Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., capitulated to President Donald Trump and the GOP over the budget this week, sacrificing one of Democrats’ last pieces of leverage as Trump bulldozes the federal government and jails activists. Schumer defended voting yes on the GOP budget that would neuter the legislative branch, arguing that he had no choice but to give in or face a government shutdown. He’s not the first to make that kind of decision.
Leaders of businesses, universities, and nations across the globe face the same question: Should they fight Trump, or hope that by giving him what he wants he’ll somehow do less harm?
Far too often, these leaders have chosen appeasement over resistance — and, in return, gotten nothing.
At Columbia University, leadership has remained largely silent over the Trump administration’s arrest of recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist with legal permanent residency in the United States. The Trump administration has not charged Khalil with a crime, arguing instead that his pro-Palestinian campus activism made him a national security threat.
Rather than publicly defending its students, Columbia on Thursday expelled, suspended, or revoked degrees of students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, sending a clear signal of where the university stands in regard to academic speech rights.
The fact that the university opted to crack down on its students even after the Trump administration cut $400 million of federal funding is a sign the school is still trying to appease Trump rather than resist him. In a letter responding to the cuts, interim university president Katrina Armstrong wrote that Columbia was committed to “working with the federal government” and said that combating antisemitism is its “number one priority.”
The university had a similar response to the Department of Homeland Security raiding two students’ rooms earlier this week. In a campuswide email, Armstrong refused to condemn the raids, writing that “Columbia is committed to upholding the law.” Now it appears that another student has been detained by immigration officials.
Yet despite these conciliatory efforts to placate an increasingly powerful president, the Trump administration continues to target Columbia and its students. On Thursday, the Department of Education threatened the school in a letter, demanding further crackdowns on student activism, a mask ban, increased authority for campus police, and that the university place its departments of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies on receivership, which could cede control of those departments to an external authority.
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