they will pay for themselves. Moreover, envy and jealousy cannot be avoided when the underlings compete for the Leader’s favor. Mussolini claimed that resolving such conflicts took most of his time. Yet, whenever loyalty is the only criterion of performance, chaos must ensue. The only purpose of the subordinates is to please the Leader. Formal authority, consideration of material consequences, or compassion have no place in their competition…

Does Trump really want to destroy American research universities? Does he have revenge feelings particularly against Columbia, Harvard, or Northwestern? Or is it just a guess by his overzealous acolytes?

The trustees at Columbia may think they are negotiating about “antisemitism” with Linda McMahon, but she makes clear what the goal really is: the universities can only continue to operate as research universities if, like her, they devote themselves to figuring out what Trump wants, and doing just that:

“Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish.”

The Columbia trustees are trying to negotiate with her a return to federal research funding. Will they agree that future research will be “in sync” with Trump?

Moving to the wider world, the genocidal Gaza campaign continues. The current plan (described here) is to finish flattening 3/4 of Gaza, to be taken over by Israel. The two million Palestinians would be imprisoned in the remaining 1/4 of the area and subjected to a starvation regime that would encourage them to leave. Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich describes the genocide he welcomes as

We are being blessed with the opportunity, thank god, of seeing an expansion of the borders of the Land of Israel, on all fronts. We are being blessed with the opportunity to blot-out the seed of Amalek, a process which is intensifying.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert writes that Israel is Committing War Crimes, so I guess he’s another example of “antisemitism”.

Update: Columbia has an update for foreign students here. Students who need a visa renewal, which needs to be done outside the US, are advised not to travel outside the US. Incoming students who already have appointments should be all right, but those who have not yet gotten an appointment may have a problem coming here in the fall if the stop on appointments is not lifted.

Update: There’s a new Harvard Law Review Forum paper coming out, about possible Title VI “antisemitism” lawsuits against universities. It concludes that grounds for such a lawsuit would be significantly weaker than generally assumed.

Update: This is really nuts. Rubio has announced that

The U.S. will begin revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.

This may fit into Przeworski’s explanation above that what is happening is that Trump’s underlings are just doing crazy things they think he wants. Or maybe it is just a nutty order from the top.

And, around the same time, a court has unanimously ruled that Trump’s tariff stuff is all illegal. It’s just all illegality all the time, and it seems the courts are finally stepping up to say it’s illegal. What happens now?

Update: The NYT has an opinion piece about Columbia closing public access to its campus, including what used to be a public street. The reason for the closure is to stop any possibility someone might try a pro-Palestinian protest. According to Columbia, this ensures that we “feel welcome, safe and secure on our campus.” I just got into my office and for the record want to state that having to go through two different security checkpoints (getting on to campus, getting into the math building) does not make me feel “welcome, safe and secure.” Instead it makes me depressed, angry and forcefully reminded that I work for an institution single-mindedly devoted to lies about “antisemitism” and to collaborating with Fascism instead of joining the fight against it. In particular having to deal with a security guard to get into the math building, when the campus as a whole is locked down tight as a drum, and there are few people here anyway (summer school just started) is highly disturbing. There clearly is no rational reason for this, it’s the kind of thing totalitarian regimes do to make sure everyone knows they are in an environment where they better never step out of line.

Update: The latest opinion polling of the Israeli public shows very strong support for ethnic cleansing and genocide. Support for expelling all Palestinians from Gaza at is at 82% (above 90% among the religious), for expelling all Arab citizens of Israel is at 56%. Support for killing all the inhabitants of a conquered city (e.g. Gaza or the West Bank) is at 47% (60% or so among the religious). No polling numbers on what fraction of Israeli citizens want their Arab citizen neighbors killed.

Update: The judge in the Harvard visa case has (see here) extended the temporary restraining order and said she will issue an injunction stopping the Trump administration from canceling Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students. As far as I can tell, this particular tactic of the Trump administration is at a dead end, they’re never going to get a court to allow it. The judge may also order that the Trump administration stop other tactics such as not issuing visas.

Update: The team at the Wall Street Journal acting as spokespersons for the Trump “antisemitism” people, have a long new profile of the people they’re working for. They end with their specialty, publishing anonymous threats from their sources:

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.

White House officials told Columbia it should be mindful during its search for a permanent president that such comments from university leaders would again jeopardize federal funding, a senior administration official said.

Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s civil-rights division, said “all these schools are in the penalty box, they’re all misbehaving.”

Harvard is taking an aggressive approach, she said.

Columbia, meanwhile, “they’re playing dead,” Dhillon said. “It doesn’t mean their intentions are any different.”

Update: In a speech yesterday, Marco Rubio announced

We have implemented a vigorous new visa policy that will prevent foreign nationals from coming to the United States to foment hatred against our Jewish community.

I gather that means that if you’re not a US citizen and have criticized Israel, especially if you’ve joined calls for a boycott, you will not be able to get a visa to visit or study here. I’m wondering how this is going to affect events like the 2026 ICM.

Update: According to CNN

The US State Department on Friday ordered all US embassies and consulates to “immediately begin additional vetting” for anyone seeking a visa to travel to Harvard University “for any purpose.”

This additional vetting mainly means going through your social media accounts to “appropriately identify such visa applicants with histories of anti-Semitic harassment and violence”, which these days means criticizing Israel.

It looks like the efforts of the Columbia trustees to negotiate “in good faith” with the Fascist dictator have failed so far. I guess this is good news, because the alternative would be reading an announcement further solidifying our reputation as “Vichy on the Hudson”. Maybe the trustees will some day realize they don’t have any choice except to go to court and fight. In the meantime, according to the NYT:

“We understand this finding is part of our ongoing discussions with the government. Columbia is deeply committed to combating antisemitism and all forms of harassment and discrimination on our campus,” a spokesman for Columbia said in a statement, adding that the school would continue to work with the government to address those issues.

The “Stand Columbia” group is solidifying its reputation as “Bend the knee, Columbia” by immediately coming out with a call for capitulation, without even knowing what we would be capitulating to.

Update: The Fox News story about this gets it right, with lede paragraph

The Trump administration on Thursday accused Columbia University of having violated federal law through its “deliberate indifference” toward anti-Israel protests that have been taking over the campus since Oct. 7, 2023.

This is not about the university allowing antisemitic attacks on students, it’s about Israel, with Columbia standing accused of allowing protests against the Israeli war on Gaza. Columbia was guilty of this until a year ago, but since then has had a policy of not allowing anti-Israel protests on campus, as the genocidal nature of the Gaza war becomes increasingly clear.

The New York Times has an excellent essay today by Steven Pinker, entitled Harvard Derangement Syndrome. This is about Harvard, not Columbia, but the two institutions are very similar, so most of what he writes applies here (except that they are now in open warfare with Trump, we’re trying to appease him).

Pinker has been one of Harvard’s most prominent critics on the subject of the excesses of identity politics, and he’s often been right about that. But about accusations of “antisemitism”, here’s what he has to say:

For what it’s worth, I have experienced no antisemitism in my two decades at Harvard, and nor have other prominent Jewish faculty members. My own discomfort instead is captured in a Crimson essay by the Harvard senior Jacob Miller, who called the claim that one in four Jewish students feels “physically unsafe” on campus “an absurd statistic I struggle to take seriously as someone who publicly and proudly wears a kippah around campus each day.” The obsession with antisemitism at Harvard represents, ironically, a surrender to the critical-social-justice credo that the only wrong worthy of condemnation is group-against-group bigotry. Instead of directly rebutting the flaws of the anti-Zionist platform, such as its approval of violence against civilians and its historical blind spots, critics have tried to tar it with the sin of antisemitism. But that can devolve into futile semantic disputation about the meaning of the word “antisemitism,” which, our council has argued, can lead to infringements of academic freedom.

Update: I haven’t always agreed with Matt Strassler about things, but he’s got it right

As far as I can see, the government is merely using Jewish students as pawns, pretending to attack Harvard on their behalf while in truth harboring no honest concern for their well-being. The fact that the horrors and nastiness surrounding the Gaza war are being exploited by the government as cover for an assault on academic freedom and scientific research is deeply cynical and exceedingly ugly.

Update: What I for a while mistakenly thought happened yesterday did happen today. Harvard went to court to challenge the removal of its ability to enroll foreign students and immediately got a temporary restraining order.

I have been told that one reason the Columbia trustees caved in March was that they had legal advice that Trump could do exactly this and that it would be a disaster for the university that they could do nothing about. We now know that this was very bad advice. So far, the court system is holding and absurdly illegal actions like this are often being immediately struck down. If, as seems all too possible, the trustees are about to cave-in further on the basis of legal advice that they have no choice because of things like this, they need to immediately fire some lawyers and rethink what they have been doing.

Update: Rise Up, Columbia has some analysis of the day’s events. They quote the opinion of a law school faculty member that the latest attempt to pressure Columbia is something that will quickly be enjoined or fall apart if the university does not cave, but goes to court:

It is very rare for an agency to complete the review this quickly, and to come to a final determination this quickly. That suggests to me that there were short cuts taken to prove the conclusion the Trump Administration wanted (similar to the Department of Education finding, which was legally insufficient and is invoked by reference in this press release). It would quickly be enjoined or fall apart, in my opinion, if Columbia filed suit instead of working with the administration to damage the university.

Update: To the extent the Trump administration has a strategy here, it’s explained by Christopher Rufo on twitter:

The strategy should be to barrage the Ivy League universities with civil rights investigations and negotiate toward consent decrees, placing their administrations under a federal anti-discrimination regime. Then dismantle DEI down to the foundations.

If Columbia agrees to a consent decree, the Trump plan is to use that to have a Trump appointee exercise control over the university. On the “anti-semitism” front, any criticism of Israel would be eliminated (this there probably are trustees happy to vote for). On the other “DEI” issues, this would be an excuse for Trump’s people to control admissions and hiring, as well as vetoing any overly “woke” course content.

Update: A late Friday communication from Shipman is here. No change: still negotiating, no consent decree, no going to court, no fighting Trump. All about the huge effort by the university to fight antisemitism. As for the ongoing negotiations, to figure out what’s going on you’ll have to read between these lines:

The finding is part of the process to resolve these investigations and seek a restoration of our vital research funding. While we disagree with the government’s conclusion, we are continuing to engage in a thoughtful and constructive manner in addressing these serious issues. It is not a signal that we are no longer working to resolve the issues with regard to our critical and long-standing partnership with the federal government…

As we move forward in our discussions with the government, we will continue to explore all strategies as we do the important work of addressing these serious issues.

Update: Bend the Knee, Columbia is out with a new long argument for why Columbia must immediately capitulate to Trump. The main part of the argument is about the tuition Columbia would lose if Trump does the same thing he did to Harvard, remove its ability to enroll foreign students. This argument I’ve been told was a significant factor in the initial cave-in last March. The obvious problem with this argument is that yesterday a federal judge immediately issued a temporary restraining order since the Trump action was absurdly illegal, and the same thing would happen if the Trump people try this tactic here. Not only that, but such temporary restraining orders are now often getting turned into permanent injunctions (see an analysis by a law professor here):

Here, Judge Burroughs will likely follow the path of Judges Beryl Howell and John Bates, who permanently enjoined the administration’s efforts to punish the law firm Perkins Coie and Jenner & Block, respectively, for speech and conduct that met with the president’s disapproval. Those rulings will likely echo in this decision as well, but not for the same reasons. Here, the failure of the administration to follow even the most basic of administrative steps required to take its desired action will likely doom the effort.

I had thought that the Bend the Knee, Columbia people were a possible counter-example to my increasing conviction that this is all ultimately about Gaza, since that wasn’t a motivation they discussed. Things have changed in the latest newsletter, where they now make explicit that they share Scott Aaronson’s motivation for collaboration with the Fascist dictator, that this is justified by the supposed fact that anti-Israel protesters here are intent on killing the Jews. Worse than that, the anti-Israel protesters are domestic terrorists and threaten national security. Discussing the recent murders in DC, the author writes:

The alleged perpetrator had been affiliated with a communist organization (which led protests at Columbia’s gates, and since disavowed him), and has now been praised by certain extremist groups as embodying “the highest expression of anti-Zionism” and “an act of solidarity and love.” One these groups (which has a following at Columbia) is now going further, calling for its members to be “completely willing and ready at all times to KILL.”

We previously wrote in these pages: “Meanwhile, these extremists are going beyond public displays of support for terrorism, to claiming they are actively in coordination with and ‘seeking instruction’ from actual terrorists… Left unchecked, we fear it is only a matter of time before some unhinged individual decides to stop ‘playing make-believe’ and turns to actual violence.”

Tragically, it appears that time has come. When those who commit acts of violence are celebrated rather than condemned, we cross a line—from protest into something far more sinister. What once may have felt like theoretical risk has now crystallized. This is no longer a matter of campus politics. It is a matter of domestic terrorism and national security.

Harvard has its own analog of our Bend the Knee people, the 1636 Forum, which is run by Sam Lessin, who has been on a campaign to stop criticism of Israel at Harvard for a while. His latest newsletter has a long explanation of how disastrous the Trump order about foreign students is for Harvard, that Harvard has no choice but to negotiate surrender. That the whole thing is absurdly illegal doesn’t seem to him worth mentioning, nor that courts will immediately put a stop to it.

Update: The Intercept has this story about what is going on with Shoshana Shendelman, one of the Columbia trustees.

Update: A story at Politico claims that the Trump administration is pausing all new interviews for student visas, and planning to add new screening of social media of all students applying for visas. Note that this is not specifically aimed at Harvard, but applies to all US educational institutions. Under the excuse of stopping pro-Palestinian terrorists, the plan may be to implement the larger MAGA goals of doing as much as possible to stop foreigners from coming to the US while at the same time doing as much as possible to harm US universities, seen as dominated by MAGA’s enemies.