To update the situation at Columbia, first of all, the weather is sunny and nice and the campus is very quiet. As has been the case since the police were brought in to clear Hamilton Hall and the encampments nearly a year ago, demonstrations of any kind have been rare and small. The only way to get on campus is through tight security at only two gates. On campus, lots and lots of Columbia security staff, at the gates NYPD and news cameras. Down the street, reports of marked ICE vehicles, unknown number of unmarked ones. There’s a reason the place is quiet: most people are terrified of what will happen to them if they say the wrong thing. The university puts out statements explaining that “At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.”
After talking to a lot of people over the past couple days, what the administration is doing has started to become a lot clearer to me. One thing that helped make things clear is the story of what happened over this past weekend, which I’ve pieced together from various sources. It goes as follows:
Late Friday the president sent an email out announcing the cave-in to the Trump demands. The decision to do this appears to have been done with little to no consultation outside of the president and trustees. Deans only heard about this at the same time as anyone else. On Saturday morning there was a Zoom session organized where the president met with deans, department chairs and some others. What happened on this Zoom is reported here:
… a transcript of the meeting [was made], which seems to have been created because Columbia administrators were unable to disable the Zoom function that generates an audio transcript. The transcript itself captures administrators struggling to prevent the software from creating a transcript and then moving forward without success.
“I am unable to turn it off, for technical reasons, so we’re all just going to have to understand,” an unnamed administrator said at the outset. “This meeting is being transcribed. If you are the requester of this, I would ask you to turn it off.”
“Yeah, that seems to be the default. I keep telling my people to stop this thing,” Olinto, the provost, responded.
The transcript was evidently requested by one of the participants, who then sent it to the Free Press, who wrote about it and appear to have shared it with the Trump “Antisemitism Task Force”.
The Free Press is Bari Weiss’s organization, and she’s been at this for twenty years, since her student days at Columbia when she led a campaign to try and get a Palestinian professor fired. What’s going on now is a continuation of this decades-long fight to tar the university as antisemitic and get pro-Palestinian students and faculty removed. The big difference now is that she and her allies (which clearly include at least one of the people on the Zoom) have carte-blanche from Trump to use his dictatorial powers to get them what they want.
Until I heard this story, while I could understand why the university felt it had to as much as possible try to cave-in to the Trump people’s demands, I couldn’t understand why they had decided not to go to court to challenge the obvious illegal confiscation of their funds. I also could not understand why they did not publicly support in any way the multiple students here and elsewhere who were being grabbed off the streets and flown to a prison in Louisiana. Whenever I asked anyone connected with the administration about this, they said that the answer they were hearing to this question was that there was fear that much worse things would happen if they crossed the Trump people. At first I couldn’t understand this, it just appeared to be unusual cravenness.
After hearing about the transcript story, it became clear to me how central feelings about Israel are to what is going on. There have always been people like Bari Weiss who feel that supporters of the Palestinians are a threat to Israel and to the lives of the Jewish people everywhere, a terrifying situation that justifies extreme measures. Starting after Oct. 7, demonstrations at Columbia made the university a target of their ire, and began a process of the university trying to appease them by agreeing with their claims about pro-Palestinian demonstrations as dangerous antisemitism. These appeasement efforts were unsuccessful, and through Trump they now have gotten ahold of the reins of dictatorial power. The Columbia administration has decided it has no choice but to do whatever they ask.
I can’t begin to guess how this will play out over the coming days and weeks. The only thing clear now is that, given the Zoom transcript story, the president and trustees are even less likely than before to inform or consult with deans and department chairs, much less any of the faculty. I can understand why people are organizing boycotts of Columbia, but do keep in mind what the source of the problem is (the Trump dictatorship and those who are using it for their ends).
While the Columbia administration won’t go to court (although it is telling people it might still do so in the future), the AAUP and AFT have now done so, on behalf of affected faculty. The complaint is here.
Update: News last Friday evening from the Columbia president and trustees was that they had agreed to cave-in to the ransom note from the “Antisemitism Task Force”. News this Friday evening is that the Columbia president is now ex-president. No idea what this means, guessing that events of this week have made clear to the trustees that they and the now ex-president made a terrible mistake last week.
Since you mention Bari Weiss and others, it is worth mentioning that they spent the decade between their time in Columbia and 2025 fighting for ”free speech” and ”academic freedom” against the ”censorship” of ”cancel culture” and ”the Woke”, gaining quite a lot of traction in the mainstream press as a free speech warrior (there was that ”letter on justice and open debate” in Harper’s magazine… it is a good exercise to see how many of its signatories are ok with people getting deported for openly debating about justice nowadays).
For anyone who says this is hypocritical, this was pointed out… back in 2017 ( https://theintercept.com/2017/08/31/nyts-newest-op-ed-hire-bari-weiss-embodies-its-worst-failings-and-its-lack-of-viewpoint-diversity/ ) but of course now the hypocrisy is off the scales. Honestly this is a very good lesson in how thoroughly and shamelessly unprincipled some people can be, especially when there is a regime where hacks can make a career.
On the other hand, pedestrians are going to court … against Columbia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/realestate/columbia-university-public-access-lawsuit-protests.html?searchResultPosition=9
should have used signal^
The demands that the Trump administration has made to Columbia are identical to the list of demands submitted by certain Columbia faculty to the Columbia administration some time before the Trump administration was sworn in. There are quite a few references to this on the internet that you can easily find and it was confirmed by one of the leaders of the proposals. Is this a coincidence? Is the Trump administration that well versed in academic procedure to know that they should target the Middle Eastern studies department with academic receivership, or were they likely advised by faculty members in Columbia who are interested in seeing certain changes that have so far been blocked by the Columbia administration?
The fundamental problem for higher education is that in the past 8 years, academia has lost public support by 20 – 30 points across the political spectrum (democrats, republicans and independents). In a democracy, if you lose the people, you are toast.
It is not too difficult to understand which elements of the university were responsible for this loss in public trust. One hopes the university administrations would use this time to make necessary changes to regain public standing.
Attendee,
While I have my own sizable list of what I think university administrations have done wrong, this likely overlaps only partially with why there has been a loss of public support. If you get your news from Fox News, Twitter, Facebook, etc. as most people do these days, you’ll not know much about what actually is going on at universities, will know only about some egregious examples of bad conduct, as well as a huge number of lies. The information you’ll have about Columbia will be almost entirely lies.
You’re quite right to notice that the list of Trump demands is precisely the list of a small group of people, many part of the university community, who are upset about support for the Palestinians and about criticism of the Israeli state from students and their colleagues. Trump has decided to hand this group the powerful weapons of a dictator.
Similarly, the choice of who to target as a “terrorist” and drag off the street to Louisiana, is not being made by Trump, Rubio, etc. There are local groups here identifying those with pro-Palestinian views, and denouncing them to Trump’s people for deportation. For some documentation of this, see here
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/03/05/in-leaked-messages-members-of-columbia-alumni-for-israel-group-chat-work-to-identify-punish-pro-palestinian-protesters/
What Trump did that’s wrongful is withholding unrelated research funding to get what he wants. But in terms of what Columbia actually agreed to do, if you think that was going to come out another way, you’re deluding yourself. The whole country watched the protests last year, and Columbia did not come out of that looking good. They were antisemitic, they were violent, and they were encouraged by professors. That had a real effect on Jewish students being afraid to apply to the school. It’s also illegal discrimination, and the courts were not going to stand for it.
When I attended Columbia, 20 years ago, I and others warned the school that there was a growing antisemitism problem at Columbia. We weren’t listened to because there was a group in the administration who thought listening to Jews was bourgeois and catering to Edward Said made them somehow cosmopolitan. Where we are now is the net result of allowing the problem to fester in the humanities for decades.
Amos,
The whole country did not “watch the protests last year”, I was here and I did. What the whole country “watched” was mostly propaganda and lies, including especially the lie that what was happening on the Columbia campus was “violent”. This is a lie: you can argue about how the Columbia administration and the NYPD handled things, but they successfully ensured that no one was injured.
I’m not going to further debate what happened here last spring, the propaganda campaign to misrepresent it was successful and there’s nothing I can do about it. I am willing to discuss the facts of what is happening here right now, as best I understand them, would love to hear from anyone more knowledgeable and with better understanding.
I’m also not going to debate “antisemitism”. A horrendously ugly war over land has been going on for generations between the Israeli state and the Palestinian people. The feelings on both sides are extremely strong, and those with such feelings believe they need to do whatever they can to fight for their side, in particular by demonizing anyone they see as being on the other side.
What’s going on at Columbia right now is that Trump has handed the weapon of dictatorial power to one side. They are using it to imprison and deport their opponents, and threatening to use it to destroy the university unless it does what they want. The university’s tactic so far has been to try and do everything it can to appease them, but the latest news may indicate this has been unsuccessful.
Again, if you want to debate what happened here last year or accusations of antisemitism, do it somewhere else. If your strong feelings about the Israel-Palestinian conflict make you want to fight your side of it on my blog, please go away. I’m not going to allow it
Attendee says:
“The demands that the Trump administration has made to Columbia are identical to the list of demands submitted by certain Columbia faculty to the Columbia administration some time before the Trump administration was sworn in. There are quite a few references to this on the internet that you can easily find”
The “easily find” part is seriously false. Can you supply a working pointer?
Peter, just curious if you view the resignation of the interim president as positive or negative?
Ian,
It depends on why she resigned, and I have no idea what that is. I would view as positive a change of policy: a decision to go to court to challenge the dictatorial confiscation of funds, as well as a decision to try and support students being arrested and deported.
I’m guessing the reason is only known to her, the trustees and a few others. Possibly this weekend, like last weekend, there will be some attempt to tell top administrators and the chairs more about what is going on, and others on campus will hear from them on Monday (as will as the Free Press and WSJ getting a transcript…).
Purely speculation, but I’m guessing that this means that the appeasement attempt didn’t work and Columbia is not getting the \$400 million back (just because if it did work that would be a success of the current strategy led by the president and you don’t get rid of people when they’re successful).
Doug,
Here is at least one article:
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/columbia-trump-funding-demands-negotiations-7038d1e8
Please scroll through to quotes by Prof Larisa Geskin.
Attendee,
Thanks, I hadn’t noticed that. Here’s the relevant part of the article:
“Last month, seven faculty members and the co-founder of the school’s Jewish alumni association went to the interim president, Katrina Armstrong, with nearly the same requests as the Trump administration.
They called on Columbia to fight discrimination and encourage inclusivity. They asked the president to ban masks, adopt a stricter definition of what constitutes antisemitism, and discipline members of the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department. Most of the recommendations haven’t been acted on.
“I was shocked when I saw” the Trump administration letter, said Larisa Geskin, a professor in the medical school and an author of a faculty letter to the interim president. “I was like, ‘Am I reading my letter?’ This is what I was talking about.”
Geskin, a cancer researcher, is critical of university leadership. “When there is a war, somebody has to make a decision, and decisions are not being made, at least that we can see,” Geskin said.”
I wonder if Geskin, as a cancer researcher, is comfortable with the cancellation of large numbers of biomedical grants in order to try and force the university to do exactly what she wants. The other six faculty should also identify themselves, and publicly make clear either that they are telling the Trump regime to restore the \$400 million or that they, like Geskin think this is a “war” and support the destruction of their own university if they don’t get what they want.
So if the Trump administration really is not giving the money back, they are making a mistake. They have lost their ability to compel university administrations to obey their commands through threats, and the next times they try this, they will be faced with lawsuits that they will probably lose.
To continue with the “war” analogy in the previous comments, if you start killing prisoners of war, a lot fewer enemy soldiers are going to surrender peacefully.