As our Kate Hidalgo Bellows reports, the Trump administration has taken dangerous aim at Columbia University. A federal task force threatened to review some $5 billion of government funding to the university and will consider stop-work orders on $51.4 million of federal contracts. The result, as one professor said, could “be a catastrophe of the first order.” That catastrophe has begun; on Friday, The Free Press reported that $400 million of federal funding had been canceled.
How did we get here? There’s nothing new about the minatory use of civil-rights law by the federal government to push colleges around. As Yale Law School’s Keith Whittington told me, the Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letter on Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is “clearly the precursor” of Trump’s crusade against antisemitism, which holds colleges in suspicion of violating Title VI of the same act. “It was entirely predictable that a Trump administration would look at that track record and say, ‘We can do that too with our own policy preferences.’ This is the world we’ve created. It’s a terrible world.” Indeed, the initial investigations into antisemitism at Columbia were opened by the Biden administration.
But the Trump administration’s heedless maximalism and contempt for process make its actions different in kind from those of its Democratic predecessors. Another difference: Colleges themselves have already prepared extensive reports tending to confirm the accusations of the new administration. As Columbia’s own task force on antisemitism asserted last fall, “the testimonies of hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students have made clear that the university community has not treated them with the standards of civility, respect, and fairness it promises to all its students.” While the creation of the antisemitism task force was presumably meant to help ward off federal intervention, in current circumstances, its reports read a bit like the accused slipping a confession to the prosecutor.
Was Columbia’s judgment on itself fair? Is its campus really rife with antisemitic bigotry? Had it really failed its Jewish and Israeli students so egregiously? As I wrote at the time, its second antisemitism task-force report makes clear that the campus atmosphere could at times be unacceptably toxic. It recounts a handful of instances of abusive language on a Columbia-only social-media site, which provide evidence, however limited, of genuinely hateful attitudes among some of its students. But most of the other incidents the report includes are uncorroborated, and there’s no reason to think that the most alarming — necklaces ripped off of Jewish students while they walk back to campus, for instance — were perpetrated by Columbia students. As a piece of investigatory reportage, the document is a mess. It strains to make the most of very little; it was going to conclude that antisemitism was rife on campus no matter what it uncovered. In this, it echoes the self-flagellation exemplified in 2020 by Christopher L. Eisgruber, president of Princeton University, when he responded to activist pressure by professing to believe that “racist assumptions from the past … remain embedded in structures of the university itself.” Then, too, the Trump administration saw an opportunity; its Department of Education opened up a civil-rights probe into anti-Black racism at the university.
The proliferation of bureaucratic mechanisms meant to identify and root out bigotry was always at risk of spinning out of control, susceptible to political and demagogic manipulation. The zealous hunt for antisemitic offenses to punish has plunged colleges into “an ethical recklessness ... that we can no longer afford if we want to survive,” writes Silke-Maria Weineck in our pages. At its worst, that recklessness might involve finding and punishing antisemitism where it doesn’t exist in an attempt at appeasing hostile lawmakers. Weineck has in mind the University of Michigan’s firing of Rachel Dawson, former director of Michigan’s Office of Academic and Multicultural Initiatives, for a series of antisemitic comments Dawson purportedly made in conversation with two Jewish professors at a conference. According to her accusers, Loyola University of New Orleans’s Naomi Yavneh-Klos and an anonymous professor, Dawson made such crudely antisemitic comments as “We don’t work with Jews. They are wealthy and privileged and take care of themselves,” and “The university is controlled by wealthy Jews.” An outside law firm, Covington & Burling, was hired to investigate and concluded that it was more likely than not that Dawson made such comments.
Or at least, sort of. Using public-records-request laws, Weineck acquired the law firm’s report. Unsurprisingly, Dawson’s own account of her conversation was different than that of her accusers. For instance, rather than saying that Jewish students are “wealthy and privileged and take care of their own,” Dawson “recalled that she said Jewish students were not big participants in cultural graduations, noting that Jewish students had other longstanding resources they felt more comfortable with.” And Dawson “unequivocally denied” saying that “the university is controlled by wealthy Jews"; in her memory, she merely “articulated that [Jewish students] were well-resourced … and had great support, like regents who had Jewish representation.”
There’s no tape. No one will ever know what Dawson said or didn’t say. Perhaps she spoke awkwardly, as people often do when it comes to sensitive matters of identity. Even the law firm that concluded she was more likely than not guilty of the bigoted speech her interlocutors remembered hearing hedged a bit: “Given the passage of several months between the conversation, ADL Michigan’s letter, and Covington’s interviews, it is likely that the actual substance of the conversation fell somewhere between the descriptions provided by” her accusers “on the one hand, and by Ms. Dawson on the other. On balance, we conclude that the weight of the available evidence supports the conclusion that Ms. Dawson made the statements attributed to her in the ADL Michigan letter.” Weineck rejoins:
Surely only one of those can be true. Either it is likely that she made the statements, or it is likely that she made statements that “fall somewhere between.” Covington & Burling argues that Dawson “has a motivation to recall her statements during the conversation in the least offensive light” but fails to consider that Yavneh-Klos — who, per The New York Times reporting, has expressed frustration that “the current DEI narrative very often excludes Jews” — likewise may be motivated to present the conversation in the most offensive light. The sloppy paragraph suggests that in the end it didn’t matter what Dawson actually said — her offense was refusing to agree that Jewish students, the only group on whose behalf Congress has conducted extensive hearings, were uniquely persecuted on campus.
The University of Michigan’s president, Santa J. Ono, recently appeared at an Anti-Defamation League event in which he insisted that, when it comes to fighting antisemitism on campus, “our regents have been amazing. They are in lockstep.” (That presumably includes regent Mark Bernstein, who told The New York Times that Dawson should be “terminated immediately.”) Later on, Ono assured the ADL that “we have fired staff who have said things that are antisemitic.” Dawson plans to sue.
