Columbia Capitulated — But So Did the Rest of Higher Ed

Faced with an agonizingly difficult decision, the interim president and trustees of Columbia University elected to capitulate to the demands of the Trump administration rather than contest in court a process and a set of requirements that many experts believe to be illegal. We can both acknowledge the injustice of their situation and believe that, in the end, the university’s leaders made the wrong choice, and then erred further in attempting to frame it as one guided by the university’s “values,” including “academic freedom.” Surrendering when a gun is pointed at one’s head is not an act of principle, but of self-preservation. It’s better to identify it as such.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this action is its futility: The university has compromised its autonomy and its integrity not for clemency, but — at best — for a stay of execution. The letter to Columbia from federal authorities merely describes agreement to the list of demands as a precondition for “open[ing] a conversation” about “reforms” at the university, not as a basis for restoring funds. After news of the capitulation leaked, Leo Terrell, a lawyer in the Justice Department, said that Columbia was “not even close to having those funds unfrozen.” Anyone who has followed the career of Donald Trump knows that he responds to weakness not with grace, but with aggressive and performative shows of strength. Columbia, by Trump’s calculus, has revealed itself to be weak. Expect increasingly onerous demands and increasingly extreme threats. Almost inevitably, the university will find itself, eventually, where it should be now: in court, seeking relief, but this time with its reputation shredded.

Columbia’s response appears to suggest that its leaders misunderstand the nature of the battle in which they are engaged. It is not about antisemitism or admissions policies or an academic department; it is about survival in the face of a government whose goal is to destroy one prominent university as a way to intimidate and control others. To recognize this, one doesn’t need to read minds, but prose. Max Eden, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote the following in December: “To scare universities straight, [Linda] McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.” These are not people whose appetite for destruction will be satisfied by the creation of a new police force on campus or the establishment of new committees and commissions.

Still, I cannot bring myself to be too hard on a single university asked to carry the weight of academic freedom on its shoulders at great risk, and with scarcely any help. The gravity of Columbia’s mistake should not be allowed to obscure a more-widespread and, in some ways, more-damaging failure. Faced with the greatest threat to the mission and viability of higher education in American history, university leaders have, with rare exceptions like Wesleyan’s Michael S. Roth and Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber, chosen silence over speech, caution over courage, and institutional over national interest.

David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic that yielding to the government’s demands “would be a disaster for Columbia, for American higher education, and for the United States.” Many inside and outside the academy agree. Yet, in the face of that potential disaster, presidents and boards at the nation’s most important and influential institutions have remained frozen, watching Columbia’s ordeal with all the fortitude of the townspeople in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

Where were Columbia’s institutional allies when they were needed?

Even the ideologues in the government and at think tanks must be surprised that higher education has proven itself to be such a soft target. Regardless of the provocation, the most visible colleges have mostly chosen passivity, anticipatory obedience, and capitulation over resistance. Websites have been stripped of potentially “objectionable” language, and diversity efforts halted or limited even in blue states and well before the legal questions around such efforts have been settled. Small nonprofits, unions, churches, and even vulnerable populations including immigrants and transgender members of the military have done more to push back against attacks on the Constitution than all the colleges in the United States combined.

The media reports that college leaders are working diligently behind the scenes, and apparently even Davidson College has hired a lobbyist. But while hiring lobbyists and meeting with congressional staffers might normally be effective, these are not normal times. It makes little sense to rely on a legislative process that this presidential administration considers irrelevant. The evidence also clearly suggests that this approach is not working.

Institutional neutrality was never intended to mean neutrality about the essential nature of the university. Remember the Kalven Report:

In leaving Columbia to fight this battle on its own, leaders in higher education have failed to fulfill this obligation.

For a variety of reasons — some legitimate, some cynically manufactured for political gain — higher education has lost the trust of many people, so naturally its collective voice does not carry the weight today that it might have in the past. But perhaps Columbia’s response to this attack would have been different if presidents and trustees and influential alumni at 50 or 100 or 200 of the nation’s leading colleges had defended, in the courts of law and public opinion, one university’s right to be a university and not a “scalp” to be collected. Now we will never know.

This self-protective silence, like Columbia’s attempt at appeasement, will of course not work. In fact it is exactly what the forces arrayed against higher education want, because it will allow them to pick off colleges one by one without fear of a united response. Believe Christopher F. Rufo, who’s as much a shadow secretary of education as Elon Musk is a shadow president: “Columbia is folding and the other universities will follow suit … This is only the beginning.”

Next up appears to be the University of Pennsylvania, docked $175 million because it had the temerity to follow the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s rules and allow a transgender swimmer to compete — three years ago. Who will rise to Penn’s defense? Or Georgetown’s? Or the University of Minnesota’s? Or Sarah Lawrence’s? Unless higher education discovers its collective nerve and collective voice, those who “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” will get precisely what they want. And if it allows such a thing to happen without putting up more of a fight in defense of its mission and social purpose, higher education — it deeply pains me to acknowledge — will get what it deserves.