‘COWARDICE INTO POLICY’ — A federal judge ruled today that Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University grad student arrested Saturday night by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials, would for now remain detained in Louisiana. Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist with a green card, had his deportation halted by Judge Jesse M. Furman, who ruled that he will remain in America until the court says otherwise. As he remains in limbo, Khalil has quickly become the avatar of a national debate over the rights of student protesters and broader free speech protections. ATTACKING FREE SPEECH & THE RIGHT TO PROTEST: REMEMBER THAT TRUMP COULDN'T READ THE CONSTITUTION! On Truth Social, President Donald Trump called Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student,” and noted that “this is the first arrest of many to come.” The case has put American universities squarely back in the Trump administration’s crosshairs — and has sparked further debate about what colleges owe to people living on their campus (though he graduated in December, Khalil was living in Columbia student housing at the time of his arrest). The day before his arrest, Khalil reportedly wrote to his university’s interim president asking for help. The broader question of how university administrators have responded to recent White House policies and threats of punitive action is sparking a debate about the values and commitments of some of the nation’s top schools at a time of elevated hostility between higher education and the Trump administration. One prominent campus leader, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, told POLITICO Magazine in a wide-ranging interview that he worries that a growing number of colleges have adopted positions of institutional neutrality in a misguided effort to avoid controversy. “The infatuation with institutional neutrality,” he said, “is just making cowardice into a policy.” That discussion is excerpted below for POLITICO Nightly . What was your first reaction to hearing of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest? I was really shocked that someone in the United States would be arrested for having participated in a lawful demonstration. I assumed there were some other justifications, I thought there would be some crime that had been committed for which the individual was being held accountable. But as I learned more about it, I saw that this was part of this broader attempt to intimidate people from protesting in ways that the White House doesn’t like. Khalil had sent a letter to Columbia’s interim president asking for protection after a doxxing campaign was launched against him shortly before his arrest. What responsibility do academic institutions have for their students, or recently graduated students? It’s a very good question, and a hard one. First of all, there is a big difference between the responsibilities you have for your students and your former students, your alumni, because although we stay in touch with our alumni, our students are more directly in our care. The doxxing campaigns, although pernicious, are also ways for people to express themselves, as offensive as I find them. If these campaigns call for violence or intimidation, then those campaigns can be illegal, and so I think an effort to find some kind of security within the university is understandable, even by a recent graduate. As I understand it, he was living in Columbia housing at the time, which makes this even more understandable. But I don’t know the details of Columbia’s response or their policies in that regard, so I don’t want to speculate on the university’s motives. How have universities and colleges’ postures toward Trump changed since his first administration? The first Trump administration, even before it began, there were many demonstrations in many colleges and universities across the country, including at Wesleyan. College campuses have been much quieter this time than they were in the first Trump administration. I think students are trying to understand what’s going on in the country, and are not sure how best to react to the flood of executive orders coming from the White House. And this is part of the White House strategy. I think that a lot of people are reeling, especially at the level of students and faculty. And at the institutional level, a lot of people are frightened. I think this is the greatest fear in civil society, including in the higher education system, since the McCarthy era. People are really afraid to be targeted by the government, whose powers are extraordinary, and when they’re willing to arrest or detain someone without charge and threaten to deport him without charges, that’s very frightening. Sixty schools got letters about antisemitism on campus, and that’s going to cost all those schools money to investigate and maybe to defend themselves. So, I think there’s a lot of fear that the current administration thinks of retribution as a legitimate political tactic and that has not been the case at this level for a very long time. How does that fear you’re talking about, especially among administrators, play out on the ground? Well, I think the infatuation with institutional neutrality is making cowardice into a policy. I guess that’s a provocative way of putting it. I have friends who don’t believe that — I’m friends with presidents who genuinely think they’re encouraging free speech by hiding. But I think that the fear is manifesting in people just not wanting to talk about policies that they really do oppose. I mean, I’m hardly a radical president. The students think of me as pretty conservative. I don’t think of myself that way. Then, there’s a massive effort to change the language that schools use to talk about the things they believe in. So, famously [conservative activist] Chris Rufo and company have managed to make Diversity Equity and Inclusion poisonous words, whereas I think most people think that it’s better to learn from folks who don’t always agree with you. That’s why diversity is good. Most everybody thinks fairness is a good thing, which is just what equity means, and no one is against belonging. But many administrators are so afraid to use these words because the government is using cheap versions of AI to find the words and then go after the people who use them. The idea that we now have a list of words we shouldn’t use is shocking. Schools are scrubbing their websites. I’m no defender of some of the excesses of diversity training. Some of the accounts I’ve read were pretty hair-raising in terms of the counterproductive ways in which some of those trainings took place. But this effort now to just make sure you’re not using some good old American words to talk about how you’re teaching, that’s one of the greatest infringements on free speech that I can remember in my lifetime. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh .
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