The interim president of Columbia was forced out last night from her position, it appears as a demand of the “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”, see here. This indicates that the trustees continue to believe that they have to do whatever they are told, including firing the university president and replacing her with someone more compliant.
A commenter here pointed to a Wall Street Journal article from a while back which explains where the demands being made by the Trump administration are coming from: Columbia’s own faculty:
Last month, seven faculty members and the co-founder of the school’s Jewish alumni association went to the interim president, Katrina Armstrong, with nearly the same requests as the Trump administration.
They called on Columbia to fight discrimination and encourage inclusivity. They asked the president to ban masks, adopt a stricter definition of what constitutes antisemitism, and discipline members of the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department. Most of the recommendations haven’t been acted on.
“I was shocked when I saw” the Trump administration letter, said Larisa Geskin, a professor in the medical school and an author of a faculty letter to the interim president. “I was like, ‘Am I reading my letter?’ This is what I was talking about.”
Geskin, a cancer researcher, is critical of university leadership. “When there is a war, somebody has to make a decision, and decisions are not being made, at least that we can see,” Geskin said.
We’ve been told over the past week that the trustees are not going to court, but agreeing to all demands because they believe that if they don’t do so, the university will lose not just the $400 million, but also all Federal grants (in the billions), as well as Pell Grants and other student loans, and visas for its foreign students. Their belief is that the Trump administration has the power to effectively destroy the university if they don’t cave-in to everything (or even if they try and go to court).
The demands being made clearly are not coming from Trump, it appears that they are coming from this group of seven Columbia faculty members. Geskin and the six others who are behind this need to immediately call off the attack on their university, or take responsibility and make clear publicly that they are willing to destroy the university if they don’t get what they want.