The shame of Columbia University
Not quite the same as in the sixties when colleges were defiant to government intervention. And there were presidents and other government officials who would intercede on campuses. Kent State was the site of deaths and shooting of students by an untrained military who were in too deep over their heads and acted out of fear. Afterwards of which, many of us in the active military went through training for crowd control.
We lost another democratic icon for people and students over money.
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.
This highlights the dependence of colleges and universities on federal funds, typically granted to support basic research that ultimately benefits the country. Like everything else in this country (and elsewhere) follow the money to understand events. To a lesser degree, similar university policy and behavior follows the desires of large private donors. It would be interesting to see what could be achieved by a school or schools operating purely on the funding from tuition and leaving expense charges together with earnings from endowments. Not likely to happen.
@JackD,
Research is everywhere and always a cost center for research universities. Grants don’t pay the entire cost, with the possible exception of some clinical trials. The difference is made up in one or more of three ways: tuition, licensing and philanthropy. For research universities that have medical schools, research can be subsidized by the margin on the practice.
One may well ask, well if it’s so expensive, why bother? The answer is that there are positive externalities that come with being a research university. When parents talk about sending their kids to a “good school,” they are referring to the research reputation of the school (even though their kid probably won’t do any research and the top research faculty often don’t teach undergrads). The research reputation is also a magnet for faculty. And big donors like to be associated with research universities.
Small colleges that rely on tuition are closing these days as the college-age demographic is shrinking. Their tiny endowments couldn’t sustain them. Foreign students paying full tuition prefer large research universities.
Sorry about the typos.
They sold their soul for 400 million when they have a 14.8 billion dollar endowment. The leadership of that university should all resign.
@Brady,
LOL! By that reasoning, the leadership of most major universities should resign. And I assume by “leadership” you mean the boards of trustees, since those are the folks who signed off on all the major fiscal decisions.
And the vast majority of university endowments are donor-restricted. Endowments aren’t just a bank that universities can withdraw from as they please. That’s not how university endowments actually work in real life.