Trump stripping Columbia grants will curtail academic freedom

As part of its crusade to upend and remake American institutions, the Trump administration is threatening to strip universities of federal research grants if they don’t comply with the government’s conditions, with Columbia University as the first target. It’s a troubling situation in which the administration points to real abuses — but proposes to correct them by gutting academic freedom.

Columbia was the center of a firestorm last year due to pro-Palestinian protests that shook the campus — and, critics said, created a hostile environment for Jewish students in particular.

There is no question that the protests often were ugly. Classes were disrupted. A campus building was occupied and vandalized, and some janitors assaulted. While some troublemakers were outsiders, a student seen on video urged fellow activists to block “Zionists” from entering the protest encampment. While that student was suspended after another video showed him talking about killing Zionists, other student activists got away with disruptive and threatening behavior. A Middle Eastern studies professor, Joseph Massad, publicly praised the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas raids on Israel, in which civilians including children were murdered and tortured, as an “awesome” act of “resistance.”

The backlash led to the resignation of Columbia president Minouche Shafik last August. Now, the Trump administration is taking drastic measures to punish the school for failing to curb “antisemitic violence and harassment”: Earlier this month, it announced a freeze on about $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia.

As a condition for restoring the funding, the administration has presented a list of demands. Columbia must tighten disciplinary rules and adopt a definition of antisemitism (for the purpose of punishing harassment) that some say would penalize criticism of Israel. All students who participated in the protest encampments must be subject to expulsion or multiyear suspension. And the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department must be placed under “academic receivership” — a rare measure in which control of a department, including its curriculum, is removed from the faculty and handed over to outside administrators.

Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber has noted that academic norms in America have long been based on the assumption that federal funding for education and research did not give the government the authority to broadly dictate disciplinary rules, let alone academic content, to universities. Overturning these norms could be catastrophic.

One could argue that many academic institutions have kneecapped themselves by restricting offensive speech in the name of protecting female, minority and LGBT students from a hostile environment — and then, in a blatant double standard, failing to curb much more aggressive rhetoric against “Zionists” that many Jewish students saw as threatening. Princeton has its own speech-related controversies such as the ouster of a professor who harshly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement. Would-be education reformers on the right likes Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo have argued that left-wing tyranny in academia has reached such a point that the aggressive use of state power is the only way to undo the damage.

While threats to academic freedom from the left are a real problem, fighting such institutional abuses with abuse of power by the most powerful institution in the country — the federal government — is no solution. Some individuals and groups that have long opposed left-wing academic illiberalism are now opposing the administration’s power play. They should be joined by all principled defenders of liberty.

 OPINIONS EXPRESSED BY Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.