Columbia: A justified surrender to Trump?

The “MAGA takeover of higher education” is underway, said Chris Lehmann in The Nation. Columbia University agreed last week to pay $221 million to settle allegations from the Trump administration that it indulged “antisemitism in student protests against the Gaza war and in academic curricula.” The school also agreed to a raft of Trump-imposed restraints, including a ban on diversity considerations in hiring and admissions, the reporting of expelled foreign students to the federal government, and a “resolution monitor” who will scrutinize Columbia for “the whiff of anything resembling affirmative action.” The university’s acting president, Claire Shipman, presented this “rushed capitulation” as a victory for academic independence that will let Columbia reclaim $400 million in frozen federal funding. In fact, all Shipman has achieved is creating a template for the shakedown of other schools: Harvard is now mulling a $500 million settlement to recover $2.6 billion in frozen funds.

“For all its flaws, the Columbia settlement is not nearly as bad as it could have been,” said Stephen L. Carter in Bloomberg. The school did not have to admit any wrongdoing, the government relented on demands for information on students’ immigration status, and the agreement does not give the government license to outright “dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admission decisions, or the content of academic speech.” Columbia could have easily avoided this punishment, said National Review in an editorial. Decades ago, it should have stopped the spread of antisemitism in its corridors and cracked down on a progressive ideology that tolerates the persecution of “disfavored minorities.” That hatred became visible to many Americans only after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel, when antisemitic protesters subjected Jewish students and faculty to venom and violence. The Trump administration has now forced Columbia back to “normalcy,” and “other schools should follow in its footsteps.”

“This deal won’t end Columbia’s torture,” said Columbia economics professor Suresh Naidu in The New York Times. University leaders are fooling themselves if they think they can trust a capricious administration that rips up trade deals it negotiated with longtime U.S. allies such as Canada and Mexico. And the agreement won’t placate the administration’s “Project 2025 apparatchiks,” who are explicitly out to transform U.S. higher education into a tool for ideological control. All it will take to shatter this deal is “a campus protest, an edgy syllabus, or even an acerbic student opinion piece.” Then “new vistas of anti-Americanism on campus will be discovered, and the attacks will continue.”