An article at the Observer with the title How Columbia University is tearing itself apart to please Trump claims Columbia’s problems really have been coming from within the house
According to two well-informed sources, members of the board of trustees were in direct communication with Republicans in Congress and, later, the Trump administration, offering information and advice on what demands to make and how to present them. The State Department’s justification for arresting Mahdawi is one of a few examples where a government document ended up closely resembling ideas that originated at Columbia.
One senior administrator, who did not wish to be named, blamed both sides for allowing their passions about the Middle East to sap the university’s ability to stand up to the Trump onslaught. “Whether it was faculty or students or board members who were pursuing their own political agendas,” the administrator said, “they just didn’t care about tarnishing Columbia’s reputation… and it gave Trump so much ammunition. That is the most heartbreaking thing about this whole story.”
The Columbia campus today is a diminished and demoralised place, ringed by security gates and patrolled by large numbers of uniformed police. Professors and students talk about the fear they experience in class, either because a student is reporting to an outside watchdog such as Canary Mission or Accuracy in Media, or they worry someone might. International students tend to say little, if they come to class at all. One long-time humanities professor said she and her colleagues were regularly subjected to doxxing, hate mail and death threats. At the sight of a camera pointed in her direction, she turned around and encouraged others to do the same, for fear that the pictures would end up on some website and lead to further harassment. She did not want to be named for similar reasons.
I don’t know how how accurate the information about the trustees is, but it unfortunately supports my suspicions that a significant part of the story of the cave-in may be Columbia trustees or top administrators who decided to collaborate with the Fascist dictatorship, as a means to pursue their personal agendas. What happened to Katrina Armstrong is hard to understand without this same sort of behavior being involved. I don’t see how the university community can now trust the current president and board of trustees to be negotiating the university’s fate with the Trump panel. The board needs to investigate these accusations, remove any trustees involved, and join Harvard in going to court to resist the attempted illegal exercise of dictatorial powers by the Trump administration instead of negotiating a new cave-in.
