On Columbia in the crosshairs

The world is complicated, and the following things can all be true:

(1) Trump and his minions would love to destroy American academia, to show their power, thrill their base, and exact revenge on people who they hate. They will gladly seize on any pretext to do so. For those of us, whatever our backgrounds, who chose to spend our lives in American academia, discovering and sharing new knowledge—this is and should be existentially terrifying.

(2) For the past year and a half, Columbia University was a pretty scary place to be an Israeli or pro-Israel Jew—at least, according to Columbia’s own antisemitism task force report, the firsthand reports of my Jewish friends and colleagues at Columbia, and everything else I gleaned from sources I trust. The situation seems to have been notably worse there than at most American universities. (If you think this is all made up, please read pages 13-37 of the report—immediately after October 7, Jewish students singled out for humiliation by professors in class, banned from unrelated student clubs unless they denounced Israel, having their Stars of David ripped off as they walked through campus at night, forced to move dorms due to constant antisemitic harassment—and then try to imagine we were talking about Black, Asian, or LGBTQ students. How would expect a university to respond, and how would you want it to? More recent incidents included the takeover of a Modern Israeli History class—guards were required for subsequent lectures—and the occupation of Barnard College.) Last year, I decided to stop advising Jewish and Israeli students to go to Columbia, or at any rate, to give them very clear warnings about it. I did this with extreme reluctance, as the Columbia CS department happens to have some of my dearest colleagues in the world, many of whom I know feel just as I do about this.

(3) Having been handed this red meat on a silver platter, the Trump Education Department naturally gobbled it up. They announced that they’re cancelling $400 million in grants to Columbia, to be reinstated in a month if Columbia convinces them that they’re fulfilling their Title VI antidiscrimination obligations to Jews and Israelis. Clearly the Trumpists mean to make an example of Columbia, and thereby terrify other universities into following suit.

(4) Tragically and ironically, this funding freeze will primarily affect Columbia’s hard science departments, which rely heavily on federal grants, and which have remained welcoming to Jews and Israelis. It will have only a minimal effect on Columbia’s social sciences and humanities departments—the ones that nurtured the idea of Hamas and Hezbollah as heroic resistance—as those departments receive much less federal funding in the first place. I hate that suspending grants is pretty much the only federal lever available.

(5) When an action stands to cause so much pain to the innocent and so little to the guilty, I can’t on reflection endorse it—even if it might crudely work to achieve an outcome I want, and all the less if it won’t achieve that outcome.

(6) But I can certainly hope for a good outcome! From what I’ve been told, Katrina Armstrong, the current president of Columbia, has been trying to do the right thing ever since she inherited this mess. In response to the funding freeze, President Armstrong issued an excellent statement, laying out her determination to work with the Education Department, crack down on antisemitic harassment, and restore the funding, with no hint of denial or defensiveness. While I wouldn’t want her job right now, I’m rooting for her to succeed.

(7) Time for some game theory. Consider the following three possible outcomes: (a) Columbia gets back all its funding by seriously enforcing its rules (e.g., expelling students who threatened violence against Jews), and I can again tell Jewish and Israeli students to attend Columbia with zero hesitation (b) Everything continues just like before (c) Columbia loses its federal funding, essentially shuts down its math and science research, and becomes a shadow of what it was Now let’s say that I assign values of 100 to (a), 50 to (b), and -1000 to (c). This means that, if (say) Columbia’s humanities professors told me that my only options were (b) and (c), I would always flinch and choose (b). And thus, I assume, the professors would tell me my only options were (b) and (c). They’d know I’d never hold a knife to their throat and make them choose between (a) and (c), because I’d fear they’d actually choose (c), an outcome I probably want even less than they do.

Having said that: if, through no fault of my own, some mobster held a knife to their throat and made them choose between (a) and (c)—then I’d certainly advise them to pick (a)! Crucially, this doesn’t mean that I’d endorse the mobster’s tactics, or even that I’d feel confident that the knife won’t be at my own throat tomorrow. It simply means that you should still do the right thing, even if for complicated reasons, you were blackmailed into doing the right thing by a figure of almost cartoonish evil.

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I welcome comments with facts or arguments about the on-the-ground situation at Columbia, American civil rights law, the Trumpists’ plans, etc. But I will ruthlessly censor comments that try to relitigate the Israel/Palestine conflict itself. Not merely because I’m tired of that, the Shtetl-Optimized comment section having already litigated the conflict into its constituent quarks, but much more importantly, because whatever you think of it, it’s manifestly irrelevant to whether or not Columbia tolerated a climate of fear for Jews and Israelis in violation of Title VI, which is understandably the only question that American judges (even the non-Trumpist ones) will care about.