Columbia Surrenders to Donald Trump’s Demands
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The Trump administration and higher education, the battle is on. The administration withholds $400 million in funding from Columbia University and issues demands for policy changes in return for the money. Columbia seems to agree late Friday with all of the terms, which some critics in the school and outside are calling a surrender. But did Columbia really have a choice and will this do enough to satisfy

the administration. That's our subject for today on Potomac Watch, the daily podcast of The Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages. I'm Paul Gigot, and I'm here with my colleagues, Alicia Finley and Eliot Kaufman. So this is really a startling turn of events. No administration in recent history has threatened to cut off this amount of money. And then Columbia's response, I think, seeming to agree to all of the terms,

has been a shock to academia. Alicia, what do you make first of this intervention by the administration and its demands? Is this something that the school deserved? Well, whenever you have federal funding of education, I think schools should expect some kinds of strings, especially when civil rights are at issue, which was the case with some Jewish students.

in the protests last year. So the federal government does have a responsibility to protect the civil rights of the Jewish students, and the university clearly wasn't enforcing its own rules or discipline. And this goes back to the demonstrations, protests last year, the occupation of buildings. This is the threshold issue that allowed the administration to go in.

Right. And so some of the stuff that they're requiring or seeking to require is just to make Columbia abide by its own rules. And that's an enforced discipline, maybe change or allow the president of the university to impose the discipline rather than going through some of these review panels. I think some of the would require them to adopt.

the anti-Semitism definition that was already proposed last year. In a Columbia task force. In a Columbia task force, right. Institutional neutrality, not just for the institution, but for all. What does that mean? Basically, the college wouldn't take political stances or positions on issues. Presumably, the individual departments wouldn't either. And this is, the University of Chicago has embraced this and more and more colleges are as well.

So, Elliot, you've written about some of this. What do you make of the demands, though? I mean, they're as intrusive as I can think of any in an administration. Now, some of them, as Alicia said, were merely things that the school should have been doing for years anyway, right? You're supposed to adhere to the civil rights laws. You're supposed to make sure that you can't discriminate against individuals. So when you set up barricades outside and say, "Jewish students can't travel here," that's a clear violation of the civil rights laws.

And that's the sort of thing that they are supposed to do. So in that sense, the administration is merely going ahead and saying, enforce the civil rights laws, enforce your own rules. But it also goes beyond that in some important respects. What do you make of that? Yeah, and I think what you said about civil rights law is true, even if the protesters phrase their statement as,

no Zionists allowed onto these parts of campus. Yeah, but if they're Jewish students, and if any Jewish student becomes a Zionist, then it's discrimination. Yeah, I mean, that's something like 90% of U.S. Jews who believe that a Jewish state should have a right to exist in any borders in the Jewish homeland. That's all that means, right? Okay, so the

demands themselves, I would break them into two categories. One of the categories is, I think, hard to argue with. That's that Colombia should have rules about time, place, and manner of speech so that you can say what you want, but if a speaker happens to be speaking at an event at the same time, well, then you're a free speech to shout and, you know, shout that person down. That's no longer a free speech. You're stifling speech.

Okay, that's one. Two is enforce those rules, actually. It's not enough to have those rules on the books, enforce them. Three is once you have campus security enforcing them, actually punish people who have violated those rules. You can't just let them off every time so that they know there's no real consequences for excluding Jewish students, harassing them, violating their civil rights.

All of those, it's hard to argue with. And you could even argue that the demand about masks, saying that no masking on campus, probably that one applies too, because the protesters were, you know, masks became a ubiquitous way to hide one's face, act with impunity and intimidate others. And particularly, Elliot, just to intervene here briefly.

A lot of non-students were coming onto campus and masking. That's a great point. Yeah. And some of the worst actions, I would say, were by those people. So, okay, put all of those to one side. Then you get into the demands that go a little further.

What are they? One of them has to do with admissions. It was sort of vague what the administration was asking for, but you could generally phrase it as depoliticize admissions, meaning don't try to select for admissions.

radical activists who will do these sorts of things. And I think admissions is part of the problem on these campuses, leading to the violations of civil rights. But you could understand how that gets into a sort of iffy area. What exactly does the government want Columbia to do with its admissions? Columbia is a private institution. Presumably, it should be able to say who can enter, who can't.

Other than for some very specific civil rights considerations. Another one in that category has to do with Columbia's Middle East studies. There are huge issues. I mean, you have a totally politicized department really violating academic standards in the sense that it's taking very strong political issues rather than teaching and

And I mean, in general, with these sort of studies to get further away from traditional views of academic standards, distance from indoctrination, propagandizing, and a lot of professors taking some very radical views, pro-October 7th, pro-Hamas, pro-violence, and in support of students violating Columbia rules. So there's clearly a problem there. But if the administration is asking for

this whole thing to be put into receivership. What exactly does that mean in the academic context? How involved is the government going to be? We don't know. And so they were definitely stretching the boundaries here. When we come back, we'll talk about just how the Columbia response to the administration's demands is being received when we come back.

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Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot here on Potomac Watch with my colleagues Alicia Finley and Elliot Kaufman. All right, I want to talk in more detail about this intervention into the curricula, essentially, into how you run the departments. But just for the context here, so what happened is that the administration made their demands

And then the president of Columbia responded late Friday with a four-page memo to the university community and presumably to the education department laying out what their responses on each of these various points are. And I want to listen to Linda McMahon, the education secretary, talk on Sunday on CNN about that response. I have had such great conversations with Dr. Armstrong, Katrina Armstrong, and we have gotten now to that first level conversation.

Columbia has agreed to about nine things we put in place. When she and I met, she said she knew that this was her responsibility to make sure that children on her campus were safe. She wanted to make sure there was no discrimination of any kind. She wanted to address any systemic issues that were identified relative to

the anti-Semitism on campus and they have worked very hard in a very short period of time. She and I exchanged personal cell numbers, we've talked, and I believe that they are on the right track so that we can now move forward.

Does that mean that the money will be unfrozen? That means that we are on the right track now to make sure the final negotiations to unfreeze that money will be in place. All right, right track, but no commitment on unfreezing the money. But optimistic response from Linda McMahon, Alicia. As you looked at Katrina Armstrong, the interim president of Columbia's response, were you surprised at the breadth of them and the degree to which they accommodated?

The administration's demands. Well, I think in one sense that they didn't really have much of a choice. There are $400 million in grants. Again, this is not any tuition money. This is mostly NIH and actually HHS money for medical school and education and such. Research grants. Research grants or like enrolling, helping train doctors and such.

They were not using or leveraging federal tuition or loans. And that's about another buck, about $400 million a year that Columbia gets from that. That money actually goes directly to the students. But there was a lot of pressure, especially from the scientists and researchers at the universities who,

largely did not support these protests to make some accommodations. And what the university was demanding in many respects, Elliot pointed to a couple that I think were a little vague and went too far, especially on the more intellectual diversity and higher

and more oversight or de-politicizing the admissions process. Now, that's, again, vague, and maybe we don't want the government dictating to Columbia who they should be admitting and who they should be firing. But a lot of the other things, I don't think they necessarily capitulated, and I don't think the demands were far-reaching in and of themselves. This is a crucial point. I mean, I'm trying to think, and, you know, I don't cover education all the time, but I can't think of a time where

Elliott, when an administration said to a private university, granted, Columbia depends to a great degree on federal money, despite its private status. But I can't remember a time when a government said, "You are going to have to take a look at how you teach."

Middle Eastern studies and how you organize what they called regional studies. This isn't just the Middle East, it's also South Asian studies, Jewish studies, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, African studies, and so on. And the university said, "Okay." Now, what they said was, "We're going to appoint a senior vice provost who's specifically going to look at and review these areas of regional studies."

And it's going to review the programs to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced, review all aspects of leadership and curriculum, steward the creation of new programs to address the full range of the fields, and create a standard review process for the hiring of non-tenured faculty across the university.

And that last point is particularly interesting because of some of these junior faculty members, non-tenured faculty members who have been hired at universities, who become the most politically active and led an awful lot of these protests. But this is extraordinary, Elliot. I mean, you know the Middle Eastern Studies Department at Columbia is notorious for being pro-Palestinian to the extent to sometimes pro-Hamas in some of the statements by some of its professors.

On the other hand, it's an extraordinary act to have government come in and say, we need to review all this, which necessarily will mean supervising to some degree what the curriculum is. Does that give you any pause? It does, but I think there are...

ways to sort of walk the line here, because I believe there are problems there and those problems have to do with the civil rights issue on Columbia's campus. But like you say, I mean, government dictating curriculum is way too far. So what can the government do?

I think it can insist that a department adhere to recognized academic standards, by which I mean there's a difference between instruction and advocacy and indoctrination.

And insisting on institutional neutrality will go a large part of the way there, but it might be worth recognizing, I mean, this is not a department that is open to other views, and the government is saying, cancel out one view or another.

This is a very closed intellectual environment that is shutting out large parts and really has been sort of captured by radical elements. You know, often there are some issues with foreign funding at different schools as well. So I wonder if they can restrict themselves in that way to just,

having some guardrails that have to do with academic standards rather than getting into the classroom in exactly that way. I think it's also probably not right to have the government as the one deciding. And when the government was asking for an

external receivership. Does that mean government? Does that mean some third party? We don't know. In the end, Colombia has chosen to keep it internal. And so I think the Trump administration will want to wait and see what actually changes. Exempting tenure means that there's only so much that can change, but maybe that was always going to be the case. We're going to take another break here. And when we come back, we'll talk about the administration's intrusion seemingly in

into how Columbia manages some of its academic departments when we come back.

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Welcome back on Paul's You Go with Elliot Kaufman and Alicia Finley. And I'm glad personally to see that we'll be supervised by Columbia internally, Alicia, because the last thing we want is some education department official going in and saying, you can teach this or you must teach that.

Your balance between one kind of thinking or another is imbalanced. You need to pick another professor who's going to be a little more, say, pro-Israel or pro, I don't know, the old Bernard Lewis School of Middle Eastern academics. Bernard Lewis was the great professor of Middle Eastern affairs, specialist in Turkish affairs, taught at Princeton for years.

But he was reviled by much of this new generation of leftist professors. And I wonder if Bernard Luce could even get tenure today if he were an academic. Or think of Fawad Ajami, our contributor for many, many years, who was also very controversial because he would criticize a lot of the Arabs and Palestinians. But still, I don't want the government intruding like this.

I think it's dangerous because the next time you get a democratic administration,

it could easily decide that it's going to use the same kind of financial leverage to influence, say, the degree to which other schools can teach history or political science. Right. And one, there's also First Amendment concerns that this raises because colleges do have First Amendment rights, speech rights, freedom of association in terms of who they hire, who they admit, all that. And the professors obviously have First Amendment speech rights. So if

government or to go and say, we don't like what this professor is teaching. You need to appoint someone else. That's arguably would be a violation of Columbia's speech rights and the professor's speech rights. The presidential impact you mentioned is very dangerous because you could easily see a Democratic administration going into some conservative colleges. And, you know, so there's some more conservative colleges like St. Thomas Aquinas,

Pepperdine that do teach actually religious education and go and dictate how or try to use federal funds to leverage how they teach and instruct not just religious courses but others as well, the classics and such and say, well, the way you're teaching this is actually discriminatory toward Black and Hispanic students, the way you're teaching Western civilization. So you can see

They're doing the exact opposite. You can see that also in climate science, how you're teaching climate science. We don't like that. So I think this does put us on a little bit of a slippery slope. Yeah, I think you raise some excellent points there, particularly about climate science, which has become dogma on the left and could be imposed on a lot of science departments down the road.

I think the other question that sort of, if we step back a bit, Elliot, is the degree to which how the university has gone so astray that they have lost enough public support so that the Trump administration can feel safe politically in doing this without having major political costs, which is, when you think about it, I think also extraordinary. I can't imagine, for example, that the Bush administration had done this.

would not have faced enormous backlash and never would have tried to do it. But I guess one reason is the protests last spring were really a catalyst and demonstrated the degree to which, and I think to a shocking degree, just how much anti-Semitism had set in at some of these schools. And then second, the degree to which Hamas and anti-Semitism had become justified in a lot of these schools, intellectually speaking,

because they were put into an anti-colonialist, anti-Western intellectual framework. That mindset had set in and really was now the dominant mindset in many of the humanities departments across the United States, history, religion, and regional studies. I think that has shocked a lot of Americans.

And this goes back, I think, this has been building in the universities for many, many years, but I think has shocked many Americans. Because what they have thought were these citadels of learning, where they were gonna pay

$80,000 to send Johnny, I probably underestimated it. Yeah, you're like, "100,000 now." $100,000 to educate Johnny. And instead, he goes in there and Johnny has to put up with what is essentially, in many schools, indoctrination. And they're saying to themselves, "Well, maybe the taxpayer dollars should be reviewed here." And in a way, I think the schools have lost their way from their basic core mission, that American support.

which is actually instruction in the best that has been said or thought, to quote Matthew Arnold, and of course in the sciences, modern sciences and so on. And when they lost that mission, straight from that mission, they inevitably lost political support. And I think Columbia University recognizes that. I mean, they have to look around at some point. Right after October 7th, the leading student protest groups said,

celebrated Hamas's attack and massacre. And you say, okay, well, maybe that was in the early days. They didn't really know what was happening yet. They reiterated it a year later on the one-year anniversary of the October 7th massacre. And to see those people set up an encampment

take over campus, be allowed to violate all the rules, and then see faculty through its institutions and also through its most vocal members rally to those students' defense and try to prevent the university from taking any action to enforce its rules or punish rule breakers. I mean, the university is looking around and saying, what is going on?

Many people want to hold classes. Many people want to attend classes, but can't do it in that sort of atmosphere. And so when the Trump administration arrives with its far-reaching demands, I think many in the university administration probably say, this is our chance to get through some of these changes and say that we had no other choice and

and can tell faculty that and tell students that because a lot of these changes will make Columbia into a better school for most of its students, a more attractive school to applicants and to lawmakers as well and taxpayers. So I think these changes are necessary. How they came about, there are a lot of arguments.

But the changes will help. All right, Elliot Kaufman, thank you. Thank you, Alicia Finley. We'll leave it there for today. We're here every day on Potomac Watch. Thanks for listening. AI requires a lot of compute power, and the cost for your AI workloads can spiral. That is, unless you're running on OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This was the cloud built for AI.

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