Columbia University could hardly have been more draconian in the last year and a half since students began speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In early November 2023, four months before the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment even began, the university banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. A few hundred students from the groups had had the audacity to walk out from classes and hold a “die-in” protest on campus — some of the most widely celebrated nonviolent protest tactics available.
The crackdown was just getting started.
There is no appeasing a political force like the Trumpian right.
Since then, the university has ordered police raids on campus three times, leading to the arrests of over 100 students. Last week, the school expelled four students, three from Barnard College, one from Columbia. Many dozens of students have faced discipline and suspensions for participating in pro-Palestine protests and speech. Professors have been slandered before Congress, censured, removed from positions, and reportedly pushed into retirement over their support for Palestine and criticism of Israel. The campus has been essentially locked down for almost a year.
Again and again, Columbia has shown a willingness to throw students, faculty, free speech, and academic freedom under the bus in acquiescence to a right-wing, pro-Israel narrative that treats support for Palestinians as an affront to Jewish safety.
For all Columbia’s appeasement, President Donald Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university.
“Columbia has worked overtime to appease,” wrote Layla, a student at Columbia’s School of Social Work, who asked to withhold her last name having faced doxxing attacks and harassment from Zionist groups. “Students are miserable. Campus is a panopticon. And their funding was still cut.”
The Trump administration can be expected to use its perverted conception of antisemitism to further its explicit plans to decimate, corporatize, and re-whiten higher education. The shame here lies with university leaderships — at Columbia and schools nationwide — that have failed to stand up for their purported missions of critical thinking and academic freedom. Instead, they have put some of their most vulnerable community members, particularly international students and students of color, at risk.
There is no appeasing a political force like the Trumpian right, intent on a program of destruction. And there is no appeasing a nationalist Zionist worldview that, defying reason, sees antisemitism in every call for Palestinian freedom. Columbia is proof of the failure of caving in; the administration has offered up a platter of repression for more than a year and is still slated to lose $400 million.
