When I left for spring break 10 days ago, I was intending to write something continuing along the lines of my last blog post. The idea was to try and fight the campaign of lies about the university and support the Columbia administration’s fight against Trump’s attempt to take control of the university by cutting off federal grants.
This weekend on my way back to New York, it became clear that the situation here is now very different. The administration appears to have caved in to all of Trump’s demands in hopes of restoring grant funding, ushering in a new era of Fascist control of the university. In addition, they appear to have decided to not support Mahmoud Khalil or other university community members facing imprisonment and deportation. Trump is now governing the US by decree as a dictator, with the full support of the legislative branch. While attempts are being made to go to the courts to try and stop this, the Columbia administration seems to have decided that route was hopeless and they had no choice but to give in.
The only communications I’ve gotten from anyone this weekend have been the President’s announcement of the cave-in and an email from the Trustees supporting “her principled and courageous leadership.” This is outrageous. As Fascism takes over US institutions, the one thing I’m seeing almost nowhere is principled or courageous resistance.
If anyone has reliable information about what is going on or helpful suggestions about how to resist what is happening, please use the comment section or contact me by email (I’ve now a non-Columbia email address where I can be contacted, peterwoit@gmail.com).
I plan to update this posting later.
Update: To get an idea of the thinking behind the cave-in to Trump, see the end of this New York Times article, which has:
Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of Columbia’s department of biological sciences, said that many people “simply do not understand that a modern research institution cannot exist without federal funding.” He pointed to the importance of research in the sciences and its potential to produce medical breakthroughs and improvements to the lives of everyday Americans.
“There is no scenario in which Columbia can exist in any way in its current form if the government funding is completely withdrawn,” he said. “Is having a dialogue a capitulation? I would say it is not.”
Dr. Stockwell added: “It is frustrating to me that people at other academic institutions who are not subject to these pressures are saying, ‘Columbia should fight the good fight.’ They are happy to give up our funding for their values.”
Katrina Armstrong, the interim university president is a biomedical researcher and head of the Medical Center, so she has much the same point of view: risking federal funding is not an option. She and Stockwell would like to claim that agreeing to Trump’s demands is not capitulation but just “having a dialogue”, but describing what is going on as “having a dialogue” makes about as much sense as describing Armstrong as “principled and courageous”. Unfortunately they are making it clear that there is pretty much nothing they won’t do in order to preserve this funding.
Stockwell is quite right to point out that there has been zero support of any kind from other institutions. We’re seeing the standard story of how Fascist dictatorship works: first make an example of one person or institution, that will cow the others who will keep their mouths shut and hope they won’t become the next target. What Columbia is doing is deeply shameful, but so is the silence of its peer institutions.
Only thing happening on campus that I’m hearing about is a “vigil” at noon today. The general attitude seems to be that this is a done deal, there’s nothing that can be done about it other than to give the University’s reputation a decent burial. At 4pm there’s supposedly a “Town Hall” where Armstrong will explain her point of view to the faculty.
Update: It’s unclear if what is going on here is that the current president and those around her are unusually craven and unprincipled. Lee Bollinger, who was president until 2023 has this to say:
We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orbán and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.
Jonathan Cole was provost for many years and has this in the New York Times:
I have spent almost 65 years at Columbia. I entered as an undergraduate in 1960, received my doctorate there, and never left. Yes, universities are contentious places, but they are supposed to be places where criticism takes place — whether political, humanistic or scientific disputes. When I became provost and dean of faculties, serving 14 years as Columbia’s chief academic officer, I dealt, alongside my colleagues, with student protests almost every year. When the federal government threatened Columbia with arrests or withdrawal of federal funds after the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, we defended academic freedom and free inquiry.
Today, the stakes are higher. We are in a fight for survival and appeasement never works. Despite platitudes to the contrary, Columbia’s leaders have weakened our community and our leadership among the greatest educational institutions in the world. This is not the way to fight Mr. Trump’s efforts at silencing our great American universities. If we don’t resist collectively by all legal means, and by social influence and legislative pressure, we are apt to see the destruction of our most revered institutions and the enormous benefits they accrue to America.
Update: Didn’t make it to the “Vigil”, which was not on the campus today. At the main gate there were no demonstrators, but to get in you needed to get past a line of 20-30 NYPD. I seem to be mistaken about the “Town Hall”, maybe it’s a Business School thing. On Wednesday there will be an Arts and Sciences faculty meeting at noon.
Someone sent a list of canceled Columbia grants.
Peter, I, like you, have found it hard to concentrate on or write about anything but what’s happening to our country, especially since it’s not abstract, Trump’s actions are harming people and institutions dear to me. I graduated from Columbia’s School of General Studies in ’82, Journalism School, ’83. Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump regime will make it harder for much less powerful schools, like Stevens Institute, which employs me, to resist. Shameful. I applaud your courage for expressing your outrage. John
https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2025/01/31/here-are-some-of-the-lawyers-waging-the-legal-fight-against-the-trump-administration/?slreturn=20250324131906
https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/22/trump-litigation-lawyers-pam-bondi/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/24/trump-judges-impeachment-law-doge
I am sorry to hear about the situation at Columbia.
In the distant past I have written papers with Al Mueller and Eric Weinberg of Physics. Question: Is this interruption in funding wide spread not just Columbia? I will ask close by colleagues at UW.
Indeed Trump is delusional with his agenda.
Ivan Muzinich
Ivan Muzinich,
There are general funding halts going on at the level of the funding organizations, especially NIH (biomedical research). Trump’s people have specifically identified $400 million in grants to Columbia, and told the Columbia administration those were being cut. As far as I know there is no detail available about which grants those were. Theoretical physics and mathematics grants are not large and not that much of an issue.
I’ll update the blog entry in a minute with some more information.
Maybe the Trump admin’s policy of using its position of power to cancel federal grants is wrong, but what I fail to understand is that, given how enormous Columbia’s endowment is, why they are unable to simply say to the Trump administration, “We don’t need you to ensure our excellence!” and fund the cut programs themselves.
A quick search for FY2024 shows:
Total Endowment: $14.8 billion
Usable Endowment for R and D (4.4%): $648 million
Revoked Federal Grant (2025): $250 million
What’s the point of being a wealthy non-profit academic institution if you don’t use it to do right when wrong is being done?
Xirtam Esrevni,
The standard refrain whenever there’s a financial problem at a place like Columbia is “why not just use the endowment”? University administrators then patiently explain the way university finances work, which is such that it’s much less easy to do this than one might think. I haven’t seen an analysis of what the implications of taking the $400 million out of the endowment would be.
In this particular case, the added problem is that $400 million is only a piece of the total federal grants that Trump could remove (one number I’ve seen in $5 billion).
The basic question for the university has been whether to go to court and fight this. They believe that if they do this, the Trump administration will go to war with them, using all the financial and other levers at its disposition, and destroy the university. At the moment it seems optimistic to believe that courts would successfully stop this from happening. The problem of course is that the intention here may be to destroy the university no matter what concessions it makes. If that’s the case, the decision to not try and fight will have turned out to be a huge mistake.
So I guess other universities should take the strategy to look at Columbia and see whether the Trump administration gives back the money. If it doesn’t, they should fight with everything they’ve got.
Sorry about your status as a canary in a coal mine. And I hope that the canary doesn’t expire.
Peter Shor,
Yes, looks like that’s the strategy other universities will pursue. But, even if he gives back the money, the implications of everyone staying silent now are acquiescence to a new dictatorship: everyone bends over backwards to do what the dictator wants, and if you get a letter telling you to do something, you do it. That US democracy would go down the tubes in a few weeks without anyone being willing to fight for it isn’t something I would have ever believed possible without seeing it happening up close.
Why use a gmail address when you want to talk about how to resist facism? Google is 100% complicit in what is going on, and while it is hard to disentangle from them instantly, a good start is a different email server. There are so many to choose from, including many based in Europe.
Jonathan Cole wrote, “appeasement never works”, and he is right. Compromise with a bully leads to more bullying.
In everyday life a bully will sometimes back down if confronted, but when the bully lawlessly controls law enforcement and the administrative state, such confrontation can be life altering, for institutions as well as people. Universities have soft underbellies of bloated, complacent, donor and external funding addicted administrations, and
Boards loaded with finance bros who don’t want to mess up their next deal.
With rare exceptions they will take the easy way out.
Charlotte Aten,
I have thought about this, since I do have quite a bit of experience with mail servers, having managed the math.columbia.edu server for over 30 years. I’m pretty aware of the various problems with them, technical and otherwise. The gmail situation is somewhat unique since it has such a huge share of the market.
At this point I’m not worried that I’m of any significant threat to the government so need unusual privacy protections for my email. As for Columbia, I’m completely disgusted by and ashamed of the behavior of the administration, which is good enough reason for starting to cut my connections with them (also looking into moving this blog). For the past few years I’ve been planning to wind up my responsibilities for things like the math department web and mail servers. What’s going on will likely accelerate that process.
Thank you for the updates, as a former postdoc there (not living in the US thank god!) I am following the situation with sadness and anger.
I understand the endowment is a non-starter but there is a lot of informed opinion that Columbia would have an excellent legal case in taking the government to court, see for instance
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-hasnt-columbia-u-sued-to-protect-itself
Columbia certainly has the resources and the political support (hell, a lot of alumni are top quality lawyers would would be willing to work pro-bono), which a lot of other institutions do not. Of course the assumption that an independent justice whose decisions are enforced exists in the USA is also very questionable nowadays
lun,
Thanks, the Chronicle article you link to has an excellent summary of the situation.
While Columbia can afford plenty of lawyers, it’s very unclear what they can do facing an opponent that violates any law it feels like, and goes so far as to try and destroy law firms that take on cases that oppose it. There’s been surprisingly little coverage of the ongoing battles in the courts over whether Trump can successfully violate the law with impunity.
The proposed deal seems to mostly go in the wrong direction: expanding DEI to include anti-semitism. Universities should instead end DEI, restore meritocracy and free speech; this would also address the cause of the current anti-semitism problem.
Alessandro Strumia indeed the fact that Columbia students were seized and are at risk of deportation entirely for protesting is, to put it mildly, far from a restoration of free speech. In fact it is orders of magnitude worse than any infringement of free speech linked to DEI or “cancel culture” or “wokeness”. The number of people who were worried about these in the past who are either silent or justifying or contextualising the latest news gives a measure of how sincere their concern for free speech was then.
Alessandro Strumia,
Your idea that Trump has installed a professional wrestling promoter to be the person in charge of universities with the goal of restoring meritocracy and free speech is pretty amusing.
Trump couldn’t care less about universities, but if you want to understand the goals of his administration, go on Twitter, which is now driven by Elon Musk, who really is in charge. The discussion there makes clear what the real goal is: burn down the elite universities, starting with their scientists.
A naive question, but since the US is a federal country, the state of NY (which is democrat and rich, I suppose) could not do something ?
martibal,
The state of New York has very little role in a private university like Columbia (as opposed to the state universities, which they run, and where they could try and step in if those universities become targets). The state has its own budget problems, does not have billions of dollars to give to Columbia.
Shamefully, a lot of the state and city Democratic politicians have not defended Columbia, instead going along with the bogus antisemitism accusations for political purposes.
Hi Peter,
I mostly just wanted to say that I’ve really appreciated your posts about this stuff. I’ve been completely disgusted at Columbia’s cowardice, particularly from my vantage as a former Columbia grad student. It’s with a lot of sadness that I’ve decided that I am going to caution students against going to Columbia for postdocs until the situation changes. This latest news is perhaps even scarier than what happened with Khalil:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/nyregion/columbia-student-ice-suit-yunseo-chung.html
Hi John,
I just saw the news you link to. When this happened we got an email from the President which gave a highly misleading account (saying the ICE agents were there just to search student rooms, when actually they were there to try and take away the student). Possibly the university was misled by the ICE agents, but surely at some point they figured out what really was going on (our students were being hunted) and decided not to let the community know.
In general, as far as I can tell, the university has adopted a policy of trying not to antagonize Trump by avoiding saying anything critical about the cases of ICE trying to arrest and disappear students. I’d love to be proven wrong about this.
I would strongly caution students or faculty with green cards or student visas about coming here if they have the wrong politics. So far such people have only had trouble if they have participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, but this may soon extend to any sort of opposition to the Fascist dictatorship.
Looking at the list of canceled grants one sees the titles such as the following:
Androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis
The Impact of the Herpes Zoster Vaccine on Herpes Zoster Ophthalmicus
Mitochondrial-based Determinants of Sex Differences in Acute Kidney Injury
Implementation research to improve the uptake of influenza vaccination in CKD
Mathematical Modeling and Scientific Computing for Infectious Disease Research
Alzheimer’s Disease Genetic Risk and Microglial Innate Immune Memory
Transcriptional regulation of progenitor cell fate in craniofacial ligament regeneration
etc.
Setting aside the stupidity of canceling grants because of assumptions about their politics, these are plainly purely scientific explorations that have nothing to do with identity politics. It’s clear that someone completely ignorant and incompetent simply did a keyword search and canceled grants that matched certain very simple patterns. And apparently these keywords include such basic terms as: vaccine, immune, genetic, reproductive, etc.
Princeton’s president actually did speak out in support of Columbia fighting this, see here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/columbia-academic-freedom/682088/