The university will find the voting public is not overcome with sympathy for its efforts to shield lawbreakers from the consequences of their actions.
It seemed likely that an unspoken compact underwrote Columbia University’s unexpectedly rapid capitulation to the Trump administration’s ultimatums that would allow the college’s administrators to pretend as though their hands were forced.
The institution had tried to tame its restive anti-Israel student population and the faculty, administrators, and other stakeholders who coddled the menacing mob, but the effort was a failure. Trump’s decision to hold $400 million in grants hostage until the university adopted neutral codes of academic conduct and enforced its proscriptions on anti-social behaviors on campus gave Columbia’s craven administrators cover: We’d have loved to supplicate before you, angry mob. Honest, we would. But it’s that awful Trump administration, you know? What can you do?
Of course, if that is the university’s strategic approach to restoring order to its campus, it would compel its functionaries to put on a show of defiance. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, that is what we’ve seen. Questions remain, however, about the degree to which the school will vigorously enforce the framework it was compelled to adopt.
A Wall Street Journal report this week revealed that Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, attempted to assuage concerns among faculty and staff by insisting that some of the terms to which she agreed were merely for show. “While Columbia’s letter to the Trump team agreed to ban masks that conceal identity during unauthorized protests, Armstrong told faculty there was no mask ban,” the dispatch read. The Free Press’s Maya Sulkin confirmed that Armstrong sided with those mounting an internal resistance to the Trump administration’s directives. According to a transcript reviewed by FP reporters, “Armstrong promised that there would be ‘no change to masking,’ and ‘no change to our admissions procedures,’ both of which the administration has demanded.”
Armstrong denied the accusations. “Let there be no confusion,” she wrote in a statement, “I commit to seeing these changes implemented, with the full support of Columbia’s senior leadership team and the Board of Trustees.” It will take some time before there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Columbia is enforcing the University of Chicago standard for academic neutrality, among other reforms. But some reforms, like banning masking for the purposes of identity concealment, should be enforceable right now. Independent reporting has confirmed that the university’s administrators have refused to enforce that directive.
If I were one of Columbia’s stakeholders, I would not want to play chicken with the Trump administration when it comes to enforcing the president’s executive order combatting antisemitism. Unlike the second Trump administration’s halting and unsure approach to some of its policy preferences — its tariff preferences, for example — the administration appears quite unyielding in its enthusiasm for restoring sanity to American campus life.
The administration has put at least 60 other colleges and universities on notice that they could face penalties as a result of investigations into anti-Jewish harassment on their watches. Columbia is being made an example in what the Trump administration has ample reason to believe is their popular crusade against the excesses to which America’s humanities departments have turned a blind eye.
It’s one thing for Columbia’s administrators to feign horror at the things the Trump administration has made them do. Outright defiance is something else.
So, go ahead, Columbia. Make the Trump administration’s day. The university will find the voting public is not overcome with sympathy for its efforts to shield lawbreakers from the consequences of their actions. It can complain about the infringements on academic liberty all it likes, but the public knows the difference between free inquiry and campaigns of intimidation and harassment explicitly designed to scare dissenters into submission.
To paraphrase Tony “Duke” Evers, Columbia’s administrators don’t know it’s a show. They think it’s a damn fight! If so, figures inside the university with a proper appreciation for the stakes at play will have to disabuse their colleagues of that notion, and soon. If they don’t, the Trump White House surely will.