Appeasing Trump Is Not the Answer

The pace of events at Columbia University has outstripped the pace of thought in recent weeks. In short, the Trump administration has sought to remake Columbia by force and fear, and the university administration has largely agreed to it. If there is a strategy behind the university’s response, it may be called appeasement: Concede now to a set of harsh demands or be subject to further attack.

It is highly dubious whether the strategy of appeasement will succeed even in its most-limited aims: convincing the Trump administration it has won this fight, casting the spotlight off Columbia, and letting other universities face the second swing of the wrecking ball. In fact, the preliminary evidence is that the so-called “negotiations” are going disastrously, with Columbia now targeted for $400 million in further cuts, and the administration reportedly exploring the idea of placing the university under a consent decree, which would give the federal government oversight over its functioning. The appeasement strategy is also being attempted by other institutions, such as Northwestern University, with a similar lack of success. (On April 8, the Trump administration froze $790 million in funding for Northwestern.)

But even if this strategy had worked, it would still have been a mistake. Being targeted by a hostile external force is not the only way an institution and its reputation may be tarnished. We can do the damage ourselves — and that is what Columbia’s strategy of appeasement is likely to achieve.

To evaluate Columbia’s response, let’s first consider the three-pronged approach of the wreckers: first, the sowing of dissension; second, the terrorizing of the vulnerable; third, the suppression of disagreement.

The government’s targeted cancellation of federal funding was not only a means of swift reprisal against Columbia but also an elegant way of exploiting the internal divisions on our campus. The key division in this moment is not between those who oppose Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and those who support it, but rather between those who think the university is a legitimate forum for debating these topics and those who think it is not.

Many researchers and faculty members at Columbia’s medical center and in the natural sciences, particularly those whose work is funded by grants, have been, over the past 18 months, sensitive to the peril that the political conflagration on campus poses to their livelihood — a concern that began to materialize when the National Institutes of Health announced a steep cut in grants in February. This action was publicly framed as a cost-cutting measure, but it was evidently part of the Trump administration’s goal of pushing back against “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new-deal social-engineering policies.” The NIH cut led to an immediate hiring freeze at the medical school and was followed by the threat earlier this month of even more drastic cuts targeting a wider range of grant funding if the university did not comply with a range of demands.

While many scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences would also be affected, directly or indirectly, by these cuts, their disproportionate — indeed, existentially threatening — effect on one part of the institution has led to a clear divergence of interests between those who think the university is a legitimate forum for debating these topics and those who think it is not. The latter group have tended to cast their colleagues who stood in defense of pro-Palestinian protesters as the Trojans who wheeled in the horse.

This targeting of medical and scientific research suggests to me a deliberate strategy by the Trump administration to sow dissension. To resist it effectively, we need to make it clear that all parts of the university stand and fall together, and that suppressing political speech will chill free inquiry, even on topics that appear remote from geopolitical affairs.

Alongside this assault on Columbia’s grant funding, immigration enforcement has been brought to bear on specific community members associated with last year’s protests, or simply caught up in them. While the details of Mahmoud Khalil’s and Ranjani Srinivasan’s cases are shocking, the broader consequence is a sense of fear among international students, whether they have student visas or even, like Khalil, legal permanent-resident status. From conversations with students and colleagues in recent weeks, it is clear to me that the Trump administration’s message has been broadcast loud and clear: Noncitizens should not expect to enjoy any political rights while in the United States. Even those of us who are citizens with recent family origins outside the United States have been made to feel fearful.

Columbia has long aspired to be a genuinely international university, attracting scholars and students from around the world and orienting its programs of research and study around a global mission. When noncitizen students, staff, and faculty are forced to be second-class citizens of the university, constantly watching what they say and to whom, this aspiration will inevitably be frustrated.

Finally, the Trump administration’s insistence that a law-enforcement mindset be applied to dissent on campus promises to make the already-frosty atmosphere for free inquiry arctic. Actions such as the demand for dramatic changes to the disciplinary process — already compromised by the use of a separate disciplinary process last year to bypass the procedures outlined in the Rules of University Conduct — and the notion that our department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies cannot govern itself give the unmistakable impression that Columbia students and faculty are incapable of independently performing the basic tasks of university life.

While antidiscrimination allegations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act are inherently serious, Columbia was presented with an unserious set of pretextual demands — presented, indeed, with a vision of itself that scarcely corresponds to reality. I do not mean to downplay ongoing disagreements about what is happening in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the issue of divestment, and the point of campus protests. But the idea that our classrooms are simply sites of indoctrination is absurd. The goal of this mischaracterization, of what goes on in our lives at the university, is evident: to cast political disagreement with the Trump administration — not simply on issues of foreign policy or over the Israel-Palestine conflict, but disagreement more broadly — as unacceptable.

These three strategies — to sow dissension, to terrorize the vulnerable, and to suppress disagreement — are meant to work in tandem, to reduce the possibility that Columbia, or any university like it, might serve as a counterweight to the authoritarian, illiberal mode of democracy that the Trump administration is working to bring about, drawing on a playbook developed by Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

To see these events take place at a leading private university in the United States is shocking enough, but it is still more shocking that Columbia’s administration has failed to articulate what is happening, to defend our values, and to fight back in the press and via the courts. Instead, it has chosen to comply, in large part, with what has been demanded. The intent of our former interim president, Katrina Armstrong, may have been that compliance would lead in the short term to a reprieve from the administration’s threats. But the authoritarian playbook involves reneging even on provisional compromises to achieve its ultimate goal: eliminating any alternative centers of power. That is why it is no surprise that further funding has been pulled.

If we remain in the business of free inquiry, our activities will offend the government in power. Half-measures seem certain to damage our reputation irreparably without any guarantee of future security.

Simply put: Now is the time to fight and to win public opinion to our side. It is a shame that the president of Princeton University has been so much more forceful in defending Columbia in the public sphere than Armstrong or her replacement, Claire Shipman, our acting president. It is left to the rest of us — the faculty in particular — to make this case ourselves, to correct mischaracterizations of what has happened on our campus, to articulate the role of universities as sites of free inquiry in society, and to connect the attacks on Columbia and on other universities to the broader authoritarian political program of which they are part.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Columbia Spectator.