The Review

What’s Columbia University doing? That’s the question our Nell Gluckman asked last week. Facing “a near existential crisis” in the federal government’s withholding of $400 million, Columbia failed to take its case to court, despite the fact that many legal experts — as Michael C. Dorf, a Cornell law professor, wrote in our pages — believe the way the Trump administration implemented these funding cutoffs is illegal. “Absolutely I could foresee a case, because what the Trump administration has done is blatantly in violation of both Title VI and the First Amendment,” David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown, told The Chronicle. Christopher L. Eisgruber, president of Princeton, took to The Atlantic to make a similar case: “The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research. Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

Instead, as our Maya Stahl reports, Columbia agreed Friday to more or less all of the government’s demands, a move the Trump administration says is “a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.” To observers who hoped they’d take Trump to court, Columbia’s administration looks like a rabbit hypnotized by a cobra, hoping to sweet-talk its way out of being eaten. The money hasn’t been restored yet, and there’s no guarantee that it will be. It’s possible that Columbia has merely bought itself further rounds of bullying.

This is not the playbook former Columbia president Lee Bollinger implicitly advised when he told me two weeks ago that, when the government interferes with university activities, “seeking shelter in the courts is most often the necessary path.” Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, seems to agree. “I am profoundly saddened and alarmed,” he posted on X, by Columbia’s “capitulation to the increasingly dictatorial Trump administration.” As the University of Chicago law professor Brian Leiter wrote on his blog, “Part of what is shocking about Columbia’s capitulation is that the states that sued over the unlawful changes to NIH funding were succesful in court and the funding has resumed. Unless there is some very important fact not in the public record, I cannot see how Columbia would have failed to secure an injunction in the federal court for the Southern District of New York putting a stop to the obviously illegal actions by Trump vis-à-vis Columbia. What is going on???”

Here’s one theory: Many of the Trump administration’s demands — a ban on masks, for example, which would permit the university more easily to identity and punish rule-breakers — will give cover to Columbia for establishing disciplinary mechanisms its administrators may already have been planning to introduce. Incidents like the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall are expensive, both materially and reputationally. Most of the items in Columbia interim president Karin Armstrong’s letter announcing “Our Work to Combat Discrimination, Harassment, and Antisemitism at Columbia” involve policies one imagines the school was considering with or without the federal government’s coercion.

From the point of view of academic freedom, the most alarming requirement from the Trump administration by far was that Columbia “begin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years.” As the Harvard literary scholar David Damrosch told The Chronicle, “It’s absolutely bizarre and unprecedented to imagine a governmental entity” interfering in this way with an academic department. “I have never heard of it in a democratic society.” The Trump administration’s letter did not explain why the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) department specifically was being singled out, though the clear implication is that it had helped sponsor a generally discriminatory — antisemitic — atmosphere.

Columbia’s response to this demand does not use the word “receivership,” and attempts to dilute the targeting of MESAAS by throwing in a bunch of other programs, none of which, as far as I can tell, are academic departments proper. It is worth quoting in full:

Appointment of new Senior Vice Provost. As part of our ongoing efforts, we are appointing a new Senior Vice Provost this week with a focus on promoting excellence in Regional Studies. As part of this portfolio, the Senior Vice Provost, acting with the authority of the Provost Office, will conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting immediately with the Middle East. This review will include the Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; the Middle East Institute; the Tel Aviv and Amman global hubs; the School of International and Public Affairs Middle East Policy major; and other University programs focused on the Middle East (together, the “Middle East Programs”). In this role, the Senior Vice Provost will: (1) review the educational programs to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced; (2) review all aspects of leadership and curriculum; (3) steward the creation of new programs to address the full range of fields; (4) create a standard review process for the hiring of non-tenured faculty across the University, partnering with the Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and the schools; (5) review the processes for approving curricular changes; (6) following academic procedures, make recommendations to the President and Provost about any necessary changes, academic restructuring, or investments that will ensure academic excellence and complementarity across all programs in the given academic areas.

There is some strategic vagueness here about just what sort of power over MESAAS this new senior vice provost will have. In the best-case scenario, Columbia is hoping to preserve some measure of academic autonomy by offering the Trump administration a toothless supervisory structure that will satisfy the government’s urge for domination. In the worst-case scenario, the administrator in charge of the “Middle East Programs” will muzzle MESAAS faculty members who express politically disfavored opinions — or even prohibit some areas of research and teaching. Leiter’s conclusion that “academic freedom is dead at Columbia” might be premature. But it is certainly on life support.

Diversity statements are out in California

As Vimal Patel reports in The New York Times, the University of California system will stop using diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in hiring. That represents a major concession to critics of the statements, since the UC system was one of their biggest and most committed proponents. But the use of such statements was unpopular with outsiders, divisive internally, and, in the case of public colleges, possibly unconstitutional (a subject on which Brian Soucek and Brian Leiter duked it out in our pages back in 2022). The UC system’s abandonment of diversity statements probably signals their death knell generally, at least at public colleges. Given the myriad pressures on the sector, defending such statements is likely not a fight most colleges will want to take up. Indeed, probably no single policy has put the sector’s reputation with the public and with lawmakers more at risk. As Harvard Law’s Randall Kennedy told me and my colleague Evan Goldstein in a conversation a few weeks ago, “mandatory DEI statements ... weren’t the end of the world, but they were a very vivid illustration of what was wrong. They provided an opening that people took.”

In a forthcoming law-review article, Yale Law’s Keith Whittington offers the most comprehensive argument of which I am aware for why DEI statements, as they have mostly been used, are unconstitutional. Going back to 1952, Whittington writes, the Supreme Court “was increasingly aware that government officials used concerns over professional fitness to rationalize inquiries into the political commitments of teachers.”

Defenders of the use of diversity statements in hiring and promotion have insisted that they are pedagogical, not political, documents. Whittington disagrees. “The statements being elicited from applicants by diversity requirements are by design value-laden and involve the ordinary stuff of politics. There is no public debate over whether professors should employ a ‘flipped classroom.’ There is an intense public debate over how to understand the role of race in society and the principles that ought to guide race relations moving forward.”

Accordingly, diversity statements almost certainly impose political litmus tests on hiring, violating First Amendment prohibitions on hiring practices that “might screen potential employees on the basis of their political views.” While there might be some local exceptions — for instance, Whittington says, “a professor who was being hired to direct a scholarly center focused on human rights ... could reasonably be evaluated in part on whether the professor’s own beliefs were aligned with the substantive and value-laden mission of the center” — such political commitments cannot be raised to a general condition of academic employment.

Finally, Whittington says, diversity statements often amount to constitutionally prohibited compelled expressions of belief. He quotes Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote the majority decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, a 1943 case that determined that Jevoha’s Witnesses could not be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” Jackson wrote, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Read Keith Whittington’s “Diversity Statements, Academic Freedom, and the First Amendment.”

Recommended

• “This idea of a memory that she alone had and that others did not share was a gift to her. Accuracy meant nothing, but neither was pure invention required.” In The New York Review of Books, Colm Tóibín writes about Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.
• “The family chose Swinburne to be little Fordie’s godfather, Liszt once dandled the infant, and Ford himself remembered pulling out a chair for Turgenev.” Also in The New York Review of Books, Michael Dirda reviews Max Saunders’s new biography of Ford Madox Ford.
• “I am often asked when I got into Crichton. My answer has become a different question: When did he get into me?” In The Yale Review, Joanna Radin recounts her decade-long preoccupation with Michael Crichton.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin