There was a standing room only Arts and Sciences faculty meeting today here at Columbia, in which the acting president Claire Shipman spoke for a while and then took questions from faculty members. The questions on the whole were challenging her on exactly the issues I’ve been repeatedly bringing up in these blog entries (why the lies about “antisemitism”? why won’t you go to court to challenge the illegal use of dictatorial powers? why won’t you do what Tufts did to support its student who was grabbed off the street?). Shipman did not provide much of an answer to these questions, or any new information about what is going on in the struggle between the university and the Trump administration, but at least she heard these questions loud and clear.
Several questioners very directly confronted her about why the university will not in any way support pro-Palestinian students like Mohammed Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, unlike the way Tufts has gone to court to support Rumeysa Ozturk. She was directly challenged to say the names of these students and wouldn’t do so (interestingly, the provost, who spoke afterwards, did make a point of saying their names). The only answer she gave as to why she and the trustees won’t say anything was that Columbia is under a lot more scrutiny than Tufts and they felt they were protecting Columbia’s students by doing what they are doing.
Given what has happened to these students, it’s hard to see how support from Columbia would make their situation worse, so I guess one must interpret the “protecting students” claim as an argument that if they supported Khalil or Mahdawi, ICE would be arresting even more people. It’s hard not to look at this and conclude that the true motivations are that expressing any support for any particular individual with pro-Palestinian views would enrage both the internal and external pro-Israeli forces attacking the university, as well as the Trump panel they are trying to negotiate with (Shipman repeated her earlier public characterization of that panel as acting in good faith). Unfortunately another possibility is that at least some of the trustees won’t defend Khalil and Mahdawi because they’re happy to have them disappeared.
There was a lot of discussion about “changing the narrative”, since everyone here is well aware that Columbia is now the most reviled educational institution on the planet. Some faculty pointed out to Shipman that the way to change the narrative would be to change the way the leadership is speaking and acting.
In related “everyone hates Columbia” news, the New York Times published today I’m a Columbia Professor. Here’s the Really Disheartening Part of This Mess by Matthew Connelly. Connelly tries to defend the university and its faculty against a lot of the accusations being made, specifically by the current campaign to boycott the university. He accurately points to a lot of ways in which such accusations have been unfair, but I think he does make one big mistake, writing
Boycott organizers insisted Columbia was “fully capitulating to the conditions imposed by the Trump administration.” In fact, many of the actions the Columbia administration announced on March 21 are similar to those originally proposed last August by more than 200 faculty members.
I don’t know what August 2024 proposal he’s referring to. There is a February 2025 letter from about 200 faculty calling for specific pro-Israel changes in policy very similar to the Trump panel demands. There are about 7,000 faculty at Columbia of which likely only a small minority agree with the cave-in to these demands. Associating the faculty here with the bad decisions of the trustees is not going to “change the narrative” for the faculty here but make it worse.
In happier news, Harvard’s decision to fight back and not go the Columbia route is very much “changing the narrative”. Rupert Murdoch’s editorial board at the Wall Street Journal has always been relentlessly devoted to attacking Democrats and liberals and defending the Republican side of all issues, even as this side descends into MAGA craziness. Today their main editorial is Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard: Many of his demands on the school exceed his power under the Constitution. It ends with exactly the argument the Columbia administration has been unwilling to make publicly for fear of alienating the Trump people they are negotiating with:
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing by demanding Harvard accede to “viewpoint diversity.”
The Administration is also overstepping its authority by imposing sweeping conditions on funds that weren’t spelled out by Congress. The Justices held in Cummings (2022) that “if Congress intends to impose a condition on the grant of federal moneys, it must do so unambiguously” to ensure the recipient “voluntarily and knowingly accept[ed] the terms.”
Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose.
Also supporting Harvard today is Scott Aaronson who was fine with the Trump administration taking Columbia’s grants away to force the university to adopt the policies he favors. Quoted on Scott’s blog is something everyone should be thinking about:
“If you ever wondered what you would do in Germany in February of 1933, you’re doing it now.”
In particular, Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for the Communists…” accurately described the situation in 1933, as the new dictator came into the universities and removed the Communists (since they were “terrorists”, analogs of current-day pro-Palestinian protestors) and their supposed influence. In 1933, anti-Communists were generally happy to see someone come in and rid their institution of the Communist problem, even if they didn’t otherwise support the new dictatorship.
The difference with 1933 is that we know what happened next, and for us the future is not yet determined.
Update: Today it’s an attack by the Fascists on Harvard from several directions at once: the IRS, international students and civil rights laws. I’m hoping that they’ve made a tactical mistake, by putting the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world in a position such that it had to fight for its survival. Going in to this, Harvard has the support of even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
Update: This website has a story about communications between Mohsen Mahdawi and the Columbia administration in the weeks and months before his arrest. From what I hear, the university is taking some actions to try and help international students whose visas are being canceled, but from everything I have heard (including at the recent faculty meeting) it appears to be university policy not to help in any way pro-Palestinian students facing possible arrest and detention. I’d like to be wrong about this, happy to hear from anyone who knows of any help the administration has given students like Khalid and Mahdawi who are targets of the government.
Why has there not been a greater, more organized banding together of high-profile private universities to act in unison/collaboration against this pernicious encroachment on their operations? Trump seems clearly intending to wear down a few examples until all capitulate, even if he has to take them to the Supreme Court (where he expects to win) to do it.
Shecky R,
Excellent question that I don’t know the answer to. One thing I’ve heard a lot of from the Columbia administration is bitter complaints that when they started coming under this sort of illegal attack, attempts to privately rally support went no where. All the other similar institutions decided to keep quiet and hope that Columbia would bear the brunt of the attack.
The new Harvard situation changes things, I think because the Trump people overreached and made demands on Harvard that were impossible to satisfy (and with what they did to Columbia made clear that satisfying their demands wouldn’t help you anyway). I suspect that at this point an effort is underway privately to coordinate resistance, and that Columbia will join this and “change the narrative”.
Point of fact, I never said that I was “fine with the Trump administration taking Columbia’s grants away to force the university to adopt the policies” that I favor. I said that I believed your colleagues on the task force that Columbia’s antisemitism problem is or was real—a claim that was somehow sufficient, by itself, to send you into fits of rage and personal abuse against me. I also said that I hoped the crisis would quickly be resolved in a way that restored 100% of Columbia’s funding while also ending the abuse of Jewish and Israeli students, disruption of classes, takeover of common areas as “Zionist-free zones,” etc. etc. Obviously that’s not what happened.
We’ve now learned, of course, that the Trumpian crocodile wouldn’t be satisfied with stronger action on antisemitism, but would just keep issuing more and more demands until universities’ intellectual independence was destroyed. You can say “I told you so” if you want. What I said a few weeks ago was: “yes, I fear that will be so.”
Crucially, though, ***it’s only because Columbia capitulated and then the crocodile kept going, that it became common knowledge to everyone, including administrators at other universities, that this crocodile wouldn’t be sated with justified actions on antisemitism, meaning that the only option is to fight in court.***
That’s why, while I salute Harvard’s administration for standing up, I ironically also salute Columbia’s administration for trying to reach an agreement and failing. That needed to happen for us to reach this stage. Otherwise, independent observers would continue to ask “why don’t the universities just make these reasonable-looking reforms and get their funding back?”
If I lived in Germany in 1933, I hope I’d have the presence of mind to say that yes, the Communists are evil and terrifying (as was already known from the experience of Stalin’s USSR), Hitler is correct to fear them, but also Hitler is even more evil, so let’s see if we can tamp down these terrifying oscillations rather than spiralling into one extreme of unspeakable evil as a reaction to the other one.
I remember as a Ph. D. student in the physics department at Columbia in the very late 1960’s and very early 1970’s seeing I. I. Rabi. I also remember a quote attributed to him
“”Mr. President, We are not employees of the university. We are the university.”
With these words, Isidore Rabi, a distinguished faculty member at Columbia University, interrupted Dwight Eisenhower, who had started off a speech by addressing the faculty as “employees of the university.” [At the time, Eisenhower was President of Columbia University.]
I am afraid there are not many present day members of Columbia’s faculty who have what I. I. Rabi had.
I have witnessed over the last 50+ years, the universities becoming more and more like businesses, so I guess now I am afraid too many faculty see themselves as employees. Also I always tenure as giving one the ability to speak one’s mind which seems to be lacking in many faculty for fear, I guess, of repercussions, although exactly what repercussions, I’m not sure.
As an Columbia alum I want to thank you for your updates. I appreciate them very much.
Scott,
Your T Rex/velociraptor/human analogy made pretty clear how you think about this, you explained to me that the T-Rex was needed to deal with the velociraptors.
From what you say about 1933, there’s not much question about what you would have done when they came for the Communists.
Yes, I told you so. Many other people also tried to point out to you the obvious fact that Trump’s people have no interest in actual anti-semitism, that’s never been what this is about. I suppose for some people, having the Columbia trustees behave the way they did and wreck the reputation of the university for nothing was a worthwhile exercise to check that the obvious was true.
As for my rage and personal abuse, I’m not going to apologize. You have no idea what is actually going on here and you had no business attacking me and my institution with bogus antisemitism charges at the moment a Fascist dictator started trying to destroy us. We are in 1933 now and my institution and people around me are bearing the brunt of it. It’s bad enough to have to deal with the endless idiots (e.g the commenters on your blog…) who think Trump is great because they are ignorant fools. You’re very smart and otherwise sensible, so should know better.
James Monroe,
I think if you talk to Columbia faculty members, you’ll find that they’re very much of the opinion that they are the university. There’s a great deal of frustration here now with the trustees, who have made bad choices and wrecked the reputation of the university. Worse, we have no idea what they are doing now, it doesn’t look good. Only hope is that Harvard’s actions will shame them into not doing more bad things.
Peter,
Yet again, we see that all your invective against me hinges on a single claim: that the charge of an atmosphere of fear and intimidation for Jewish and Israeli students at Columbia in late 2023 and continuing through 2024 is entirely bogus. If you’re right, it would strongly suggest not only that Gil Zussman is a liar, but also that Ester Fuchs is a liar, Clemence Boulouque is a liar, Jeremy Dauber is a liar, Rebecca Dobrin is a liar, Deborah Valenze is a liar, and everyone else who put their names to that long, harrowing task force report is a liar. How confident are you? The one witness who you were able to produce for me was an equivocal one.
If the task force was *not* full of liars, fanatics, or dupes, then I can’t see that Columbia, in any way, tarnished its reputation by agreeing to do things that it clearly should have been doing anyway … even if a fascist bully (for his own self-interested reasons) coerced it into doing those things.
And yes, when Communists murder millions of people, it does increase the chance that a Hitler will seize power, in part by promising to protect people from Communists, and then murder tens of millions more. And when a significant fraction of the social science and humanities students and faculty at Columbia see Hamas burn babies alive, starve its own population, throw its internal critics off the roofs of buildings, etc … and then they decide to cheer Hamas with inverted red triangles and cries of “intifada,” that this is what they support, it does increase the chance that fascist goons will seize the opportunity to try to destroy Columbia, *including* all the wonderful things there that the fascists hate. This is, alas, a recurring theme of human history.
Scott,
“a significant fraction of the social science and humanities students and faculty at Columbia see Hamas burn babies alive, starve its own population, throw its internal critics off the roofs of buildings, etc … and then they decide to cheer Hamas with inverted red triangles and cries of “intifada,”
Again, you have no idea at all what is going on at Columbia. You live in a fanatic’s obsessive fever-dream. It’s a mania and there’s no way I can help you.
Peter–thanks for keeping up the blog posts on this. The Trump admin’s attacks against the universities has been horrific. Based on your recent posts, it sounds like the university admin/trustees, did not bow to pressure from the Trump admin; rather, they also wanted to punish the student protestors (presumably to satisfy the demands of donors)? Is that accurate? I’ve read that several of the female protestors were doxxed and subjected to rape and death threats.
For what it is worth, I suspect Scott’s about-face was for pragmatic reasons: when the admin tweeted out “Shalom Mahmoud”, they essentially made the Jewish Zionists the face of the destruction of civil liberties and of the American universities. It’s not hard to see that as something terribly dangerous (pretty much every diaspora community will. On 4/3/25, he still maintained that Trump admin could argue for the deportation for “a few hundred or a few thousand Hamas-supporting radical students” see https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8758#comments (comment #19). The legal and moral justification for this is tenuous at best. Very disturbing to see a scientist argue like this.
LTLFTC,
The overriding concern of the trustees I’m sure is the financial survival of the university. So, they’re doing everything they can to try and appease both the Trump panel and pro-Israel donors. While I suspect that there may be a few trustees happy to see Khalil and Mahdawi imprisoned and deported, most are not happy to see this, but still don’t want to annoy powerful forces by doing anything about it.
To be fair, the whole situation with student losing their visas, going into hiding, getting imprisoned or deported is an extremely difficult one for the university. The university wants to keep following the laws, while the Trump administration violates them with impunity. They are trying to figure out what the university can do while avoiding getting into a high-profile confrontation, in which the Trump people might just double down on the illegality and do even more awful things.
Also to be fair, Scott has blogged about in principle not supporting what the government is doing to these students (although it’s also clear, that like possibly some of our trustees, he’s not unhappy with the result in some cases).
Scott,
“And yes, when Communists murder millions of people, it does increase the chance that a Hitler will seize power, in part by promising to protect people from Communists, and then murder tens of millions more”
I can assure you that this is historically untrue. Hitler ran on a platform based on racism, imperialistic and colonial promises, and social stability, profiting from the shock of WWI humiliation and the double whammy of economic collapse and the insane and utterly devastating austerity measures that followed. He never said to his electorate, “we will protect you from communism” (unless you think that the “electorate” were his industrialist sponsors); he told them, ” We will get you rid of the Jews and make Germany great again. ” The idea that Germans voted for Hitler because they were afraid of “them Commies” was a popular excuse post-WWII to justify their vote, but numbers don’t add up.
Even Mussolini, who conquered power without racial motives (and was popular with Italian Jews until he betrayed them in 1938), didn’t really use the “I will protect you from Commies” card. Again, this is excluding his promises of social stability supported by his financial and industrial/agrarian sponsors (and his foreign supporters, particularly the UK and USA). Still, it was “if you don’t vote for me, the Communists will kill you”; it was more “If you don’t vote for me, the Communists will redistribute wealth in a way you won’t like”. At the beginning, his reforms were of the liberal/pro-market type, but then he switched to state interventionism.
People never vote or support Trump-like types because they want to be protected from some “other”. They do it because they want to oppress the “others”
Also Scott,
“If I lived in Germany in 1933, I hope I’d have the presence of mind to say that yes, the Communists are evil and terrifying (as was already known from the experience of Stalin’s USSR), Hitler is correct to fear them, but also Hitler is even more evil, so let’s see if we can tamp down these terrifying oscillations rather than spiralling into one extreme of unspeakable evil as a reaction to the other one.”
1) In 1933, “fear of Stalin” was “fear of communist reforms and class differences being levelled and industries becoming state-owned”, not “fear of Stalinist violence”, because Stalin’s purges had not yet happened, and much of what was happening in the Soviet Union was unknown. Also, fear of communism was very much fear of “Judeo-Bolschevism”. I know that “Judeo Bolschevism” didn’t exist, but if you lived in 1933 Germany, you would have very much believed it (even a lot of German Jews thought Soviet Jewry was intimately linked with the regime
2) Hitler had no “fear of Stalin”. He feared that Slavs (whatever their political allegiance) would one day demographically overwhelm the population of “white” Europe (and Germany), and he thought that German-speaking people in Slavic countries were “oppressed” and had to be unified. But he despised Stalin and the Soviet regime as hopelessly ineffective and racially “inferior”, so he thought that with the right amount of armaments, he could invade the Soviet Union, exterminate its population and get all that lovely land and nice resources. But he didn’t do that because they were “communists” (actually a lot of Nazi thought they weren’t anymore, but that’s another story). Had Russia been a liberal state, it would have been attacked. Poland was under a semi-fascist, rabidly antisemitic regime that got along very well with Hitler until 1939, but was still invaded.
So the truth is that in 1933 you would had been either a Jew or a anti Nazi opposed, and you may had not liked communism/socialism but you would would had been still imprisoned or killed or forced to exile and loathed Hitler (but thought Soviet Union was the lesser evil). Or you would have been an antisemite or a German nationalist, and you would have thought that Hitler was, at the very least, the lesser evil (but in reality, the majority thought he was right). Not much space for “moral equivalences” or middle ground, I’m afraid. That came after the war, and was mostly bogus btw
So I still don’t see how the retroactive fear of Stalin would justify the extreme measures imposed by Trump.
Luca Signorelli,
Thanks, although I want to discourage further debate here about the details of the role of communism in the history of the 1930s, which is a complicated topic not all that much related to what is going on now. In general, while there are clear parallels between now and 1933 to learn from, luckily it’s also true that the situation now is very different in many ways, giving hope for a different outcome.
LTLFTC: What you call an “about-face,” I call “updating in response to a rapidly evolving situation, while doing my best to explain to everyone the values that guide me.”
I share with other post-WWII liberal-minded people that a huge fraction of the telos of my entire moral worldview is preventing the return of Hitler — and not merely because he murdered most of my extended family. But if you’re serious about that, then there’s also the meta-worry: that you’ll spend your entire life guarding against the return of Hitler from one direction, and then he’ll sneak up on you from the other. So you have to constantly turn your head around.
Luca Signorelli: The Bolsheviks committed horrifying mass murders pretty much immediately on taking power, if not yet on quite the scale of the Holodomor and Stalin’s purges. And when you read Mein Kampf, Hitler does treat what the Bolsheviks did in Russia as the sort of ultimate proof of the horror of “international Jewry.” The idea that this, or anything else, could possibly *justify* Hitler is obscene. But I strongly believe that you can’t effectively fight anyone without first working really, really hard to understand the story they tell themselves, and the same goes for the authoritarians of today.
Peter,
I agree the situation is significantly different, but also Trump’s ideology diverges greatly from 1930s Nazism or fascism, although there are some similarities in political language and methods. I believe that what he is trying to impose is a sort of kleptocratic-oligarchic authoritarian regime, which could cause considerable current and future damage to U.S. democracy and its global role; however, that does not equate to “fascism” per se (not all authoritarian regimes are automatically fascist).
Peter and Scott, I advise you to put this acrimony behind you. Neither of you has anything to gain from it and a lot to lose. Was Columbia’s failed effort to play ball with the administration useful in demonstrating the administration’s bad faith, or was it an abject capitulation? Could be both. Was antisemitism at play in the Gaza war protests or was protest a justified response to war crimes committed by Israel? Again, could be both. Certainly true is that the administration benefits while we bicker. I also advise everyone to go a bit easier on talk of 1930s Europe. If you want illuminating case studies, US history provides them: Jim Crow, revanchist backlashes of the 70s, the Obama-era Tea Party (a small but definite foreshock). If you want comparisons abroad, Latin America and Africa provide many, up to domestic racial caste systems more closely resembling the US’s. About 30s Europe I’ll add just one observation. What Peter says is important: we know what followed Hitler’s rise to power but not what comes next. This is, in fact, good reason to be cautious with the comparison. I’m not suggesting that we forget anything, I’m pointing out that one important example can distract us from others.
Luca Signorelli,
There’s an obvious problem with using the word “Fascism” since I don’t know of a precise definition, and it would be better to have an accurate characterization of what’s going on in terms of the various genres of authoritarianism. But, “kleptocratic-oligarchic authoritarian” is a mouthful, and I’m not sure even accurate as we see new ways of smashing the US democratic and legal system being tried out. We are seeing something new and constantly evolving. I’m not as familiar as I should be with the history of Fascism in Italy, but looking at films of Mussolini, he sure looks and sounds a lot like Trump, so that’s my excuse with going with that word.
Antibellows,
My reason for being hard on Scott for his behavior is not personal (I know and like Scott personally), but that here at Columbia the university is in the middle of a fight for its life, and a large part of what we’re having to fight is bogus accusations of antisemitism, of exactly the sort Scott has been making. Those accusations are given as the legal backing for defunding the university and for dragging our students off the street to prison. They are lies. Scott’s ” a significant fraction of the social science and humanities students and faculty at Columbia…” accusation is an outrageous lie, and it’s exactly the lie being used to attack us (an attack with help coming from others like Scott within the university). Our administration made a horrible mistake early on by not fighting accusations like this, I’m not going to go along with it.