The leaders of America’s top universities should have realized long ago that no amount of cowering and capitulation or attempts to hide will save them from the attack being unleashed and orchestrated by the Trump administration. It seems the leaders of these fine institutions do not understand the crude and lawless nature of their opponents or the focused, all-out war on higher education that the White House and its allies have launched.
Like many New Yorkers, I am baffled and dismayed by Columbia University’s meek acceptance of the outrageous, bullying announcement from the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the U.S. General Services Administration that the White House intends to snatch back $400 million in federal research money based on what the administration called “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” an alleged violation of civil-rights law. For good measure, the letter warned that “these cancellations represent the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow.”
But the threat is plainly illegal. Federal law governing scientific grants specifies that clawbacks of research money can only happen after a voluntary resolution has been attempted and “a full written report of the circumstances and the grounds for such action” has been filed with the committees in Congress that initially authorized the grants. Importantly, cancellations must be limited to the offending section of the grantee organization, and “no such action shall become effective until thirty days have elapsed after the filing of such report.”
The Trump administration’s announcement skipped all the legal requirements, ignoring any attempt at voluntary resolution and basing its action on alleged discrimination at the undergraduate campus that has nothing to do with scientific work happening three miles north at the NewYork-Presbyterian–Columbia research complex. The announcement makes no mention of the mandatory written report or the required notification to Congress. It should have been swiftly and publicly rejected by Columbia’s president and trustees on the day it was received, ideally with language to the effect of “Our lawyers will see you in court.”
Instead, the university immediately raised the white flag. “We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combating antisemitism and ensuring the safety and well-being of our students, faculty and staff,” the university said in a statement. “We remain dedicated to our mission to advance lifesaving research and pledge to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding,” a spokesperson told the student-run Spectator publication.
Columbia’s meek public responses, which avoided calling out the plain illegality of the situation, failed to stop or even slow the attack. Within days, the Trump administration informed Columbia that it must change its student disciplinary policies and place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years” and announced it will begin investigating dozens of other universities for implementing diversity measures that the administration opposes.
That is how blackmail works. The moment of fearful surrender is precisely when the blackmailer informs his pitiful, groveling victim: “Unfortunately that will no longer do.” And then a new round of humiliation begins with even higher stakes.
“It’s entirely illegal. We’re challenging that,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told me. “This is a thinly veiled effort to bully the universities every which way. They’re using every tool in their tool kit. They’re going after faculty. They’re going after students. They’re going after grants that have absolutely nothing to do with politics.”
“It’s an escalation of a kind that is unheard of,” Joan Scott, a historian, told the Associated Press. “Even during the McCarthy period in the United States, this was not done.”
It’s not too late for Columbia to change course and start fighting back. The school’s website lists five attorneys among the 22 members of the board of trustees, but at least one of them, former Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson, surely understands enough about Washington politics to warn against the folly of appeasement.
The Trump administration has been open about its mission of defunding and disabling elite institutions. As Christopher Rufo, an anti-diversity ideologue affiliated with the Manhattan Institute who has advised the Trump administration, recently told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: “I think that you could put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing … A medium- or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Columbia installed its 13th president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, shortly after he had led the historic Allied armies to victory over Nazi tyranny and not long before he became the first supreme commander of NATO and then president of the United States. It’s hard to imagine a leader of that stature giving in to a lawless power grab staged by the likes of Trump, Rufo, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Until the leadership of Columbia and other institutions recognize that the White House isn’t really interested in battling antisemitism, or diversity programs, or waste in government, they will get battered and beaten every time.
“Instead of pandering and trying to appease the administration, they actually need to show up for their faculty, for their students, for their mission, which is education,” Lieberman said. “Education does not mean rolling over and censoring people to please some master or some donor. It means fighting for the right to free _expression_, fighting for the notion that democracy requires free and open debate. And that means people have to be free to express themselves. Columbia will get nowhere by trying to mollify the MAGAs.”