Columbia’s Capitulation, and Wesleyan’s Pushback

On Friday, Columbia University’s acting president, Katrina Armstrong, caved in to all of Donald Trump’s major demands, in the vain hope that the administration will restore $400 million in lost federal funds. Fat chance.

Despite Armstrong’s capitulation, Trump has made no binding commitments in return, and Trump now has Columbia on a very short leash that he can jerk at his pleasure.

One of the demands to which Armstrong acceded was to put the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department into receivership. In effect, Trump has managed to put the entire university into receivership. He can now keep escalating demands.

Why did Columbia cave? The alternative was to litigate. Columbia had plenty of faculty who wanted to pursue that course, including leaders of its law school, who argued that Trump’s moves violated the same Title VI of the Civil Rights Act that Trump spuriously invoked.

But in the end, the university’s leaders were fearful of further stoking Trump’s wrath. Rather than turning to the courts, they decided to salvage what they could. That is not likely to be much. Columbia’s leadership has disgraced itself in exchange for no deal, and has only whetted Trump’s appetite.

“It’s a Vichy moment in American history,” Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, told me in a wide-ranging interview. “Like I have a restaurant and if I collaborate with the Nazis and don’t let any Jews eat here, then the guys who wash dishes will still have jobs. As you know, that slope is very slippery. Appasement doesn’t end well.”

Only the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, writing in The Atlantic, has joined Roth in criticizing the assault on academic freedom and Columbia’s response to it, though in somewhat more guarded language. “Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights,” Eisgruber wrote. But he added that “legitimate concerns” about antisemitism might warrant investigation.

Roth told me that he has tried to organize other university presidents to stand together against Trump’s strategy of picking off universities one at a time, but has had no takers. Here is a link to the Zoom of our entire interview.

The real question is, why is Roth so lonely?

ROTH’S VICHY ANALOGY IS EXACT. In 1940, the French hoped to preserve part of “free France” by making a separate peace with the Nazis and setting up a puppet regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain based in Vichy, while the Germans occupied and ruled northern France. The arrangement lasted only until the Gestapo decided otherwise in 1942 and “free France” fell increasingly under direct Nazi rule.

Preserving a Columbia that is partly free is the same sort of fantasy. The rest of Columbia is free only until Trump decides to escalate his demands and seize more territory.

Wesleyan has the same kinds of federal funding streams at risk as larger universities: research grants from NIH and NSF, as well as Pell grants to students and the federal student loan program. I asked Roth if speaking out puts all of these at risk.

“Of course, I think about that,” Roth said. “And then I think that’s the classic collaborationist dilemma, right? You know, you collaborate with authoritarians who you know are in the wrong, in order to keep them from doing worse stuff. And I think when you do that, when you engage in the collaboration, you actually encourage them to do even worse stuff.”

With the Columbia precedent, Trump will feel free to roll over other unversities that have violated this or that made-up standard. Universities are hiding in self-censorship.

The University of Cincinnati, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Alaska system, and many more have scrubbed their websites of all DEI references. Former diversity offices have been remained offices of “Belonging” or “Collaboration,” as the University of Colorado calls its former diversity program.

Collaboration is all too apt a name.

Students at Harvard are being urged not to display signs in solidarity with Gaza to avoid provoking our dictator. Harvard has an endowment of about $54 billion. Weirdly, Harvard picked last week to announce that the college would be tuition-free for all students with family incomes of under $200,000. That’s generous, but how about using its massive endowment as F-you money to defend academic freedom from Trump?

The president of Johns Hopkins, which lost $800 million in USAID grants causing over 2,000 layoffs, issued only the most anodyne statement, not breathing a word of criticism about the administration’s outrageous decision. “Today is a profoundly difficult day for our colleagues and for our university, marking a significant loss of exceptional people … whose work has advanced the mission of our university,” said Hopkins President Ron Daniels.

Earlier this month, Trump suspended $175 million in federal funds to the University of Pennsylvania on the absolutely trivial ground that Penn allowed a transgender athlete to compete on the women’s swim team—in 2022. An unnamed university spokeman said that the university had received no official word, and that Penn has “always followed NCAA and Ivy League policies” and does not have its own policy “regarding student participation on athletic teams.”

Under Trump, Wesleyan’s President Roth said, “the government seems too willing to use its powers more like organized crime figures than like elected representatives in the past.” Yet the stance of most university presidents in the face of Trump’s assaults is somewhere between contrite and complicit.

Why have university presidents been so cowardly? The broad answer, I think, is that for decades universities have become more and more like corporations. They have bloated administrations, overpaid presidents who style themselves as CEOs, and profit maximization strategies that include gaming the U.S. News rankings and raising sticker prices to see how little financial aid they can grant while still maintaining their rank.

Having a presentable number of lower-income and minority students has been part of the package. But if the government wants to change the rules, no big deal.

Their boards of trustees are dominated by very wealthy people. The co-chair of Columbia’s board, David Greenwald, spent 20 years as a senior executive at Goldman Sachs. You can just imagine how he advised acting President Armstrong on the question of whether to confront or appease Trump.

College presidents spend most of their waking hours raising money. Cultivating rich donors and maximizing federal funding and the allowable overhead charges is a huge part of the business model. If that’s now at risk, what might they do to kowtow to the Emperor?

Scholarly inquiry and academic freedom kept falling further and further down the hierarchy of what mattered to college administrations. The debasement of the university and the corruption of democracy are two sides of the same greasy coin.