The interim president of Columbia was forced out last night from her position, it appears as a demand of the “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”, see here. This indicates that the trustees continue to believe that they have to do whatever they are told, including firing the university president and replacing her with someone more compliant.
A commenter here pointed to a Wall Street Journal article from a while back which explains where the demands being made by the Trump administration are coming from: Columbia’s own faculty:
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.
We’ve been told over the past week that the trustees are not going to court, but agreeing to all demands because they believe that if they don’t do so, the university will lose not just the \$400 million, but also all Federal grants (in the billions), as well as Pell Grants and other student loans, and visas for its foreign students. Their belief is that the Trump administration has the power to effectively destroy the university if they don’t cave-in to everything (or even if they try and go to court).
The demands being made clearly are not coming from Trump, it appears that they are coming from this group of seven Columbia faculty members. Geskin and the six others who are behind this need to immediately call off the attack on their university, or take responsibility and make clear publicly that they are willing to destroy the university if they don’t get what they want.
Update: The bogus “antisemitism” attack has been such a success at damaging Columbia and giving Trump’s people control of the institution that they’re now moving on to doing the same thing to Harvard. Hopefully the trustees at Harvard have more willingness to stand up for principle and go to court to fight Fascism than the ones at Columbia.
This development is hardly a surprise given the Columbia administration publicly committing to one course of action with the government and privately suggesting that it was going to violate the terms of the agreement. Our administrators have gotten so used to violating or ignoring laws (e.g. Prop 209 in California or SFFAI v Harvard) that it did not even occur to them that they should not be broadcasting their intent to violate agreements. It is indeed this kind of blatant disregard for law that has landed academia in the political crosshairs
So after my first comment and your reply, I looked into endowment policies and constraints, and indeed, as you pointed out, it’s extremely difficult to utilize profits in a unilateral dispersed manner.
The question now is: does the university stand up for what it knows is right (maybe it doesn’t know 🤷), risking the destruction of the university and the livelihood of many academics? My emotional feeling is yes, but of course, I’m not the one affected, and I say so from behind a keyboard and screen.
There are examples of universities resisting overreaching policy and bullying, only to end up losing much of their luster and reputation. History books do remember they were on the right side of things—maybe just not people.
Which universities lost much of their reputation by resisting bullying?
Attendee,
The description of the zoom call I was given by several people who attended was not that Armstrong said she would violate terms of the agreement, but rather that she was correcting press reports saying that the university had given to all demands. She was pointing to the exact language of the proposed agreement explaining why it was different than what was demanded, and what the university’s interpretation of the language and how it would be applied was.
Given the utter lawlessness and endless lies of our new dictator and those that surround him, accusing Armstrong of being a law breaker in this case is rather rich.
John,
Not really in the US but Goethe University Frankfurt in 1930s Germany was purged for resisting Nazification; intellectual core exiled; prestige lost for long time. Similar thing happen with University of Cape Town in 1980s, South Africa) opposed apartheid and heavily penalized and became less attractive for researchers.
Peter,
It would be interesting to read the actual transcript rather than go by media reports of the discussion. I expect that the WSJ has seen the actual transcript and I am going by their report:
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/columbia-trump-faculty-meetings-38a65fff
There seems to be two issues – with regards to policies on masks and the meaning of academic receivership. I can see why there might have been ambiguity in the “discussions” between the Trump administration and Columbia on receivership (is it merely control over hiring of lecturers, or does it extend into setting curriculum?). But, when it comes to masks, I dont see much room for ambiguity – either protesters are allowed to be masked, or they are not. Which is it? There would appear to be an inconsistency between Armstrong’s positions.
I have little interest in defending the Trump administration. However, I am greatly interested in our academic leadership developing spine and restoring credibility to the academic enterprise.
Attendee,
I agree about that there is a serious spinelessness problem here, but it is in the unwillingness to resist the illegal behavior of our new Fascist dictatorship (and their allies on the campus).
About masks. I have no idea what was said on that topic at the Zoom meetings. Read though the text of what the university agreed to. It was not a blanket “no masks”. The language is
“face masks or face coverings are not allowed on our campuses for the purpose of concealing one’s identity in the commission of violations of University policies or state, municipal or federal laws. ”
and
“All individuals who engage in protests or demonstrations, including those who wear face masks or face coverings, must, when asked, present their University identification to the satisfaction of a University Delegate or Public Safety officer.”
This makes explicit that participants in protests or demonstrations that are not illegal can wear masks. It is at the university’s discretion to decide that in a specific circumstance someone may be asked to remove the mask to identify themselves.
Some context for the mask issue. There is an organized effort by multiple groups to attend any anti-Israel demonstration, photograph the faces of everyone who attends, use facial recognition software to identify people, then add their names to a campaign to destroy their lives. In particular, right now, names are being sent by these people to the Trump administration to demand that they take action, especially imprisonment and deportation of non-US citizens (including green card holders).
Since last spring there have been very few and small anti-Israel demonstrations on campus. At the one or two of these I observed, most of the participants were using keffiyehs to cover their faces, precisely because of what I explained above. This was even before the imprisonments and deportations started. The intent behind this “no mask” rule is to ensure that almost no one will ever participate in an anti-Israel demonstration on campus.
This policy is not ambiguous. I don’t know what the president said about it, but I doubt she said that the intention was to violate it. Likely what she did do was to explain that claims like yours that the policy was now “no masks” were not correct, pointing to the text of what had been agreed to.
Expressing no opinion here, just pointing out that:
The March 13th letter from the GSA, Dept of Education and HHS to Columbia University asks for something about masks something a little different from what Columbia University announced.
The March 13th letter demands that masks be banned except for health or religious reasons and that any masked individual must wear their Columbia ID on the outside of their clothing. It points out that Columbia’s Irving Medical Center already has this policy.
What Columbia has announced is:
https://president.columbia.edu/content/fulfilling-our-commitments
“All individuals who engage in protests or demonstrations, including those who wear face masks or face coverings, must, when asked, present their University identification to the satisfaction of a University Delegate or Public Safety officer.”
Leftist Students and Faculty: We’d sooner burn universities to the ground than allow them to remain safe for the hated Zionist Jews, the baby-killing demons of the earth. We will disrupt their classes, bar them from student activities, smash their Hillel centers, take over campus buildings and quads, and chant for Hezbollah and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to eradicate them entirely. We’ll do all this because we’ve so thoroughly learned the lessons of the Holocaust.
Trump Administration: Burn universities to the ground, you say? What a coincidence! We’d love nothing more than to do exactly that. Happy to oblige you.
Leftist Students and Faculty: You fascist scum. We meant “give us what we want,” not “call our bluff”! Was it the campus Zionists who ratted us out to you?
Trump Administration: We don’t answer to you and we’re cutting your funding, effective immediately. Actually, since you don’t have much funding to speak of, we’ll just cut any university funding whatsoever that we can reach. Cancer studies. Overhead on NIH grants. Student aid. Fellowships. Whatever universities use to keep the lights on. The more essential it is, the longer it took to build, the more we’ll enjoy the screams of anguish as we destroy it in a matter of weeks.
Leftist Students and Faculty: This then is the end. But if our whole little world goes up in flames, at least we’ll all die having never given up on our most fundamental moral principle: the eradication of the State of Israel and the death of its inhabitants.
Sane majorities at universities, including almost everyone in STEM: [don’t get a speaking part in this play. They’ve already bled out on the street, killed in the crossfire]
The clear solution here is to move non-campus issue protests off campus to public spaces where there are clear time and place and behavior laws that can be enforced.
There are zero good arguments for why a college campus should be trying to operate political protests and destroying themselves over what amount to political arguments manifesting as positions on what should protest rules should be.
Scott,
The “Far-left students and faculty” who are not imprisoned in a Louisiana jail are invisible on campus, in the past few months have only managed to mount a few very small demonstrations outside the gates. Doxxing people and throwing a small number of them in prison turns out to do a very good job of making almost everyone shut up.
On Friday the president was fired because although she and the trustees had given in to just about all the demands for how to purge the university of “antisemitism” a dean or chair didn’t think she was doing enough so went to the Free Press and to Trump’s people. The new president is a figurehead whose only job is to take orders from Trump’s people and those collaborating with them.
You have lost your mind and now live in a far-right fantasy land. I’m extremely disappointed that you’ve completely ignored efforts I and others here at Columbia have made to explain to you what really is going on. Instead you insist on inhabiting a fanatic’s fever-dream.
Diogenes,
What you ask for has already happened. There have been virtually no protests on the Columbia campus in recent months. The only protests have been small and held outside the campus gates, under the watchful eye of the NYPD.
This is not only true for student groups, but even for mainstream faculty groups. Last week when the Columbia AAUP chapter held a “vigil” to protest the university cave-in to Trump demands, they did not do this on the campus, but outside the gates.
Peter,
Thank you for the sobering coverage of the events at Columbia. I’m concerned at your willingness to reply to every deranged moron who presents a ridiculous theory about what exactly happened there.
I’m actually a student at Case Western Reserve University, and I’ve been closely following our own political landscape as we experience a similar but much less high-profile version of these events. We now have various guidelines for what exactly makes a student protest “approved” by the administration, and our president recently announced that the office of DEI has been shuttered and replaced with an “office of campus enrichment and engagement”, so as to avoid various buzzwords that bring scrutiny from The Powers That Be.
My question to you is- how will this new paradigm affect other colleges going forward? I’m personally already seeing a chilling effect on students who don’t want to endanger future career prospects for protests unlikely to achieve anything, but do you think American universities will truly submit to the Trump Administration’s political whims, or will they simply paint an appearance of having done so?
Artemy Burakh,
I want to reassure you that the great majority of the lunatic comments I get about Columbia are deleted, I rarely take time to respond to them.
About the future, I have no idea what’s going to happen here at Columbia next week, much less more long-term. An important factor will be whether there is effective resistance to what Trump and his collaborators are trying to do. All I know is that the Columbia trustees and administration have thoroughly given up, and that resistance of any kind on the campus is now pretty much nonexistent.
Personally I’m trying to do my part, by spending time I should be spending thinking about twistors instead trying to better understand what is going on here and writing about it on the blog. Looking forward, based on my current understanding of the situation, it’s difficult to see how I can happily teach here after this semester ends, so am looking into moving up previous plans to retire in a few years from my Columbia position.
Peter, your university’s antisemitism task force — formed with no Trump involvement — produced a harrowing report last year filled with specific incidents that added up to a pretty compelling case for Jewish and Israeli students (unless anti-Zionist) to want to steer clear of Columbia. If your position requires condemning all of your colleagues on that task force as liars, fanatics, and snitches, then that seems to me like an excellent way to lose this battle and alienate most of those who would otherwise be your allies.
The “snitches” part seems especially troubling in its wider implications: did Columbia’s future really depend on it not leaking to the wider world that its president was saying something to the faculty wildly different from what she said to the government? If so, how stable do you imagine that was ever going to be?
I continue to believe that most academics, including at Columbia, are reasonable people, capable of holding multiple thoughts in their heads at the same time — for example, that the violent, lawless effort to “de-Zionify” Columbia is or was a real civil rights problem, BUT ALSO, the Trumpers have gleefully seized on that effort as a pretext for a broad crackdown on academia that will ultimately be vastly worse. You’re allowed to say both! Alas, the more I read your posts aggressively denying the reality of any antisemitism problem, going so far as to call your own colleagues liars for saying otherwise, the more I see that there really is a hard core of denialism — people who’d sooner sacrifice academia, just hand it over to the monsters eager to destroy it, than acknowledge any mistakes on their side that helped put them in this situation.
Scott,
I’m not going to address the mountain of lies and misinformation about what happened at Columbia last spring. Your feverish description of the situation as
“We’d sooner burn universities to the ground than allow them to remain safe for the hated Zionist Jews, the baby-killing demons of the earth. We will disrupt their classes, bar them from student activities, smash their Hillel centers, take over campus buildings and quads, and chant for Hezbollah and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to eradicate them entirely.”
coming after my previous efforts to provide you accurate information about what has happened at Columbia makes clear this is a waste of time. You need not facts but a therapist.
I will continue to discuss here what is happening here (and elsewhere) now:
1. People are being dragged off the streets in a Gestapo-like manner and imprisoned, for doing often nothing more than writing an op-ed critical of Israel. No one dares say anything anti-Israel publicly for fear they will be next.
2. The leadership of the university has completely caved in to your side. They have fired the president for insufficient zeal in fighting “antisemitism”, refuse to say a word in support of disappeared students, refuse to go to court to do anything about the canceled grants.
You’ve got what you wanted, why aren’t you happy? Instead you’re still ranting about your obsessive fantasies of people smashing Hillel centers.
Seriously, leave us the fuck alone and go get professional help.
Peter,
I have been an admirer of your blog since its beginning. I know how you have gone to great lengths to be nonjudgmental and to keep the focus on the science and not the personalities. I know how hard it must be for you to get involved in the current issues at Columbia, along with the great stress your comments must have subjected you to. But, it is important (maybe even more important than twistors), so, please, continue to keep us informed of how this plays out at Columbia.
It has been both fascinating and disturbing to see, displayed on your blog, two examples of individuals who, presumably because they have been the subject of personal “woke” attacks (Scott Aaronson and Alessandro Strumia), have such dramatically warped perspectives on the dangers facing the University. Although I have never suffered such personal attacks, I would hope that I could distinguish what is basically an extreme limit of what must be tolerated in a free speech society, versus the financial weight of the entire government acting as a censor on university behavior. For example, however virulent the antisemitism speech and words, etc., anyone with a reasonable perspective should recognize that this is coming from a protest group with zero institutional or government support or power and clearly never with the ability to “burn universities to the ground”. To somehow put the “Far-left students and faculty” on an equal footing with the “Trump Administration” as threats to the University is ridiculous and absurd. And, to see this view expressed by someone who has personally thrived (despite the “woke” attacks) because of the university is, as you mildly put it, really, really depressing.
Of course I’m not happy right now, as with or without “coddling of Hamas supporters” as their convenient pretext, I don’t want the Trumpists to destroy American academia any more than you want it!
Having said that, while I’m not normally half this confident, in this instance I’m perfectly happy for people to read your comments, read my comments, and decide for themselves who seems more unhinged and in need of help.
Scott: you are unhinged.
David,
Thanks! Yes, this is stressful, but I think important.
In understanding what’s going on, I think it’s a good idea to try and keep separate (although there is some overlap) the woke/anti-woke and Palestinian/Israeli conflicts. Trump and his people are trying to use both to destroy those institutions that oppose him. I think most people at Columbia were expecting him to come after us on the woke/anti-woke issues, where, unfortunately, I think the university has some things to answer for.
What was very clever of Trump’s people was to sidestep (for now?) woke/anti-woke, and go for a different issue, one where feelings were much more intense and irrational, so much so that otherwise completely sane people like Scott have lost their minds.
Before Oct. 7, 2023 the long, brutal and horrific story of the Israeli/Palestinian struggle had long ago led to a polarized situation where each side could point to atrocities of the other and justify extreme behavior in defense of their side. The Oct. 7 murders of Israeli civilians, followed by the wholesale killing of civilians in Gaza made everything 10 times worse. Both sides felt that they needed to bring the fight home to wherever they lived, in particular to the Columbia campus.
The Columbia administration did an excellent job under extremely difficult circumstances in keeping the two sides physically apart and making sure no one got hurt. The battle on both sides was conducted with a blizzard of lies in the information space, where the university decided not to play a role in trying to fight the lies. Most of what people are sure happened here at Columbia didn’t actually happen.
With the choice by a subgroup of the students to abandon camping on a lawn and physically take over a building, the university had no choice but to call in the NYPD to clear the building and the lawn.
That was the end of that part of the story. Right after that the university kept the campus as closed as possible, did everything it could to stop protests from reigniting. I left campus for a trip when the occupation started, by the time I came back mid-May the campus was very quiet and it has remained so since then (a couple exceptions you could point to involved small numbers of people and a very limited time).
Since that time though, there’s been a continuing vigorous campaign to paint the university as “antisemitic” and to demand severe punishment of those who participated in the demonstrations and occupation (after all, they are “terrorists”). This campaign successfully learned from the earlier weaponization of accusations of racism and misogyny and applied these lessons to weaponize accusations of antisemitism. This campaign was having a lot of success, the pro-Palestinian side was defeated and on the run, and then Trump took office.
That’s when things here, and everywhere, got ten times worse…
Scott,
I’ve read Peter’s comments, and I’ve read your comments, and I have decided that you seem unhinged and in need of help.
A perspective from a faculty member here at Columbia that is different from Scott’s or Peter’s. First, I do not think it is accurate to say things have been quiet or normal here this year. There have been multiple incidents that have happened *within* the locked down gates of Columbia/Barnard this academic year. A non-complete list:
1.On the first day of classes Alma Mater was defaced with red paint in the center of campus.
2.A very large and chaotic protest by protestors and counter protestors on October 7th which was loud enough to interfere with my class.
3.An incident where TAs in Astronomy gave an assignment based on Gaza (https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/01/28/university-condemns-insertion-of-political-views-in-astronomy-course-syllabus/)
4.On the first day of classes this semester protestors broke into a class, disrupted it and handed out flyers deemed bad enough even by faculty who support the protests to condemn it. This led to the relocking of all campus buildings (although who knows what that helps) and the expulsion of 3 students.
5.In response to the expulsion of the students involved in incident #4, students took over the Barnard library and occupied it for several hours. The lock down of the building prevented students from entering and in some cases going to classes/recitations.
6.A repeat of the take over at Barnard the next week where again some pretty objectionable flyers were handed out. This led to the arrest of several students and in one case the attempted deportation of one of the students.
There have been other incidents. Have things been quieter than last year? Yes, they have been, but I feel frustrated that the university has still not developed a means of properly dealing with this. One can view a university as a micro civil society. A society should want to allow maximum freedom within bounds that enable all its members to thrive and (in the case of a university) learn. It seemed to me the way to do this was clear from the beginning but for whatever reason was never invoked. The way is:
1.Clearly defined “time place and manner” rules for protest. These define the sanctioning of protests by groups registering their protest, where and when protest can take place, and the like.
2.Well-defined punishment for violation of said rules. This could be a 1st strike, 2nd strike, 3rd strike set of escalating sanctions so as not to be arbitrary and punitive.
3.The actual carrying out of (2) in an objective manner regardless of the speech involved.
4.To do 1-3 one needs a public safety cohort that can actually carry it out-Columbia’s specifically cannot as their contract does not allow it.
My feeling is this would have made the situation here far better and created a far more inclusive learning environment than we still have. In fact, we had (far from perfect) “time place and manner” rules that the Senate let laps during the protests which was a big mistake in my mind. Why we let these rules (which were being considered three presidents ago) fall to the Trump administration to force on us and more in a worse way was a major failing.
Would I prefer the situation as it was last year over to being lorded over by a fascist administration? Absolutely! Would I prefer it to having students disappeared? More than absolutely. Would I prefer it to having my grant funding cut off? Sure. But the fact that we have an administration hell-bent on not only destroying the country but also my university does not absolve Columbia for its inability in enacting obvious ways to balance free speech with a functioning “civil society.”
Dave,
Thanks for the detailed and informative comment. I was aware of most of the incidents you mention, although not all. In particular 2 and 4 were what I was referring to by “(a couple exceptions you could point to involved small numbers of people and a very limited time.”) I intentionally was not saying anything about events on the Barnard campus, partly because they’re a separate institution with a separate administration and separate relations to the Trump administration (I’ve heard nothing about Trump attacks on Barnard, but maybe I’m just not informed).
Some of what you list (somebody throwing red paint on alma mater, a small number of people distributing objectionable leaflets, someone adding a few sentences about Gaza to lab notes) involves extremely small numbers of people and had very little effect on anyone’s life. There always has been and always will be a small number of people doing this sort of thing, but they’re a minor annoyance.
People on both sides of this conflict want to fight it out on our campus. I’ll stand by my claim that the serious large scale problems we had up until May 2024 are gone. It’s not clear to me that the remaining problems are of enough significance to require great attention to new and better disciplinary processes.
I notice that you’re not listing the obvious examples of problematic behavior on the other side (Shai Davidai, Betar and other groups doxing and campaigning to get students deported, online harassment). The university finally on March 12 put out a new policy about this, which in itself indicates this was something serious going on that they have not had the right tools to address.
Seems best to me to not turn problems of student discipline at this level to the Deans and not turn them into a hot-button locus for those who want to fight the Palestinian/Israeli war here.
Aside from formal financials and a separate set of trustees and president, Barnard is a college of Columbia and Barnard students get Columbia diplomas (and the students expelled after the second library take over were almost all formally Columbia students). I agree with you-doxxing should indeed be part of policy with clearly defined punishment. My feeling is that we have had (if you include Barnard) 3 large scale flareups and one very visible one (the class disruption). This is better than last year, but to me this really should not still be happening as it is not so difficult to put in place the structures to deal with this without quashing free expression.
If I’m unhinged and in need of psychiatric help, then so is the entire membership of Columbia’s antisemitism task force, as I’ve done nothing more extreme than try to balance my fear of Trump with my fear of what the task force concluded in its 120-page report. I just want to be clear and explicit that this is the position of Peter, “zzz,” and “AJewishGuy”: that the Columbia faculty chosen by Columbia to interview students about their experience with antisemitism and write up what they learned are all liars, fanatics, or insane.
(Meantime, I’ve been getting emails today from readers of Peter’s, either afraid to comment here or unable to get through the moderation, thanking me for what I said.)
One other thing-with respect to “Seems best to me to not turn problems of student discipline at this level to the Deans and not turn them into a hot-button locus for those who want to fight the Palestinian/Israeli war here.”
I feel that we have to have rules and someone has to enforce them. All societies have to have them for good reasons as much as we would want to be free to express our views. The problem I see here is that we need to create, both legally and ethically, an environment where students do not feel threatened or harassed. You and I might not think these students “should” feel harassed, but that is not up to us. I can tell you for sure that it isn’t just right-wing Jewish students who feel uncomfortable when something like the class break-in happened. I have talked to many students in my department who are not really political who felt uncomfortable enough to hide outward signs of their Jewishness (like a Chai or Star of David) even this year. I don’t want to tell them their problems are in their head, and I don’t think I should. Instead, I think there is a clear enough way to have real rules in place that allow the campus to feel free enough that one can protest as one wishes, while not having an environment where some students feel hostility. Note that during last year’s protests 40% or so of polled students felt that Columbia had both an Antisemitism *and* Islamophobia problem! Dealing with this takes rules and structures that someone has to enforce which I do not think have to be draconian but do have to be objectively followed, even if you think things are quite now.
Scott,
For the n’th time, where n is becoming a very large number, I am not going to take the time to go one by one through everything any one said to that committee about what happened last year and before, and argue about what’s true, what’s the meaning of slogan X, what’s an exaggeration, what’s a lie. You’re a fanatic, and arguing with fanatics about their obsessions is a huge waste of time.
I am willing to discuss with anyone what the situation is now. Next comment will be to Dave, who I appreciate is engaging with that issue.
“I just want to be clear and explicit that this is the position of Peter, zzz, and AJewishGuy”
no its not.
i have read your blog, this blog and have evaluated my opinion based on that.
oh, my, you have posted again. take a breath. read what you wrote. its nonsense.
i dont live near Columbia, neither do you.
I thank you for writing on this issue.
To Scott and anyone else who does not understand why they are being perceived as unhinged:
You appear to be conflating any critique, no matter how peaceful (or themselves Jewish as I have encountered plenty of Jews who protest Israel), with belief that the other side is full of baby eating demons. That’s not just straw-manning, that is, ironically enough, demonization. If that is not your intent, I strongly suggest toning things down and apologizing, because in this kind of discussion, intent does not matter. You have contributed to the us vs. them mentality, whether you meant to or not that is how it has been read by numerous people, and added to the volatility of our de-stabilizing society. Maybe the idea of asking forgiveness feels unthinkable, maybe it feels humiliating, but I must assure you in the strongest terms that it would only make me and many others think the best of you, not the worst. It takes the deepest kind of strength to admit you fucked up, even if you are convinced you only fucked up a little bit, that’s still something.
If you are genuinely convinced that is impossible for someone to critique someone else without thinking the absolute worst of them, then I genuinely feel sorry for you. You must be in so much pain and fear all the time, that even I, who wonder if I will live past the next four years, would not wish that upon anyone. Please understand that people on the ‘other side’ do care about you, for you are a fellow human being, and merely wish that you would stop.
I do not think you are a demon. As an atheist, I do not think either side is full of demons. Many protestors genuinely just want the war to end and do not know how else to go about it. Thrown paint and the like isn’t worth ruining someone’s life over. Deep down you know this. I understand that you are hurting or scared and feel the need to lash out, and for that I am sorry.
Dave,
I think where we disagree is that you think that there is some set of rules and an enforcement mechanism that will satisfy people better than what we have now. I don’t believe in a world where there are rules everyone agrees with and everyone agrees when the rules are violated and what the punishments should be. What I see in the argument over rules is too many people who just want another excuse to fight with the other side and destroy their enemies. The Fascist dictatorship trying to destroy our institution is gleefully exploiting this and we should be fighting with them, not over the rules. I’m extremely angry that some people seem to think it is all right to bring the Fascist dictatorship into our community because it will help them get what they want in the ugly fight that obsesses them.
Until the past week or two when I realized this is what is being used to tear our institution to pieces, I had a rigorous policy of personally never publicly saying anything about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. To bring this up is to open the box of a horrendous moral horror that people on both sides are legitimately upset about to the point of mental illness. No good can come of it.
But, the people who wanted this fight got what they wanted, with the result that our community has been torn apart and we’re at the mercy of the Fascists exploiting this to destroy us. We are going to have to live with the fact that our community includes people from both sides whose families were murdered by the other side and there are very raw emotions everywhere. Those who identify with the Israelis and those who identify with the Palestinians who want to fight can easily find hostility and hostile people from the other side to fight with. What we need to do is to stop the fighting, including telling the Scott Aaronsons of the world who want to come here and fight that they should fuck off.
Scott,
No, that is not my position at all – I’m not sure how you could arrive at that conclusion from my previous one-sentence comment that didn’t even mention the antisemitism task force. It reflects very poorly on your arguments when you hallucinate nasty opinions from people who disagree with you. It also suggests that reasoned discussion would be a waste of time with you, as Peter already said.
Peter,
Where I might agree is that at this stage rules may have a far lesser effect than the would at the start. I also agree that rules don’t cure all problems. But we still don’t even have any “time place manner” rules for protest and assembly. A majority of universities do. We don’t have a public safety that can do anything, like many universities do, etc. These things might have had a more useful effect 15 months ago but they’d still help a lot.
Dave,
If you can find a way to come up with a better set of rules and enforcement mechanisms that both sides can agree on, through a process that keeps out those for whom this is a righteous battle against their enemies as well as keeping out the Fascist dictatorship from the process, that’s fine with me.
My own perspective is that in talking to people about this the past couple weeks I’ve been hearing way, way too much “sure the Fascist dictatorship is bad, but having them here now running our university and holding hostage our money is an opportunity to make some of the changes I’ve always thought were a good idea.”
Most depressingly, I’m having trouble convincing myself that this isn’t the attitude of a lot of the trustees, part of the explanation of why they won’t fight back. I’d love to be wrong about this.
Oh I totally understand this. I don’t think the rules should be agreed upon by “sides.” This should be a politically neutral set of rules about allowed guidelines for when and where you protest and how to enforce punishment for violations. My views on this long predate this fascist regime and are informed by both what some other universities have had in place for a long time, and what happened in ‘68. I was one of several who discussed this with administrators here including our president last Spring. My frustration is that while I know some of this has been under consideration for a long time, essentially none of it has been carried out. I suspect because, as you might guess, it wouldn’t be popular with some faculty and because the entire system (4 presidents in less than 2 years) has been one of attempting to put out local fires. In the end I think we’d still suffer under the heel of Trump but I think we would have been better off. Water under the bridge I suppose.
Btw I guess that makes me sound like some you have talked to, except I don’t see this now as a good opportunity for anything….the point is it was always the right thing to do as far as I see.
Dave,
What’s really been upsetting me has been the decision of the trustees not to go to court over the illegal taking of the grants, so in particular when I hear this kind of argument in the context of trying to justify the cave-in.
The latest news is that they’re trying to do the same thing to Harvard. I’m hoping the Harvard trustees, unlike ours, will fight this in court.
Unfortunately fighting in court is most likely a losing battle. Best case scenario is bad-money is frozen for a long time while this is adjudicated. Then you need courts to not have a single judge rule in favor of the administration all the way up the chain to the SC which has 6 arch conservatives. I hope I am wrong but the prognosis for that line of defense is not good.
Maybe. But I haven’t heard a compelling argument for not doing this at the same time as trying to negotiate, other than:
1. We’re scared he’ll hurt us more
2. We’re fine doing what the Fascists want anyway
My paraphrase of the far-leftists’ position was actually a toned-down, more milquetoast version of what CUAD (Columbia University Apartheid Divest) has loudly declared. They’ve been 100% clear and consistent that they want, not merely the end of the current war, but the end of Israel, and intifada against “Zionists” everywhere on earth. And, as hard as it might be for well-intentioned people at Columbia to believe, CUAD has largely succeeded over the past 18 months at making itself the central face of Columbia to the rest of the US—with the thinking being that, if the administration and faculty won’t stand up to CUAD, it must be because they basically agree with CUAD.
More broadly, any fair-minded observer will note that I’ve simply done my best to explain my position, actually in much calmer language than you’d typically find nowadays from mainstream campus Jewish organizations, while again and again, it’s the “all claims of antisemitism are fascist lies” side that’s resorted to abusive and emotional language against me (“fuck off,” “get help,” “right-wing fanatic”). This observation is what makes me confident and unafraid, no matter how many names I get called.
Scott,
CUAD the central face of Columbia? You have absolutely no idea what is going on here. Stop reading whatever lunatic internet sites you’re spending your time on. You’ll probably do better with Fox News.
Now please go and start bothering the anti-semites at Harvard.
The practical argument is that the administration won’t negotiate with a university that is suing it for its illegal actions. It has to be one or the other. I think that is clear. It is not a statement of what I would do, especially morally, but it seems an obvious reality. The situation is different from law firms being attacked by Trump. In that case I don’t see why they all don’t fight this in court because the leverage the administration has is far less. In the case of universities, the administration can essentially close the university by simply shutting down all federal funding. In the case all federal funds are stopped the university won’t even be able to pay faculty salaries for long, and as I said the fight will be a long and perilous one in the courts.
Dave
Suing the party you are negotiating with is perfectly normal, and often the only way you can get leverage in your bargaining. By your argument Columbia has zero leverage and no choice but to turn the keys over to Trump and let him run the place.
Yes-because Trump is not normal. And yes, when the person you are negotiating with is Trump and all of your funding comes from the federal government you have no leverage. I think this is pretty clear. The difference from the usual case is the administration has absolutely nothing to lose if they are sued other than what was already happening. They themselves don’t lose money or incur injury. This is why the law firms are doing the binary-sue or negotiate, not both.
Hi Peter,
Just curious but what do you think the long term implications of this will be on the university system in the US? I saw a recent Nature article that 75% of US scientists are considering leaving the country (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00938-y). What is the sentiment among the faculty? What have you heard from colleagues abroad?
All of this is extremely disturbing. This looks like the slow destruction of the American university system in real time. Göttingen comes to mind.
LongTimeLurkerFirstTimeCommentator,
Among my colleagues in the math department I don’t know of others than myself who have been thinking much about leaving the country (more of a long-term plan in my case, since I currently have family reasons to not be away from New York for very long).
The situation here is changing rapidly, and my understanding of it keeps changing. I have no idea where this will end up. Most people I think are hoping the university will make some changes to address its nonexistent “antisemitism” problem, then Trump’s people will give us back the money and go away and start bothering someone else (Harvard next?). Maybe all Trump cares about is publicly demonstrating that he can do whatever he wants, including replacing the president of Columbia. Or maybe he really does want to completely destroy the institution. I guess we’ll find out in coming months.
For pure mathematicians grants aren’t so crucial, and the NSF has not yet been hit with major cuts. That may happen soon though. Fields with a lot of people thinking of leaving are experimental sciences where grant money is crucial, so if you want to continue your work in the face of grants going away, you need to start looking elsewhere.