The Situation at Columbia XXXI

Columbia’s new policies intended to stop and punish any on-campus criticism of the Gaza genocide by characterizing it as “antisemitism” have made it impossible for Rashid Khalidi to teach his planned fall course. See his explanation here, which ends with:

Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an-anti university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.

Update: The Knight First Amendment Institute here at Columbia has put up on its website a document What the Columbia Settlement Really Means, which explains in detail many of the problemw with what the trustees have committed the institution to. Some extracts:

The settlement is an astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to the government—and not just to the government, but to an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day. It will have far-reaching implications for free speech and academic freedom at Columbia—even if we assume that the provisions that are susceptible to more than one interpretation will be construed narrowly, as the settlement itself says they should be (¶ 5). We also doubt that the Trump administration will be satisfied with the territory it has won. The settlement does not foreclose the Trump administration from demanding more from Columbia on the basis of the university’s real or imagined failure to comply with the settlement’s terms, or on the basis of purported transgressions that are new or newly discovered. Indeed, the settlement itself gives the administration an array of new tools to use in the service of its coercive campaign…

The July 23 settlement also limits Columbia’s authority over the hiring of faculty and administrators. It obliges Columbia to appoint new faculty members “with joint positions in both the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the departments or fields of economics, political science, or [public policy]”—faculty members who will (the settlement says, without explaining) “contribute to a robust and intellectually diverse academic environment” (¶ 13). We know of no precedent for the federal government compelling a private university to hire faculty in specific fields, let alone dictating the specific institutes and departments to which they must be appointed…

The cumulative effect of these terms will be, again, to subject Columbia’s administrators, faculty, and students to a regime of intense surveillance. The surveillance is a significant incursion into the university’s autonomy and will inevitably deter faculty and students in their exercise of constitutionally protected freedoms. It may also provide the Trump administration with pretexts to make new demands of the university…

Columbia has been the target of a months-long campaign of extortion by a presidential administration that is contemptuous of legal constraint and deeply hostile to the values that universities exist to promote. We are not convinced the settlement will put this behind us. What we can say with confidence is that the settlement comes at a very steep price to Columbia’s autonomy and to the constitutional freedoms of Columbia’s faculty, staff, and students. All of us affiliated with Columbia should understand this—and administrators, faculty, and students at other universities should know how much is at stake in their own institutions’ negotiations with the Trump administration.

Update: Another open letter to Claire Shipman, this one from Marianne Hirsch.