Trump’s Attack on Columbia Does Not Make Me Safer

As antisemitism has been ratcheting up over the last few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about Karl Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question.” The recent decision by the Trump administration to withdraw $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University has got me thinking of it again.

I haven’t read it since grad school, sandwiched as it was with other tracts in Robert Tucker’s red paperback Marx-Engels Reader, ubiquitous on university syllabi and in college-town used bookstores. I don’t want to rehash the deeply antisemitic premise of the essay — that Jewishness infects society with individualistic and capitalistic qualities that must be eliminated for true emancipation to happen. Nor do I want to revisit Marx’s persona as a self-hating Jew or trace the scarlet thread of antisemitism that connects Marxism to the Soviet Union’s “Zionism is racism” libel and its persistence among leftists today.

But as a Jew born and raised in the United States and making a good living in higher education, I want to extract from the essay a central and durable question about rights and democracy that strikes me as pertinent to Columbia’s fate: What is the relationship between the equal treatment of minorities such as Jews and the democratization of politics and society at large?

While I have no first-hand knowledge of the situation at Columbia, I have viewed the overall dynamics of the protests on college campuses following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel with several concerns in mind. One was whether Arizona State University’s Tempe campus, where I teach, would be afflicted by such protests. A second was whether Tempe’s modest Jewish community, of which my family is a part, would be singled out in any way. A third was how my son’s approach to searching for an undergraduate institution — he will graduate from high school in May — would be influenced by what he saw and read about campus protests. Suffice it to say, for the moment at least, most of what our community has experienced has been real and difficult but blessedly mild compared to other campuses. And of course nothing here compares to the horrors inflicted by Hamas on Israelis and the consequent and immense death and destruction wrought by the Israeli onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza.

That being said, I take as read Deborah Lipstadt’s recent description in The Free Press of Columbia’s inability during the post-October-7 protests to protect its Jewish students, which Lipstadt considered so inexcusable that she rejected a visiting faculty appointment. Columbia’s efforts to remedy its disastrous campus atmosphere have been far too meek.

Nevertheless, I am horrified at the Trump administration’s actions against Columbia.

My opposition is not grounded in the idea that the cancellation of the grants and contracts serves as some form of collective punishment, though it certainly does. Canceling the funds will harm many people — students, staff, and faculty — who bear no responsibility for antisemitism at Columbia. But it is difficult to hold organizations and their leaders accountable without consequences for others inside the organizations.

My opposition is also not grounded in the size of the $400 million penalty (about 3 percent of Columbia’s 2024 endowment). Given the scale of other penalties — for instance, the $148 million in damages owed by Rudy Giuliani for defaming two election workers — it is not out of line, at least if it has been the result of an appropriate process.

However, the rhetoric issued from the Trump administration not only promises more but hints at the broader scope of its power. A March 3 memo from the General Services Administration describes “ongoing investigations for potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act” that has as its target an estimated $5 billion in federal commitments to Columbia. A March 7 press release from the administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism states that the $400 million is only “the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow.” It also registers the idea that “doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.”

So here is the real basis of my opposition: The Trump administration can and has threatened a large, established independent institution of higher education in a way that, while it purports to defend the rights of an oppressed minority, actually puts the larger constitutional order at risk.

The Constitution doesn’t just sort out a power-sharing agreement among functions of government. It seeds a democratic society through its guarantee of the rights of speech, association, assembly, and religion, among others. Independent institutions of higher education are magnificent edifices built upon those rights. When a government threatens the independence of such institutions, it attacks democratic flourishing.

Eighty years ago, some thinkers had similar concerns about the relationship between the federal government and universities. World War II had offered an opportunity for institutions of higher education to contribute knowledge and effort to the preservation of democracy. In exchange for generous funding, universities helped deliver great boons to the country — not just the atomic bomb, but penicillin, radar, the proximity fuze, and other innovations. While few fretted about the wartime relationship, some did worry that continuing it in peacetime would lead to an increasing dependency. These worriers were mostly political conservatives wary of any communal approach to setting the scientific agenda.

In response, the work of political scientist Don K. Price (who would later be the founding dean of what became the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard) rationalized the exchange between a relatively powerful government in Washington and an array of lesser but still independent entities connected by flows of money. Articulated in books such as The Scientific Estate and America’s Unwritten Constitution, this new kind of federalism would allow universities, like states, to retain crucial elements of their independence even while accepting some monies, with some strings, from Washington. As a member of the Bureau of the Budget in the immediate postwar years, Price helped design and implement elements of this important arrangement.

While the contours of this new kind of federalism have been regularly disputed, the Trump administration has crossed a line with Columbia that no one, perhaps not even the postwar conservatives, thought would ever be crossed — the articulation of an open-ended threat against all grants and contracts. The Trump administration has shown how willing it is to tighten to the extreme the fiscal ties that Price thought would lay lightly on universities.

To return, then, to my question, derived from Marx: What is the relationship between my particular interest as a Jew in protection from antisemitism and my membership in society at large? Is punishing Columbia in this way protection for me?

No.

The protections I want are those of a constitutional democracy that are afforded to all of my fellow citizens (and even noncitizens). Those protections importantly include the presence of a thriving set of independent institutions through which people can enact their protected rights. As much as someone has needed to shake Columbia out of its somnambulant approach to antisemitism, the damage the Trump administration is doing to the constitutional order will not be good for anyone, including Jews. That order, and the democratic society it enables, is the greatest protection for Jews and other minorities. Trump threatens it, perhaps in our name, but certainly at our peril.