The Trump Administration Is Out for Blood

The confrontation between the Trump administration and Columbia University reminds me uncomfortably of the scene in Independence Day when Bill Pullman, playing the U.S. president, confronts one of the aliens who have been attacking Earth. “I know there is much we can learn from each other,” he pleads. “What is it you want us to do?” The alien replies: “Die.”

It would be nice to think that, however crude and misguided its tactics, the administration was at least suspending research funding to Columbia out of a genuine concern for the safety of Jewish students there. But the brazen disingenuousness of its own rationale for the action belies any such conclusion. On March 3, the administration announced that it would conduct “a comprehensive review” of the university’s federal contracts because of the alleged antisemitism on campus. Just four days later, it determined that antisemitic acts were continuing at Columbia, and that therefore grants and contracts worth $400 million were being canceled. Obviously no serious review — “comprehensive” or otherwise — had taken place. The administration presented no meaningful evidence for its assertions. As Michael C. Dorf, a Cornell law professor, pointed out, the administration ignored the procedures spelled out in statute for suspending funding over Title VI violations, and thus its action is illegal.

Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, is desperately playing the Pullman role. In a message to the university community on March 7, she characterized the Trump administration’s concerns as “legitimate” and insisted that the university was working to address them. She pointed out that Columbia had established a new office to combat antisemitism and instituted tough new procedures for dealing with demonstrations of the sort that had roiled the campus since the war in the Middle East began a year and a half ago. In fact, last year Columbia created an entire “Task Force on Antisemitism” that issued two substantive reports on the issue. It took many other steps to mollify its critics, including closing its main campus to the public and twice asking the New York police to break up protests and arrest student protesters. Columbia also opened an “Office of Institutional Equity” to handle alleged Title VI violations, staffing it with a team of 57 full-time employees, “including full-time professional investigators.”

Three student protesters recently filed suit against Columbia alleging a violation of their rights under Title VI — the same statute the administration has cited in cutting off the research funds. The details sketched out in the 65-page lawsuit make Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s claim that Columbia has “ignored” the issue of antisemitism look absurd.

Armstrong’s response might have succeeded last spring, when the principal attacks on the universities were coming from right-wingers in Congress such as Elise Stefanik, whose House committee had summoned Columbia’s then-president Minouche Shafik to testify. At the time, I wrote in these pages that Stefanik’s goal “has not been simply to humiliate these educators, but to force them to accept her diagnosis of what is happening at their institutions, and to push them to change their policies.” But bullying and humiliation are no longer the political objective.

The vice president has declared that “the professors are the enemy.” The secretary of health and human services is a longtime anti-vaxxer and science skeptic. The president’s chief adviser is a tech lord who thinks that the federal government can be cut to the bone like the target of a hostile business takeover. The administration appears to be executing on a wild playbook from the American Enterprise Institute to “rein in America’s universities” in part by “taking a prize scalp": “Simply destroy Columbia University.” (The plan goes on to suggest indicting former Columbia president Lee Bollinger and embedding Office for Civil Rights workers in the Harvard admissions office.)

Trump’s political base lives within an information system that presents most academic research as “waste” or “abuse” directed towards “woke” ends. The president himself is on a revenge mission against everyone who tried to hinder his political career. The administration does not want a change in policies. They want blood. They want to demonstrate their power. And they are not going to stop with Columbia. Nine other universities are already on their list, including Harvard, New York University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Like the aliens in Independence Day, once they have blasted one target into ruins, they will move on to the next. (Seeing the writing on the wall, Harvard just announced a hiring freeze across the university.)

So is this the time to plead with the administration that “there is much we can learn from each other,” as Pullman tells the aliens? Is it the time to accept Trump’s Columbia attacks as “legitimate,” as Armstrong did? No. Columbia should instead respond that it would welcome a legitimate, nonpartisan investigation of its record, but not the blatantly partisan persecution it is currently facing. Columbia should fight the rescinding of grants and contracts in court and denounce it for what it is: McCarthyism.

Back in the 1950s, many liberals hesitated before taking on Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee because they could not stomach defending men and women who had supported Stalinism. But the real issue was not the record of the people being persecuted but the persecution itself. Today, that issue is not antisemitism, but the Trump administration’s desire to smash higher education, which it perceives as an enemy. The only course of action is the one that the president in Independence Day ultimately adopted, after his attempts to mollify the aliens had failed: Fight.