The shame of Columbia University

In surrendering to Trump, it's opening all universities to Trump's tyranny

Robert Reich Mar 22

Friends,

If you give in to extortionists, they’ll extort you and others for more. If you let bullies get their way, those bullies will bully you and others even more menacingly.

Which brings me to Columbia University’s president and trustees, who today surrendered the university’s academic freedom to the Trump regime.

Trump threatened to cancel $400 million in federal funding if Columbia didn’t put its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department in “academic receivership.”

Columbia has now agreed to appoint a senior vice provost to oversee the department.

A cornerstone of academic freedom is that professors can research and teach what they want. Not even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught.

Trump also demanded that Columbia ban the wearing of face masks, so that protesters can be more easily identified. Columbia has agreed to do this, too.

But don’t Columbia students and faculty have a right under the First Amendment to hide their faces while demonstrating? Trump’s obvious goal is to intimidate protesters.

In fact, it’s all about intimidation — not only at Columbia but at every other university in America. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking this is just about Trump wanting to protect Jewish students from expressions of antisemitism.

It’s about the Trump regime wanting to impose all sorts of values on American higher education.

This week, the Trump regime also targeted the University of Pennsylvania, threatening to cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university allowed a transgender woman to participate on a women’s swim team.

What about the rights of that transgender woman to be free from harassment and intimidation?

The Trump regime is also targeting diversity efforts at universities.

I’m ashamed to say that my university, the University of California, has surrendered on that issue — conceding on Wednesday that it will stop using diversity statements in hiring, statements that simply ask job applicants to describe in a page how they would contribute to campus diversity.

What’s next? Trump demanding that political science departments hire an equal number of registered Republican and Democratic professors? That sociology departments ban the teaching and study of Karl Marx? That law schools offer courses on the efficiency of dictatorships?

Once we start down this road there’s no stopping. Today, Columbia University’s president and trustees established a perilous precedent, which opens the doors of all academic institutions to wanton tyranny.

There’s not even a guarantee that Columbia’s concessions will be enough to get back the federal funding. (The Trump regime told the university that meeting its demands was “a precondition for formal negotiations” over continued funding.)

The worst irony here is that the reason Congress appropriates federal funding to our universities is to facilitate academic research and freedom, not to give a demagogic president tools to stifle that freedom.

Shame on Trump. Shame on Columbia.

White House could target any recipient of federal funds, including K-12 public schools, hospitals, nursing homes and business initiatives.