The university has become the Trump administration’s test case for the largest assault on higher education since the McCarthy era. Sadly, it has notably failed to defend itself.
The Trump administration’s abduction, detainment, and threatened deportation of the Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil earlier this month is first and foremost a threat to every American’s civil liberties. Khalil—a green card–carrying legal resident of the United States, whose wife is a US citizen and eight months pregnant—has not been charged with or even accused of any crime. By the implicit admission of President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Khalil was arrested by Department of Homeland Security officials in New York and transported to an ICE detention center in Louisiana entirely on the basis of his constitutionally protected speech criticizing US support for Israel’s war on Gaza. To Trump and his enablers in, for instance, the Anti-Defamation League, Khalil’s nonviolent activism constitutes material support for terrorism and therefore justifies the suspension of his rights. Trump has promised many more arrests of pro-Palestine activists—indeed, more have already begun—and the precedent he is establishing with Khalil is one that could easily be used to penalize any kind of speech the administration disapproves of. As not nearly enough elected Democrats have said, one need not agree with any of Khalil’s positions to defend his rights both to express them and to remain in the country.
What is happening to Khalil has been enabled at every turn by one of the most venerated elite liberal institutions in the country, Columbia University, which has consistently failed to defend basic academic freedom since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. For decades, Columbia has been a symbolic battleground between critics and defenders of the State of Israel. As the one Ivy League school located in the global media capital, home to both a large Jewish population and a tradition of radical activism dating back to the near-legendary 1968 student revolt—and as the school where Edward Said taught for years and where Bari Weiss staged her first provocations—Columbia commands outsize attention. It hosted arguably the most infamous pro-Palestinian encampments of any major university last spring, which were met by the most infamous police crackdown. Now, with Khalil’s arrest, Columbia has become the Trump administration’s test case for the largest assault on American higher education since the McCarthy era.
When Donald Trump first assumed the presidency eight years ago, Columbia, like many universities, positioned itself as part of the broad resistance movement defending core liberal principles. Barely a week into Trump’s first term, Columbia’s then-president Lee Bollinger put out a strong statement condemning the new president’s executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. “[T]he University, as an institution in the society, must step forward to object when policies and state action conflict with its fundamental values,” Bollinger wrote at the time, in a letter pledging solidarity and support to the Muslim and international students and faculty potentially affected by the ban.
Bollinger, a leading First Amendment scholar—who in 2007 had invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus and stood his ground after significant blowback—understood that Columbia had a role to play in protecting the rights of free speech, religious expression, and assembly. While his long tenure was not without controversies, he offered his campus some basic reassurance when those rights came under threat from the Trump administration.
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That commitment was sorely lacking last spring when Bollinger’s freshly installed successor, Nemat Shafik, was thrust into the university’s biggest crisis since 1968. In April, as student activists set up encampments on Columbia’s main campus to demand that the university divest from Israel amid its genocidal war on Gaza, Shafik was called before Congress to testify about what Republicans alleged was the campus’s pervasive climate of antisemitism. Having just seen the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania ousted over the same set of issues, Shafik—accompanied by still-active members of the Columbia Board of Trustees—turned in a shambolic, evasive performance that failed either to defend academic freedom or to deter Representative Elise Stefanik from calling for Shafik’s resignation shortly thereafter.
The night after her testimony, Shafik ordered an initial police sweep to shut down the encampments, resulting in over 100 arrests but failing to prevent activists from setting up another encampment the next day. After two weeks of refusing to negotiate in good faith, Shafik called the cops again to expel students occupying an administration building. Starting even before any encampments were set up and continuing to this day, Columbia has been sealed off with 24/7 security checkpoints from the surrounding neighborhood, to the consternation of local residents. Having comprehensively mismanaged every part of this fiasco, Shafik was forced to resign after just a year on the job.
All of this happened under a Democratic president, governor, and mayor, none of whom stood up for the rights of student activists and all of whom were eager to be seen as protecting Jewish students against alleged antisemitism—which has been expansively interpreted by groups like the ADL to mean practically any pro-Palestinian speech. All of it happened before Trump’s election victory and his return to power pledging to criminalize and root out antisemitism on campuses under the same expansive definition.
The week before Trump’s second inauguration, Columbia pushed out law professor (and Nation contributor) Katherine Franke over her involvement in last year’s protests—a portent of how the new interim university administration would handle the coming maelstrom. Since then, and just ahead of Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration suspended $400 million in federal grants to Columbia to punish the university for the antisemitism and “illegal protests” it supposedly failed to prevent last year, an unconstitutional end run around Congress’s power of the purse that will soon be deployed against other schools and that threatens to undermine vital scientific research. The administration is holding those funds hostage pending a number of outrageously invasive demands, including that Columbia’s Middle East, South Asian, and African studies departments be placed under academic receivership for at least five years (this demand was first made public via an exclusive in The Free Press, the publication founded by Bari Weiss, who has been campaigning against Middle East studies professors at Columbia since she was an undergraduate 20 years ago, and who now counts the Trump administration as an ally in her efforts).
“Appeasement hasn’t worked,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia and one of the most vocal faculty advocates for Palestine, told me last week. “We have been saying for a year now that these charges of systemic antisemitism at Columbia are obscuring real incidents of bias against both Jews and others, that they are part of a bad- faith right-wing attack on higher ed, and that we are going to be powerless to defend ourselves against the MAGA Trump agenda. It turns out we were right.”
Howley is of course correct that appeasement hasn’t worked for Columbia, won’t work for higher ed in general, and won’t work for any other institution that attempts to accommodate Trump’s comprehensive war on liberalism. But “appeasement” may also understate the problem: For Columbia’s administration, the pro-Israel donors it answers to, and many likeminded Democrats, the suppression of Palestinian activism and even the obscene violation of Mahmoud Khalil’s civil rights are more feature than bug.
“I support this administration” with regard to Khalil, Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz told CNN last week. “If you’re here on a tourist visa and you’re going to a Hamas rally, then yeah, you probably shouldn’t be here anymore,” he added, managing to misrepresent both Khalil’s immigration status and his activism. Moskowitz is only somewhat to the right of New York’s own Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, who could not bring himself to defend Khalil’s constitutional rights as a legal US resident without first stating that he “abhors” many of Khalil’s opinions and reiterating his condemnation of “antisemitic actions” at Columbia.
As Zeteo’s Prem Thakkar reported last week, Columbia administrators knew Khalil was under threat from ICE and did nothing to protect a graduate student on their campus. “I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm,” Khalil wrote in an e-mail to interim university president Katrina Armstrong the day before ICE arrested him. He never received a response.
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Rather than robustly defend Khalil by name following the arrest, Armstrong put out a tersely worded statement that acknowledged “a challenging moment for our community” and vaguely pledged to navigate it while making no substantive commitments. Since then, Columbia has expelled Grant Miner, the head of the graduate student union and a participant in the encampments last year, a week ahead of scheduled contract negotiations—one of a raft of student protesters to be hit with expulsions, suspensions, or degree revocations. With university leadership like this, it can be difficult to parse where cowardice ends and eager complicity begins.
“We’re in the middle of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government,” Bollinger, Columbia’s former president, told The Chronicle of Higher Education last week. “We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.” If Columbia is any indication, it is clear that the current crop of university administrators has little inclination to defend the values of free inquiry and expression from Trump. That task will have to fall to those parts of the academic community, students and faculty alike, who still believe there’s anything left worth defending.
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