I’ll be heading out on vacation tomorrow morning, on a road trip first to Montreal, then Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, back at work on the 21st. While away I’ll try to detox from reading or thinking about the topics of this series of postings. Very much looking forward to being away from Columbia and outside this country for a while.
In non-Columbia news, yesterday Penn bent the knee and caved-in to Trump. The interesting question now is whether this gets them back the \$175 million in grants which was illegally withheld from them based on this Title IX accusation. It may be that they’ve just put themselves in the same position as Columbia, humiliating themselves for no reason and inviting further demands. If they do get the money back, that would provide some encouragement for what the Columbia trustees are trying to do (negotiate a new and better cave-in).
The long outage of Columbia servers last week was due to a hacker (also see here), seemingly with a pro-Trump agenda of stealing data to show the guilty nature of “woke” university policies. In particular this hacker gave the data for 2.5 million applications to Columbia over many years to Bloomberg News. Not sure what this would show of significance other than the already heavily litigated fact that Columbia and most other universities have been practicing affirmative action and giving preference to applications from specific disadvantaged groups since the 1960s-70s. One thing that this could resolve might be the big debate over whether Barron Trump was rejected from Columbia, perhaps explaining Trump’s campaign to destroy the university.
The Trump assault on Columbia via the accreditation system continues. See this and a university statement here. It seems unlikely that the US higher ed accreditation system will go ahead and make itself an effective arm of the Fascist dictator’s illegal attempt to gain control of the universities. But, these days, who knows…
One of the Columbia trustees, Shoshana Shendelman has gone on right-wing media (Fox News, Breitbart) to attack a large part of the Columbia community as “destructive”, effectively supporting the Trump attack on the university. That the trustees allow this indicates that many if not most of them agree with her. This unfortunately seems to be a big part of the explanation for the cave-in, the firing of Armstrong, the failure to support arrested students, etc.
Remarkably, Shipman and other trustees last year were well aware that Shendelman was already then attacking the university community from within. Elise Stefanik and some House Republicans are continuing the assault on Columbia as “antisemitic”. They point to the fact that on January 25,2024 Shipman wrote to others about Shendelman “I just don’t think she should be on the board.” In later text message exchanges with the vice-chair of the board, Shendelman was described as “a mole” and “a fox in the henhouse”. Clearly Shipman and other trustees by 2024 realized that Shendelman was collaborating with Republicans in an attempt to damage the university with “antisemitism” accusations. That they did nothing about this then has put us in the current situation of having a partially MAGA board of trustees devoted to caving-in and unwilling to fight Trump and those who want to destroy us.
Update: Getting ready for vacation, with Columbia craziness level very high. We have a trustee who has been collaborating for a long time with the Republicans trying to destroy Columbia for being “antisemitic”, and is now going on Fox News/Breitbart to attack the university she’s a trustee of. In any other such situation, this would be grounds for immediate removal. Presumably she feels she can do this kind of thing with impunity because Trump has his boot on the necks of the trustees. At other institutions like Harvard, Trump’s people are plotting how to force a settlement that would give them some control, e.g. by having someone on the board. At Columbia, they’re all set, already have their person on the board.
Shipman has sent out a letter abasing herself and saying she didn’t really mean it. Stefanik and Ari Schrage are demanding her resignation. The trustees already did something incredibly stupid last time this happened (Armstrong), if they do it again they will make it crystal clear that the Columbia president serves at the pleasure of Trump and his people.
I really need to get away from this, now…
