Columbia and the next front in the war on higher education
It's not just punishing protestors - two of the government's demands are far worse.
Boğaziçi University vigil, 14 March 2025
Yesterday I began to track a week’s worth of developments in Trump’s rapidly escalating war against higher education and Middle East Studies and promised more regular posts keeping up with the unfolding crisis. That war dramatically escalated last night with the release of a truly shocking letter to Columbia University from the General Services Administration, Department of Education, and Department of Health and Human Services laying out the government’s demands to begin negotiations over the restoration of federal grants. The government demanded a response to its sweeping set of demands within a week. If Columbia submits to the demands, it would in essence represent a political takeover by the government of one of the country’s leading private universities — and pave the way to its doing the same at the national level.
Most of the government’s demands revolve around Columbia becoming even more punitive towards students who took part in campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza last spring. It wasn’t enough that Columbia called the police onto campus, in a stark betrayal of its responsibility to its students and its academic mission, and has since turned the campus into a locked down security zone. It isn’t enough that Columbia just announced that it was suspending, expelling, and even revoking degrees from student protestors. It isn’t enough that Columbia allowed ICE to arrest Mahmoud Khalil. The Trump administration, in alignment with external advocacy groups who have long targeted Columbia, wants to see even harsher punishments, the empowerment of internal law enforcement to arrest and remove anyone deemed disruptive, the prevention of any form of student activism (“permanent, comprehensive time, place and manner rules”), empowering the Office of the President to suspend or expel students without appeal, "hold student groups accountable,” and ban the wearing of masks.
Based on the performance over the last year, Columbia — and most other universities — will likely happily go along with all that. They have long since made clear their willingness, indeed enthusiasm, to punish and silence students and faculty to appease external advocacy groups, alumni, donors, the media and the federal government. Perhaps they could further appease the government and their external critics by offering to carry out some public executions in the quad… sorry, don’t want to give anyone any ideas.
Two of the government’s demands getting less attention are actually more troubling because of their implications well beyond the Columbia campus. First, the government demands that Columbia “formalize, adopt, and promulgate a definition of antisemitism” - by which it means following President Trump’s Executive Order 13899 which uses the intensely controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism which equates some forms of criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Harvard University shocked those paying attention recently when it caved to pressure and adopted that definition recently as part of its settlement of two federal lawsuits. Between Harvard and Columbia, it seems almost certain that the Trump administration is going to push for this definition to be universally adopted as a condition for federal grants, and potentially even for accreditation and other basic requirements for institutional survival.
Pro-Israel groups have been pushing the IHRA definition for a long time because they want to prevent criticism of Israel. That’s their right, but it’s a major problem for anyone concerned with academic freedom or free speech because equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism — while imposing draconian penalities for alleged antisemitism, redefined to include criticism of Israel — would make research, teaching, and public discussion of Israel, Palestine, and the broader Middle East virtually impossible. It would amount to the manifestly unconstitutional but effective criminalization of both academic and political discussion of anything deemed insufficiently pro-Israel. In the latest round of the Middle East Scholars Barometer, which will be released soon, 73% of the Middle East academic experts we surveyed said the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism would impact their work negatively and only 1% said it would have positive effects. As the Middle East Studies Association warned in 2021:
“By conflating criticism of Zionism and Israel, and advocacy and activism informed by such criticism, with antisemitism, these elements of the “Contemporary Examples” facilitate the delegitimization, and potential sanctioning, of certain political perspectives and those who express them as manifestations of antisemitic bigotry or hatred. These examples and their translation into policy by government agencies and university administrators thus threaten the constitutionally protected right to free speech. By exerting a chilling effect on research and teaching about, as well as public discussion of, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college and university campuses, they also undermine the academic freedom so vital to the mission of our institutions of higher education.”
The second, equally critically disturbing demand in the federal letter is to put the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) Deparment into academic receivership for at least five years. I could talk here about the long, proud history of MESAAS, which has long featured some of the very best Middle East faculty in the world, or about how it has long been the bete noir of critics of Columbia and Middle East Studies — but that really isn’t the point. The idea that the federal government should be able to dictate the internal organization of academic departments at a private university needs to be rejected on principle by everyone involved in higher education. If the Trump administration can force Columbia to put its MESAAS Department into receivership, it will be empowered to do the same with any academic department or center which comes into its crosshairs. Academic freedom and the independence of higher education will be gone.
Adopting the IHRA definition and creating the precedent of the government’s right to intervene in internal academic affairs of private universities will give cover to the same kind of full-scale purges which we’ve already seen on issues related to diversity. Look at how the Trump administration has retroactively punished hundreds and hundreds of federal grant recipients for including “DEI” or “woke” topics in their completely correctly won grants — usually in response to stated preferences, if not mandatory requirements, for such content in grant proposals. It has crippled scientific research across NIH and NSF for no real reason whatsoever. How much more vindictive will it be as it leans into Middle East Studies — in the context of the still hot polarization around alleged antisemitism and the unwillingness of key institutions and individuals to stand up in defense of these particular issues?
This governmental assault on higher education and academic freedom is, as many have noted, entirely typical of autocratizing regimes. Most people point to Hungary, rightly, but I keep thinking about Turkey (Türkiye, if you must), where Erdogan took control over the country’s leading private university Boğaziçi University by appointing an unqualified loyalist rector in January 2021. Erdogan, like Trump and so many other would-be autocrats, viewed academia as a competing power center and a potential source of opposition to his ambitions. He manufactured superficially plausible reasons to justify the takeover, and implemented it forcefully - even labeling protesting students “terrorists”, if you need the analogy to be even more clear.
There are multiple lessons here - it isn’t just that Trump’s attack on higher education resembles Erdogan’s (though it does), it’s also that that attempt in Turkey generated a remarkably sustained and unified opposition mobilization by students and faculty which put up a surprisingly effective resistance. The attempted takeover, backed by intense police presence and securitization, wasn’t simply accepted as a fait accompli. Academics pushed back there with unified resistance, claiming “professional and moral authority over the domain of university governance”. Students launched a sustained mobilization against the takeover — still happening today, more than four years later, as you can see in the photo accompanying this post — which became a central front in the broader struggle against incipient authoritarianism. Is such a collective response really beyond an American academia divided by the antisemitism discourse, cowed by external pressures, and led by administrators who seem to have forgotten the purpose of the academy?