The rallying cry of the far-right American Enterprise Institute wonk Max Eden — “destroy Columbia University” — seems a little behind the times. Who needs such a stratagem when Columbia appears bent on destroying itself?
The university’s widely decried capitulation to the Trump administration’s extortionist demands highlights, among other things, the deep red line running right down the middle of higher education. A now-infamous March 13 letter from federal agencies threatened Columbia with $400 million in canceled grants unless it crushed its student activists, brought to heel the one department that, inter alia, focuses on Middle East studies, and took all disciplinary decision-making out of the hands of the faculty to be dispensed instead by presidential diktat. To this and more, Columbia unctuously acquiesced, startling the university’s former presidents and many of its illustrious alumni.
From the outset, though, very little added up. The proposed cuts represented a small portion of the interest earned annually on Columbia’s $14.8-billion endowment, although they would not, of course, have been easy to absorb. Most of the endowment money is tied up in dedicated funding streams and cannot be reallocated to weather political storms. Columbia’s finances depend heavily on government grants and income generated by the medical school. More telling, though, is the rapid response from the faculty ranks just after the menacing letter arrived. A battery of Columbia University legal scholars offered help in waging a counterattack, underscoring the many ways in which the $400-million docking would violate Title VI and VII laws.
It is not really betrayal when those committing the action have no investment in the principles betrayed.
A fight could have been waged, the pro bono talent was at hand, and a win was just a matter of time. One clue why that never materialized can be found in the letter itself, which bristled with Columbia-specific lingo. It seemed to have been fashioned by university insiders hammering out a to-do list in the backrooms of the White House, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia historian, noticed, describing the letter as essentially a set of “grievances from extremist alumni group chats, translated directly into federal policy.”
Another hint emerged when, in the wake of Nemat (Minouche) Shafik’s ouster as Columbia’s president, Katrina Armstrong (her replacement) was quickly fired as well, apparently for reassuring a department during a Zoom call that she did not really intend to carry out all of the government’s insolent demands. In a startling move, Armstrong was replaced by the co-chair of the Board of Trustees itself, Claire Shipman, in apparent violation of Columbia’s statutes, which reserve the position for the standing provost. Katherine Franke, a former Columbia Law School professor, called the action a “coup.” Admitted students are wary of enrolling at Columbia, and a number of professors are looking to escape, yet the trustees only hardened their line. What better way to destroy higher education than to sabotage the very features that make it attractive?
Apart from the blow to academic freedom, the Columbia affair illustrates a much-larger trend. Ostensibly there to oversee the busy operations of the university so educators do not have to, administrations have increasingly become overpaid impediments to faculty work. The out-of-control growth of administration signifies an indifference to education and resembles the hostile takeovers and industry shake-ups of the corporate world. Many of those now reborn as educational professionals (deans, provosts, college presidents) are yesterday’s soybean futures analysts. More and more, administrations play the role of hired guns for the trustees, and the trustees in turn serve as the handpicked agents of wealthy donors and state legislators on a mission to muzzle, dilute, tame, or shunt educational programs to the side. The ukase from Washington in Columbia’s case was not, as university leaders saw it, a crisis but an opportunity: “Things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly,” said Ester R. Fuchs, co-chair of Columbia’s antisemitism task force.
Terms like “quislings,” “Thermidor,” “Vichy,” and “submission” have circulated widely in articles denouncing Columbia’s surrender, zeroing in on betrayal as the proper note to strike. But it is not really betrayal when those committing the action have no investment in the principles betrayed. Their whole mission, in fact, has been to explode Columbia’s hard-won aura of gritty New York trendsetting evident in its long line of antinomian originals. These populists and progressives were much more than star professors. They managed to turn the public conversation in enduring ways toward the rights of immigrants, women, the poor, and embattled points of view; some questioned the hierarchies and irrationality of capitalism itself — among them, John Dewey, Franz Boas, members of the Frankfurt School in exile (such as Paul Lazarsfeld and, for a short while, Theodor W. Adorno), Karl Polanyi, Margaret Mead, C. Wright Mills, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
To that list, of course, should be added the absent presence behind each of the recent government demands on Columbia: Edward W. Said, the most important Palestinian critic and scholar and one of the most influential left public intellectuals of the 20th century. Put another way, the assault on Columbia was a deliberate attack on Said’s legacies. It was neither indirect nor occasional, but a personal assault designed to undo the world that Said made visible.
Writing to his sister Joyce in December 1967, Said captured what a lot of Columbia faculty no doubt feel today:
I now think that one might be better off, if one is intelligent and has his wits about him, remaining [in the Middle East]. America is so utterly crazy now, and exactly those people who should be guiding its collective life — i.e., people with intellect and mind — are so totally alienated from its collective life, that it’s pretty horrible to watch the national life go down the drain.
It’s one of those moments, to borrow an image from Giambattista Vico, when history spirals forward and downward — repeating the past but with a difference. In May 1968, Herb Liebowitz wrote Said a letter that could easily be mistaken for an account of the brutalization of the encampment protests by New York City police in 2023: “Students you’ve taught bloodied in the head, or bumped and banged along the ground as they were thrown out of the buildings and into paddy wagons; tactical police dressed like stormtroopers, their faces contorted in sadistic rage.”
There have always been two Columbias vying for control. The hot center of radical student revolt and the East Coast snobbery of those products of Ivy League “feeders” and finishing schools. The center of postcolonial critique and exposés on the “power elite” and a real-estate empire busy gentrifying neighboring Harlem. Columbia, it turns out, also has a long history of expelling students for nonviolent protest. In the 1930s, these included students opposed to offering Nazis a platform; in the 1950s, anyone labeled “communist”; during World War I, faculty pacifists.
If the memory of Said is lurking in the government’s demands, then each of them neatly inverts his own: the muzzling of speech, the attempted vassalage of academe, the loose and self-interested definition of the term “antisemitic,” the suppression of criticism of Israel, and the pronunciamento that Middle East studies conform to State Department realpolitik. It is in his writings, ultimately, that one found the language to break through the carapace of justifications for Palestinian dispossession and, by contrast, the rhetorical tone and arguments consistently deployed by activists in the campus protests.
Other universities are being attacked through Columbia and not only because of the Israel-Palestine crisis, its proximate cause. The real target is the university Said embodied — an idea more than a place: the model of the humanities as public conscience; the voice of a broad, nonspecialized, intelligence without any particular expectation of profit, putting itself in danger in the name of truth alone. This is ultimately what the lawyers, legislators, and think-tank stalwarts of the pro-Israel team revile.
Many remember Said’s essay “Permission to Narrate,” but only in the context of the current demand to put Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African-studies department (MESAAS) under receivership does its meaning sink in. Not satisfied with this top-down control over a department, the Trump administration has recently proposed that the entire university be placed under a consent decree, giving a federal judge authority to see that the government’s ultimatums be made good. What is offensive to the current order is not simply protests against war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank but any telling of the Palestinian story. Palestinians must not have a story, any story. They must simply not exist.
Said has re-emerged, we might say, as the bogey to be banished. He gave to the critique of Zionism (especially its penetration into American foreign policy, media, and higher education) a dignity it was previously denied. Along with Noam Chomsky, he made intellectual intervention into politics professionally respectable, more likely for others to achieve; much more than Chomsky, he gave the Palestinian position its gravitas.
What has changed is that his lesson, once admired from afar for being maverick and lonely, has now taken hold in educational circles across the country, its force emanating from Columbia. Hence, the brand has to go even if it means killing Columbia too. The institution always had its luminaries, but Said more than anyone gave the university its current mystique. In 1963 when he arrived as a young instructor, Columbia was not considered a worthy rival of its Ivy League peers, Yale and Harvard. For many of the country’s elite families, the university’s location was questionable, its neighborhood dangerous. Much of the student body (many of them Jewish graduates from City College) came from the wrong pedigree for blue-blood tastes. Columbia’s reputation was that of gentlemanly learning rather than the place where great ideas are forged.
All that changed in the course of Said’s career, not least because of his own triumphs. Fresh out of graduate school, he was already the sought-after protégé of the leading lights of literary criticism and the New York intelligentsia. Surrounded by well-connected mentors who knew the New York publishing scene, he managed to popularize French theory in, among other places, the pages of The New York Times. His agitation for the study of non-Western literatures and cultures, and his exerting pressure to make hiring and admissions criteria more international, helped transform Columbia demographics. It cannot be said that he put Columbia on the map, but he certainly gave it a different, more prestigious location.
The late Christopher Hitchens could not have been more wrong when he said that Said “owed his … eminence at Columbia to the special encouragement of Lionel Trilling.” It was not that precious, protected, sibylline above-it-all-ness that he emulated, which is clear from his unpredictable combinations of splicing anti-humanist “theory” onto humanism, disseminating heady politics and philosophy through crossover venues like The Nation, the London Review of Books, and Grand Street, and bringing to the intellectual’s role an authoritative activism in which humanists played the starring role.
His routine appearances on nightly news programs, his meetings with Cyrus Vance and, later, George Schulz at the State Department, Anwar Sadat’s proposal that he be made the Palestinians’ chief emissary in U.S.-Israeli negotiations, and his appearances at the Council on Foreign Relations all put Said in a different league than Columbia’s other superstars. No one on the faculty bridged, as he did, the worlds of mainstream media, establishment publishing, literary magazines, and elite theory journals at the highest pitch of performative verve, and all at the same time. His personal attributes were amplified by the good fortune of living in the right age. He found himself at the center of a world-historical conflict at a moment of radical transformation of attitudes and exilic shifts that he both exemplified and helped articulate.
Said, for that reason, still haunts Columbia’s halls and has become fused with its being. Signs, both explicit and implicit, mark his continued presence. We have the Edward Said memorial lecture series, the Edward Said Chair, the Edward Said Memorial Library — two sizable reading rooms side by side in Columbia’s Butler Library towering over the quad on which the students pitched their tents, whose walls are lined with 2,000 books from his personal collection.
If Said had simply played the renegade, he would have been easy to outmaneuver. But his dissidence was always at the institution’s core rather than its outposts. He was no stranger to flattery or to the allure of rubbing shoulders with other VIPs. Routinely hobnobbing with the Columbia brass, Said was at ease with them over lunch at the faculty club and loved being feted as a celebrity himself. Indeed, his own credentials were not that of an iconoclast but that of the president of the Modern Language Association, chair of The English Institute, an honoree of a Prince of Asturias Award — a strange radical showered with every honor that universities can bestow. In controversies at Columbia over programming, he was the mediator rather than the resentful incendiary on the margins. But if Said was, in many senses, a company man, this is a company that interested parties now want to eviscerate.
Columbia’s leadership once worried that Said might succumb to Harvard’s long-term wooing and leave for Cambridge. They had in fact been eager to protect him from political as well as physical attacks, even installing bullet-proof glass in his office windows. When his campus office was vandalized, the administration defended him and ignored surveillance inquiries from the FBI, refusing to sell him out when he was called a terrorist by the journal Commentary. The provost at the time, Jonathan Cole, Said’s friend, came to his defense after the now-infamous photo of Said throwing a rock while visiting the Israeli-Lebanese border. Such a defense would now be unthinkable under the dispensation of Shafik, Armstrong, or Shipman.
To eradicate a disease, one at times risks killing the host. The brand that Said helped fashion, Columbia’s trustees appear to be saying, must be dismantled, packed away, forgotten. He brought the insights of the seminar room to an anti-intellectual America in the worldly style of the scholar as Beamter: the professor as public official with a say in how the country might actually be run. To bring universities to their knees, first deny intellectuals that role. Start by picking off the one who exemplified it best.
