Not Even Wrong

Harvard has gone ahead and done what Columbia should have done a month and a half ago: filed a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s illegal cutoff of funding for grants hosted at the university. The statement from Harvard about this is here, the complaint itself is here. Obviously I’m not a lawyer, but it’s impossible for me to believe that under the US constitutional system the president can legally issue an order to remove funding from an institution either because he thinks (see point 67 in the complaint) “Wouldn’t that be cool?” or because he wishes to take control of an institution he doesn’t like and remake it to his liking.

The acting president of Columbia a few days ago was complaining to the faculty that a way needed to be found to “change the narrative.” Right now, there’s an obvious way to get started on that: Columbia needs to file a similar lawsuit or take part in a joint lawsuit on this issue with Harvard and other institutions. I’m hoping we’ll hear encouraging news about this soon.

In the day’s local news, some students have chained themselves to one of the university gates to protest the arrest and imprisonment of Khalid and Mahdawi. Note that the gate the students locked themselves to is a gate that already is locked and not in use, so by doing this they are in no way interfering with anyone in any way. If acting president Shipman really wants to change the narrative, she could speak out against the treatment of Khalil and Mahdawi on behalf of the university.

Update: First response from the Trump administration here. It’s not about anti-semitism, it’s about defunding science at research universities because of their “grossly overpaid bureaucrats”:

"The gravy train of federal assistance to institutions like Harvard, which enrich their grossly overpaid bureaucrats with tax dollars from struggling American families is coming to an end," Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, wrote in an emailed statement in response to the lawsuit.

He added: "Taxpayer funds are a privilege, and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege."

About the “grossly overpaid bureaucrats” argument, while I don’t think that’s going to help the Trump side win in court, at least it’s finally something on which some faculty will agree with Trump…

Update: 200 presidents of US universities and colleges have signed a Call for Constructive Engagement

As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.

One name conspicuously missing is Claire Shipman’s. When will the Columbia trustees stop trying to appease the Fascists trying to destroy their institution and start fighting back, even if just to the extent of signing a statement like this?

Update: Columbia has now signed, Shipman’s name is in the latest list of names here.

Update: The New York Times has a long article about what has been going on behind the scenes at Harvard. It gives a good idea of what likely has been going on at a similar level here at Columbia. I had been thinking of these discussions as happening just between the trustees, but the NYT story makes clear that large donors can wield significantly more influence than most of the trustees. What Columbia is doing unfortunately makes a lot more sense looking at things this way.

Update: It’s important to emphasize to those not here at Columbia the extent to which we are living in an unusual security environment which has been very successful in achieving its goal of suppressing any anti-Israel protest. On Monday some protesters tethered themselves to a campus gate (one that has been locked for the past year for security reasons). In the past the university generally left protestors who were not obstructing anything alone, but the current policy is very different: they were taken into custody by the NYPD. On Tuesday, Trump official Linda McMahon said she was “very pleased” with this. Still, Columbia hasn’t gotten any of its cancelled grant funds back yet. She also said she was pleased with how negotiations with Columbia are going, which is disturbing to hear, since it indicates Columbia is showing no signs of joining Harvard and others in fighting the Fascist dictatorship.

A story from NBC News reports a super-secret plan to try to start a new encampment at the Columbia campus. The super-secret plan and meeting was described by three people to NBC News, and a recording of the meeting was provided to their reporters. In response, the university has clamped down even harder on security, and issued a statement saying there would be no tolerance for encampments.

Over at Barnard, the Trump administration is helping Jewish faculty and staff feel more safe by sending them texts to their private phones asking them about whether they are Jewish and their practice of Judaism.

I’m encouraged by Scott Aaronson’s latest post, telling Harvard to “Fight Fiercely” against the Trump Administration’s illegal effort to make Harvard do what it wants by cutting off research funding. This is quite a change from his attitude when Columbia first came under this kind of attack from the country’s new dictator. In Columbia’s case, he was looking forward to having this exact sort of attack improve the horrible problem of “antisemitism” here. Many people tried to point out to him at the time, with little effect, that this wasn’t about antisemitism at all, and he should instead have been calling for Columbia not to give in, but to “fight fiercely”. I hope he and others will join the effort to get the Columbia trustees and donors to understand that they need to fight, and that collaborating with the Fascist dictatorship in hopes of furthering one’s personal agenda is not a good idea.

Update: NASA has just announced that as of the end of May it is terminating the lease of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences which operates out of a Columbia-owned building at 112th and Broadway (above Tom’s Restaurant, of Seinfeld fame). GISS has a long and distinguished history in space science, going back to 1961 (see here). After next month, employees will be working remotely, unclear what the future is. Also unclear if this has anything to do with the Trump administration’s continuing effort to apply pressure to Columbia, or if this is some DOGE-thing of just canceling all leases of office space to supposedly save money.

Update: More on the “Are you a Jew?” texts here. They also went to people at Columbia, not just Barnard. Columbia says they only gave out people’s personal contact information in response to a subpoena, and warned those affected in advance that this had happened (Barnard did not do this).

A new detail about the Khalil case is that his arrest was even more Gestapo-style than previously thought: the ICE people who dragged him away from his apartment building did so without any kind of warrant.

The playing fields in the center of campus are now occupied by hundreds and hundreds of students. It’s a really nice spring day and they’re enjoying laying around on the grass and having a good time. As long as they don’t say anything about Palestine, they should be fine.

There was a standing room only Arts and Sciences faculty meeting today here at Columbia, in which the acting president Claire Shipman spoke for a while and then took questions from faculty members. The questions on the whole were challenging her on exactly the issues I’ve been repeatedly bringing up in these blog entries (why the lies about “antisemitism”? why won’t you go to court to challenge the illegal use of dictatorial powers? why won’t you do what Tufts did to support its student who was grabbed off the street?). Shipman did not provide much of an answer to these questions, or any new information about what is going on in the struggle between the university and the Trump administration, but at least she heard these questions loud and clear.

Several questioners very directly confronted her about why the university will not in any way support pro-Palestinian students like Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, unlike the way Tufts has gone to court to support Rumeysa Ozturk. She was directly challenged to say the names of these students and wouldn’t do so (interestingly, the provost, who spoke afterwards, did make a point of saying their names). The only answer she gave as to why she and the trustees won’t say anything was that Columbia is under a lot more scrutiny than Tufts and they felt they were protecting Columbia’s students by doing what they are doing.

Given what has happened to these students, it’s hard to see how support from Columbia would make their situation worse, so I guess one must interpret the “protecting students” claim as an argument that if they supported Khalil or Mahdawi, ICE would be arresting even more people. It’s hard not to look at this and conclude that the true motivations are that expressing any support for any particular individual with pro-Palestinian views would enrage both the internal and external pro-Israeli forces attacking the university, as well as the Trump panel they are trying to negotiate with (Shipman repeated her earlier public characterization of that panel as acting in good faith). Unfortunately another possibility is that at least some of the trustees won’t defend Khalil and Mahdawi because they’re happy to have them disappeared.

There was a lot of discussion about “changing the narrative”, since everyone here is well aware that Columbia is now the most reviled educational institution on the planet. Some faculty pointed out to Shipman that the way to change the narrative would be to change the way the leadership is speaking and acting.

In related “everyone hates Columbia” news, the New York Times published today I’m a Columbia Professor. Here’s the Really Disheartening Part of This Mess by Matthew Connelly. Connelly tries to defend the university and its faculty against a lot of the accusations being made, specifically by the current campaign to boycott the university. He accurately points to a lot of ways in which such accusations have been unfair, but I think he does make one big mistake, writing

Boycott organizers insisted Columbia was "fully capitulating to the conditions imposed by the Trump administration." In fact, many of the actions the Columbia administration announced on March 21 are similar to those originally proposed last August by more than 200 faculty members.

I don’t know what August 2024 proposal he’s referring to. There is a February 2025 letter from about 200 faculty calling for specific pro-Israel changes in policy very similar to the Trump panel demands. There are about 7,000 faculty at Columbia of which likely only a small minority agree with the cave-in to these demands. Associating the faculty here with the bad decisions of the trustees is not going to “change the narrative” for the faculty here but make it worse.

In happier news, Harvard’s decision to fight back and not go the Columbia route is very much “changing the narrative”. Rupert Murdoch’s editorial board at the Wall Street Journal has always been relentlessly devoted to attacking Democrats and liberals and defending the Republican side of all issues, even as this side descends into MAGA craziness. Today their main editorial is Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard: Many of his demands on the school exceed his power under the Constitution. It ends with exactly the argument the Columbia administration has been unwilling to make publicly for fear of alienating the Trump people they are negotiating with:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may not use federal benefits or funds to coerce parties to surrender their constitutional rights. This is what the Administration is doing by demanding Harvard accede to "viewpoint diversity."

The Administration is also overstepping its authority by imposing sweeping conditions on funds that weren’t spelled out by Congress. The Justices held in Cummings (2022) that "if Congress intends to impose a condition on the grant of federal moneys, it must do so unambiguously" to ensure the recipient "voluntarily and knowingly accept[ed] the terms."

Congress can pass a law to advance Mr. Trump’s higher-ed reforms, such as reporting admissions data. But the Administration can’t unilaterally and retroactively attach strings to grants that are unrelated to their purpose.

Also supporting Harvard today is Scott Aaronson who was fine with the Trump administration taking Columbia’s grants away to force the university to adopt the policies he favors. Quoted on Scott’s blog is something everyone should be thinking about:

"If you ever wondered what you would do in Germany in February of 1933, you’re doing it now."

In particular, Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for the Communists…” accurately described the situation in 1933, as the new dictator came into the universities and removed the Communists (since they were “terrorists”, analogs of current-day pro-Palestinian protestors) and their supposed influence. In 1933, anti-Communists were generally happy to see someone come in and rid their institution of the Communist problem, even if they didn’t otherwise support the new dictatorship.

The difference with 1933 is that we know what happened next, and for us the future is not yet determined.

Update: Today it’s an attack by the Fascists on Harvard from several directions at once: the IRS, international students and civil rights laws. I’m hoping that they’ve made a tactical mistake, by putting the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world in a position such that it had to fight for its survival. Going in to this, Harvard has the support of even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

Update: This website has a story about communications between Mohsen Mahdawi and the Columbia administration in the weeks and months before his arrest. From what I hear, the university is taking some actions to try and help international students whose visas are being canceled, but from everything I have heard (including at the recent faculty meeting) it appears to be university policy not to help in any way pro-Palestinian students facing possible arrest and detention. I’d like to be wrong about this, happy to hear from anyone who knows of any help the administration has given students like Khalid and Mahdawi who are targets of the government.

Update: The absurd letter the Trump “task force” sent to Harvard is now claimed to be a mistake, “unauthorized”, premature, or something. That this time around the Fascists are complete clowns gives some hope we’re in something different than 1933.

Update: More Sunday from the WSJ journalists who are acting as press agents for the Trump “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”. According to the latest press release, the NYT article about this was wrong and the letter was not a mistake. Instead:

The Trump administration has grown so furious with Harvard University after a week of escalating dispute between the two sides that it is planning to pull an additional 1ドル billion of the school’s funding for health research, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump administration officials, the people said, thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations.

They were surprised on Monday when Harvard released the letter to the public. Before Monday, the administration was planning to treat Harvard more leniently than Columbia University, but now officials want to apply even more pressure to the nation’s most prominent university, according to the people…

The letter wasn’t marked private, but task force members say that they had made clear in weeks prior that they wanted to keep their discussions private. Harvard disputes that there was any agreement about confidentiality.

Trump administration officials now doubt Harvard ever meant to negotiate and suspect the school aimed to fight the entire time, people familiar with the matter said.

The government’s set of demands was mistakenly sent a day earlier than the task force intended, but its contents weren’t an error, people familiar with the task force said. The administration stands behind the letter with the demands, a White House spokesman said. The New York Times earlier reported that a government official said the letter was sent mistakenly.

"Instead of grandstanding, Harvard should focus on rebuilding confidence among all students, particularly Jewish students," the spokesman said. "The White House remains open to dialogue, but serious changes are needed at Harvard.

This is completely nutty. The Trump Fascist clowns were “treating Harvard more leniently” than Columbia by making ridiculous demands that they take over the university and impose “viewpoint diversity”? If this is true, I’m wondering what their demand letters to Columbia look like. The one thing that does ring true is that the clowns are outraged that Harvard publicly released their clownish letter, which humiliated them by making them look like clowns.

You can now watch the “Oscars of Science’ here. The US tech billionaires and various Hollywood starlets gathered for this ceremony on April 5, in the middle of a massive illegal defunding of US scientific research by our new Fascist dictatorship. As far as I can tell, if you watch the whole thing, you’ll hear nothing at all about this.

Turns out though, that what the Breakthrough Prize people put out is a censored version of what actually happened. According to the Hollywood Reporter:

Emboldened by a dirty martini backstage, Rogen jumped in with a none-too-subtle reference to past attendee and current DOGE mastermind Elon Musk. "And it’s amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science," he said, clearly making Norton uncomfortable. The comment underlined the irony of Silicon Valley’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Trump administration, which has cut federal science funding and defied scientific consensus. "It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with 320ドル million and RFK Jr, very fast," Rogen continued.

but these comments were censored from the video. The reason?

When asked why Rogen’s potentially embarrassing comments were excised, a spokesperson for the Breakthrough Prize Foundation said, "This year’s ceremony lasted longer than the prior few years, and several edits were made in order to meet the originally planned run time."

A significant part of the story of the disaster that has befallen the US and US science is the behavior of various tech billionaires, including Zuckerberg, who is one of the main financial backers of the Breakthrough prize. Putting out a dishonest lie about what they just did is consistent with their general support for the dishonest, lying government we now live under.

The first good news I’ve heard so far: Harvard has announced that it will not cave-in the way Columbia did. The letter from their lawyers is the one Columbia’s lawyers should have written, ending with:

[your letter] presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court. The government’s terms also circumvent Harvard’s statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law. No less objectionable is the condition, first made explicit in the letter of March 31, 2025, that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our country’s scientific, medical, and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world. These demands extend not only to Harvard but to separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals engaging in life-saving work on behalf of their patients. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.

Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.

Harvard president Garber’s statement is here, and includes:

The University will not negotiate over its independence or its constitutional rights.

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

I’m hoping that the Columbia trustees are looking at what Harvard is doing, starting to realize what a horrible mistake they’ve been making the past few weeks, and coming up with a plan to try and extricate themselves from the moral disaster they have gotten themselves into. A good place to start would be resignations of those responsible for this.

There is nothing in the Harvard statement about the other front in the war on universities, the campaign to deport students, often for exercise of their first amendment rights. In Columbia related news, a Palestinian student with a green card and 10 years residence in the US was arrested today, there’s a detailed story at The Intercept.

There was a small demonstration in the center of campus midday today, largely organized by people from the medical school, see here for their demands that the university stand up to Trump. This is the first such demonstration on campus that I have heard of, hopefully it will be the start of a much larger movement by students, faculty and staff.

Update: The New York Times has a detailed article about the ongoing Trump campaign to attack Columbia and other universities.

Update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article which puts what has been going on at Columbia in context as an attempt to eradicate the influence of Edward Said. About the Trump demand letter and the cave-in, it notices the same thing that it took me a while to see:

A fight could have been waged, the pro bono talent was at hand, and a win was just a matter of time. One clue why that never materialized can be found in the letter itself, which bristled with Columbia-specific lingo. It seemed to have been fashioned by university insiders hammering out a to-do list in the backrooms of the White House, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia historian, noticed, describing the letter as essentially a set of "grievances from extremist alumni group chats, translated directly into federal policy."…

The ukase from Washington in Columbia’s case was not, as university leaders saw it, a crisis but an opportunity: "Things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly," said Ester R. Fuchs, co-chair of Columbia’s antisemitism task force.

Update: Evidently the Columbia administration would not allow press on campus to cover the faculty demonstration today. The local news organizations did get a helicopter up above campus to get video, and the faculty went outside the gates to hold a press conference.

Update: The Wall Street Journal reporters who have been writing articles from the point of view of the Trump panel have a long and detailed article about the panel here. They generally treat illegally defunding the universities as a clever if unusual tactic (“a brilliant stroke”), although do get this quote

"Cutting off the funding spigot is a nuclear-type weapon of enforcement," said Scott Schneider, an education lawyer in Austin. "It’s outside the legal system and is a remarkable exercise of executive authority."

A “remarkable exercise of executive authority” taking place “outside the legal system” is a very polite way of describing the workings of a Fascist dictatorship. The Fascist justification is that this is the “will of the people” and the WSJ has done polling to back this up:

In a Wall Street Journal poll that surveyed 1,500 registered voters by phone from March 27 through April 1, 48% favored withholding funds from universities for failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.

Note that the poll question didn’t seem to say anything about this being against the law.

The way the panel works is described as follows:

In its meetings, task force officials discuss strategies, legal tools, and news from student and alumni groups and university trustees that its members are connected to.

It seems all too possible that “its members are connected to” one or more of the Columbia trustees and that would explain a lot. The Columbia board of trustees needs to remove any of its members who are working with the Trump panel.

Update: There’s a late-night statement from the Columbia president. They’re still negotiating with the Trump people, haven’t reached any agreement:

Those discussions have not concluded, and we have not reached any agreement with the government at this point. Some of the government’s requests have aligned with policies and practices that we believe are important to advancing our mission, particularly to provide a safe and inclusive campus community. I stand firmly behind the commitments we outlined on March 21, and all the work that has been done to date. Other ideas, including overly prescriptive requests about our governance, how we conduct our presidential search process, and how specifically to address viewpoint diversity issues are not subject to negotiation.

To be clear, our institution may decide at any point, on its own, to make difficult decisions that are in Columbia’s best interests. Any good institution must do that. Where the government – or any stakeholder – has legitimate interest in critical issues for our healthy functioning, we will listen and respond. But we would reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution and undermine useful reforms that serve the best interests of our students and community. We would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire. And yes, to put minds at ease, though we seek to continue constructive dialog with the government, we would reject any agreement that would require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution.

Like many of you, I read with great interest the message from Harvard refusing the federal government’s demands for changes to policies and practices that would strike at the very heart of that university’s venerable mission.

On the issue of students losing their visas and being dragged off to prison, still no support for them. No mention of the student arrested today in Vermont. Instead there’s a new International Student Hardship Fund from which students can apply for grants of from \1000ドル-\2500ドル if they’re having financial problems.

Update: I took a look at the demands sent to Harvard last Friday, hadn’t realized they were different and much more extensive than the ones I had seen a week ago. They’re not about anti-semitism, basically a demand that Harvard turn itself into Trump U. This makes me see Harvard actions yesterday not so much as a profile in courage, but as the only option they had. These were demands they couldn’t give in to, and they had seen from Columbia’s example what happens when you start giving into these people’s demands (they just take more of your money away and make more demands).

Latest craziness from Trump this morning: wants to take Harvard’s tax-exempt status away from it, because “it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting "Sickness””

Yesterday Science magazine had an exclusive news story that the NIH freezes all research grants to Columbia University, going beyond the previous \250ドル million in biomedical research grant money. According to the story

In an 8 April email seen by Science, NIH’s Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration Director Michelle Bulls told grant administrators that HHS had initially ordered NIH to terminate the first "wave" of grants to Columbia and hold others while the school negotiated with the government. Now, she said, no NIH awards can be made to Columbia until the restriction is lifted. In 2024, Columbia received about 690ドル million in grant funding from NIH.

It seems likely that the source of this story is an NIH grant administrator who received this email.

The university responded later in the day with this:

At this time, Columbia has not received notice from the NIH about additional cancellations. As Acting President Shipman has said, the University remains in active dialogue with the Federal Government to restore its critical research funding.

The only thing we’ve been hearing from the acting president about the “active dialogue” is enthusiasm for the March 21 cave-in (see here and here) to demands from the Trump administration.

Two journalists at The Wall Street Journal over the past few weeks have been effectively acting as spokepersons for one or more of the Trump administration officials attacking Columbia. Today’s press release starts off

The Trump administration is planning to pursue a legal arrangement that would put Columbia University into a consent decree, according to people familiar with the matter, an extraordinary step that could significantly escalate the pressure on the school as it battles for federal funding.

A consent decree, which can last for years, would give a federal judge responsibility for ensuring Columbia changes its practices along lines laid out by the federal government. If such a decree is in place, Columbia would have to comply with it. If a judge determines the school is out of compliance, it could be held in contempt of court—punishable by penalties including fines.

and continues with threats to Columbia in case it might be thinking of resisting:

Columbia could fight the move in court; the Justice Department would need to prove that the arrangement is warranted. But a court case could take years, and Columbia would likely lose federal funding in the interim—and might ultimately lose. Opposing the move would also open the school up to required depositions and legal fact-finding, which could keep the school’s campus politics in the spotlight.

If there’s any problem with the idea of dictatorial powers being used to take an institution’s funds away, have them fire their president, and then put a representative of the dictator in charge, the WSJ reporters don’t seem curious about it.

I have no idea what happens next and what the trustees think of this. Unfortunately, it seems possible that we are where we are now because a significant element within the university has taken advantage of the current situation to push pro-Israel changes, and wouldn’t be unhappy with a partial takeover of the university to make sure they get what they want. This includes hiring new pro-Israel faculty, which is already underway: the first job ad for such a position is now up, with more promised in the cave-in.

Update: There’s a story about this at the New York Times. Unlike the WSJ reporters, the NYT reporters talked to a lawyer not working for Trump, who explained:

But if a consent decree is under negotiation, either the administration or the school would probably have to file a lawsuit in federal court, which would serve as a vehicle for turning any deal into an agreement that could be overseen by a judge, said Tobias B. Wolff, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school who specializes in civil procedure and has written about consent decrees.

"Judges can’t just wave a wand and turn an agreement into a consent decree absent a lawsuit over which the court has proper jurisdiction," Mr. Wolff said.

The NYT article also included some inside information not in the WSJ press release:

It is unclear whether the final version of any agreement would include a consent decree, and the White House has yet to sign off on the possibility of a consent decree, said two administration officials involved in the planning.

Update: The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about the impact of stopping funding of NIH grants at Columbia. It tells the story of what’s happening in the biomedical research lab of Donna Farber. Supposedly because of the problem of “antisemitism” at the university, major medical research efforts like the one in this lab are in the process of being shut down.

NPR has a story about how, for students opposed to what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, fear and silence is a new campus reality. This focuses on Cornell rather than Columbia, but things are much the same here. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have effectively been shut down for nearly a year, with those who in the past participated in such demonstrations now keeping quiet out of fear. If they are non-US citizens, they are rightfully terrified of their name being on a list, their visa being silently revoked, and ICE agents coming to drag them away to a prison in Louisiana. Amidst all of this, the university is claiming that its number one priority is combatting antisemitism on the campus.

Update: This is disturbing.

Two pieces of news this evening:

1. A week or so ago the interim president of Columbia was removed by the trustees, seemingly to appease the Trump panel she was negotiating with. At the time we were told she would be returning to her position running the medical center. Tonight the news is that she’s been replaced there, will go on sabbatical. This appears to be because of this news story, which is based on a transcript of a deposition by Armstrong. I haven’t yet read the deposition, but the story accuses her of not being aware of the details of incidents of supposed antisemitism at Columbia.

2. Just received the following email from the provost:

Dear members of the Columbia community,

As many of you may have seen in various media reports, the federal government has begun taking action to terminate visa eligibility for international students across the country for alleged incidents including minor traffic violations. Over the past two days, the University has learned that four current international students have had their visas revoked and participation in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program terminated by the federal government. The University was not notified of these status terminations and only became aware of them through proactive daily checks in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) database by our International Students and Scholars Office (ISSO).

ISSO is monitoring the situation closely, notifying students as we become aware of any change in their SEVIS status, and connecting them with resources, including external legal assistance that the University has made available.

ISSO is also standing by to provide support resources to any international student or scholar who may have questions or concerns. ISSO (Morningside/Manhattanville and CUIMC) offers advising appointments in person, via Zoom, or phone (212-854-3587). ISSO advisors are here to support you. The ISSO e-mail (isso@columbia.edu) is continuously monitored. Please immediately notify ISSO of any pressing concerns and an advisor will reach out to set up a same-day appointment.

The University deeply values our international scholars and students. Our international community is essential to driving excellence in scholarship and research at Columbia and we are committed to supporting all members of our community.

Sincerely,

Angela V. Olinto
Provost

Professor of Astronomy and of Physics

It’s very unclear what is going on here. Were these some of the students being pursued by pro-Israeli groups? People with traffic tickets? Something else? What happens to a student who loses their visa in this way? Will Columbia join any legal actions of the students the way Tufts did?

Update: Just read through the transcript. Very odd, a Trump administration lawyer brow-beating Armstrong about her supposedly insufficient dedication to fighting antisemitism, after she was forced out. Also very odd, the transcript is cut off exactly where it gets interesting, when she is asked “why did you step down as interim president?” Maybe the answer to that didn’t fit the agenda of the person who leaked the deposition.

Update: The Wall Street Journal has a story. Reporters Liz Essley Whyte and Douglas Belkin have now written a string of stories based on confidential information provided them by one or more sources hostile to the university. This time, like the far-right Washington Free Beacon, they were provided the partial transcript of the Armstrong April 1 deposition, and used that to make Armstrong and Columbia look bad. On top of helping execute this anonymous attack, they’re also helping their anonymous sources put out threats:

The government called Armstrong in for questioning to send a message to higher-education officials broadly beyond Columbia that they will have to answer for their words and actions under oath, people familiar with the matter said.

Update: Excellent analysis and advice: Why Universities Must Start Litigating — and How, from 3 law professors (Columbia’s David Pozen, Harvard’s Ryan Doerfler, and Michigan’s Samuel Bagenstos.

Update: There are now two dueling documentaries out there about the protests here last year. In one, the Columbia administration is anti-semitic, supportive of the Palestinian cause and won’t protect its pro-Israel students. In the other the Columbia administration is firmly pro-Israel and won’t protect its pro-Palestinian students. Stephen Silver has watched both and discusses here.

Inside Higher Ed has a story about an event discussing the Trump administration’s plans for higher education. Besides shutting down Columbia University, the article features Grand Canyon University, which is a model for what the Trump administration wants higher ed to look like. It’s a for-profit operation, run out of a variety of locations throughout the West. They are proud that “a biblical worldview is incorporated across all academic subjects at GCU.” and argue that:

"The media, higher ed and Hollywood has tried to convince most of America that what is being taught at 95 percent of our universities is what Americans want, and that is absolutely untrue," Mueller said. "The majority of Americans don’t want what’s being taught from a worldview perspective in most of these institutions. It wants what we’re teaching in our institutions."

This kind of for-profit non-truth-based operation has had problems with accreditation, so changing the accrediting system is one of the main goals of the Trump people.

The 2025 Breakthrough Prize winners were announced yesterday. On their website there’s a video saying that Hollywood is set to roll out the red carpet for the Breakthrough Prize ceremony, scheduled for Saturday April 12 at 3pm Eastern time. But, there are lots of pics of celebrities at the ceremony now available on the Footwear News website. I guess the ceremony was yesterday, edited video available April 12.

• On the mathematics side of things, big winner was geometric Langlands, with a \3ドル million prize to Dennis Gaitsgory and a \100,000ドル New Horizons prize to Sam Raskin. There’s a nice interview with Gaitsgory at Scientific American.
• On the physics side, there was one \3ドル million prize given to all the LHC experiments, with money going to the CERN & Society Foundation. A second \3ドル million prize was given to Gerard ‘t Hooft for his work forty-fifty years ago on renormalizing Yang-Mills and non-perturbative effects in QCD.

Debates about the future of CERN post-LHC continue (see two articles by Davide Castelvecchi here and here). In June there will be an Open Symposium in Venice as part of the process for producing next year an update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. Submitted contributions for this discussion are now available here. The leading proposal (“FCC”) has been for a new very large tunnel, to host first an electron-positron Higgs factory, then later a new proton-proton machine. This however would be extremely expensive and take a very large time to build and operate, with no guarantee of finding anything new. An alternative being proposed would give up the huge new ring, instead build first a linear collider as a Higgs factory, then later a muon collider.

Idiocy about “observational evidence for string theory” will never die. For the latest, see here.

Not much news from Columbia this week, the Fascist dictatorship was successful at getting the president of Columbia removed and has now moved on to Harvard, Princeton and Brown. Hopefully the leadership of those institutions is more willing to fight Fascism than Columbia’s. Or, at least, they may have noticed that if you do what Columbia did you’ll bring shame on your institution, and still not get your money back.

During the past week I’ve been trying without success to find anyone who knows anything about what is going on with Columbia’s leadership and its dealings with the Trump administration. The acting president of Columbia has just issued a statement, entitled Listening, Learning and Starting the Conversation, video here. In this posting I’ll try and do a close reading of the statement. Shipman’s text is the part in italics, my interpretation of what she’s saying follows.

First, the commitments the University made to address antisemitism, harassment, and discrimination, which were outlined on March 21, are now my commitments, and work is underway to continue their implementation. We are not changing course. I believe the plans, many of which were already underway, are the right thing to do, and good for our institution.

The previous president (Katrina Armstrong) was fired for insufficient dedication to implementing the cave-in to Trump. I’m not going to make her mistake. We should all be enthusiastic about the cave-in, which is “good for our institution”.

Second, we are proceeding, with integrity and care, in our discussions with the federal government about restoring our research funding.

Even with the cave-in, they still won’t give us the money back. They’re continuing to illegally use the money to try and force us to do more things against our principles, but we have to be really careful not to annoy them by resisting. We’re still too afraid to try and deal with their illegal behavior by going to court.

Third, I also want to acknowledge the deep fear and uncertainty being felt at this moment in our international community. I see you, and I hear you, and the University administration is, and I am, deeply concerned for all our international students and scholars…

We are committed to supporting our international community in any way possible for us. I’ve asked our team to substantially increase our funding and hours for our International Student and Scholars Office (ISSO), so that our advisors are more readily available to help…

Let me also make this clear—Columbia doesn’t have the ultimate authority, and we’re committed to following the law.

We are not going to do anything like what Tufts is doing for its imprisoned student. We’re not going to help any of our students who get dragged out of their dorms or off the streets, we’re not even going to mention their names. As far as we’re concerned, using bogus accusations that our students are terrorists to arrest, imprison and deport them is perfectly legal.

I’ll also take this moment to put some rumors to rest. No member of the leadership team or the Board of Trustees ever notified ICE about any members of our community. Full stop.

There was a March 10 Forward article with the text:

“Ross Glick, a pro-Israel activist who previously shared a list of campus protesters with federal immigration authorities, said that he was in Washington, D.C., for meetings with members of Congress during the Barnard library demonstration and discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to "escalate" the issue. He said that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.

"This unfolded very quickly because it was obvious," Glick said in an interview Monday. "Everybody was upset," he recalled of his meetings on the Hill. "The guy was making it too easy for us."

Here I’m going with a non-denial denial. I won’t deny this, instead I’ll vigorously deny something different (trustees reported Khalil to ICE).

Update: Two Harvard Law professors argue in the Boston Globe that Harvard should not do what Columbia did, but go to court.

Update: The New York Times Editorial Board has advice for the Columbia trustees.

Update: My colleague Michael Harris puts the current attack on Columbia and other universities in perspective, including the role of “the billiard ball-headed billionaire bros.”

The interim president of Columbia was forced out last night from her position, it appears as a demand of the “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”, see here. This indicates that the trustees continue to believe that they have to do whatever they are told, including firing the university president and replacing her with someone more compliant.

A commenter here pointed to a Wall Street Journal article from a while back which explains where the demands being made by the Trump administration are coming from: Columbia’s own faculty:

Last month, seven faculty members and the co-founder of the school’s Jewish alumni association went to the interim president, Katrina Armstrong, with nearly the same requests as the Trump administration.

They called on Columbia to fight discrimination and encourage inclusivity. They asked the president to ban masks, adopt a stricter definition of what constitutes antisemitism, and discipline members of the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department. Most of the recommendations haven’t been acted on.

"I was shocked when I saw" the Trump administration letter, said Larisa Geskin, a professor in the medical school and an author of a faculty letter to the interim president. "I was like, ‘Am I reading my letter?’ This is what I was talking about."

Geskin, a cancer researcher, is critical of university leadership. "When there is a war, somebody has to make a decision, and decisions are not being made, at least that we can see," Geskin said.

We’ve been told over the past week that the trustees are not going to court, but agreeing to all demands because they believe that if they don’t do so, the university will lose not just the \400ドル million, but also all Federal grants (in the billions), as well as Pell Grants and other student loans, and visas for its foreign students. Their belief is that the Trump administration has the power to effectively destroy the university if they don’t cave-in to everything (or even if they try and go to court).

The demands being made clearly are not coming from Trump, it appears that they are coming from this group of seven Columbia faculty members. Geskin and the six others who are behind this need to immediately call off the attack on their university, or take responsibility and make clear publicly that they are willing to destroy the university if they don’t get what they want.

Update: The bogus “antisemitism” attack has been such a success at damaging Columbia and giving Trump’s people control of the institution that they’re now moving on to doing the same thing to Harvard. Hopefully the trustees at Harvard have more willingness to stand up for principle and go to court to fight Fascism than the ones at Columbia.

Update: For a detailed discussion of the events at Columbia I’ve been covering, see this blog posting from Columbia Law Professor David Pozen.

Update: I’ve tracked down the story of the group that met with Armstrong and presented her a list of demands similar to the Trump task force demands. Evidently there was a meeting on Jan. 17 where a group of 9 people (medical school, law school, business school, engineering, alumni, no arts and sciences) presented Armstrong a list of demands. This group then circulated a letter for signatures, got about 200 signatures. The letter published Feb. 3 is here, coverage in the Spectator is here.

The WSJ referred in March to a meeting the month before, so there presumably was another meeting in February with Armstrong of much the same group of people. The March 13 letter from the Trump task force has many similarities (and some differences) with that Feb. 3 letter.

So, when Armstrong got the March 13 demands, this was presumably just the latest in a back and forth of demands, which started with the internal Columbia group and later became demands from the government. This goes a long way to explaining why the university caved-in to the demands from the outside: for a while they had been dealing with similar demands from a large group inside the university. It seems possible that some of the trustees supported these demands, explaining why the trustees decided not to go to court to challenge the version of the demands coming from outside.

Update: The University Senate has published a 335 page report on the events at Columbia from Oct.7, 2023 to the end of 2024. It contains an exhaustive description of what exactly happened here during that period.

Update: Worth following is political scientist Adam Przeworski’s ongoing diary of our descent into Fascism. From his March 25 entry:

Here is an excerpt from Adventures of a Bystander, by Peter Drucker, without a comment because it speaks for itself:

“[S]everal weeks after the Nazis had come to power, was the first Nazi-led faculty meeting at the University. Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia altogether. So did everyone at the University. Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist of Nobel Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar for Frankfurt was announced around February 25 of that year and when not only every teacher but also every graduate assistant at the University was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear his new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. … The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities…. [He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said: ‘You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.’ There was dead silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said: ‘Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating. But one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?’ The meeting broke up shortly thereafter with the commissar assuring the scholars that indeed there would be plenty of money for ‘racially pure science’.”

To update the situation at Columbia, first of all, the weather is sunny and nice and the campus is very quiet. As has been the case since the police were brought in to clear Hamilton Hall and the encampments nearly a year ago, demonstrations of any kind have been rare and small. The only way to get on campus is through tight security at only two gates. On campus, lots and lots of Columbia security staff, at the gates NYPD and news cameras. Down the street, reports of marked ICE vehicles, unknown number of unmarked ones. There’s a reason the place is quiet: most people are terrified of what will happen to them if they say the wrong thing. The university puts out statements explaining that “At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.”

After talking to a lot of people over the past couple days, what the administration is doing has started to become a lot clearer to me. One thing that helped make things clear is the story of what happened over this past weekend, which I’ve pieced together from various sources. It goes as follows:

Late Friday the president sent an email out announcing the cave-in to the Trump demands. The decision to do this appears to have been done with little to no consultation outside of the president and trustees. Deans only heard about this at the same time as anyone else. On Saturday morning there was a Zoom session organized where the president met with deans, department chairs and some others. What happened on this Zoom is reported here:

… a transcript of the meeting [was made], which seems to have been created because Columbia administrators were unable to disable the Zoom function that generates an audio transcript. The transcript itself captures administrators struggling to prevent the software from creating a transcript and then moving forward without success.

“I am unable to turn it off, for technical reasons, so we’re all just going to have to understand,” an unnamed administrator said at the outset. “This meeting is being transcribed. If you are the requester of this, I would ask you to turn it off.”

“Yeah, that seems to be the default. I keep telling my people to stop this thing,” Olinto, the provost, responded.

The transcript was evidently requested by one of the participants, who then sent it to the Free Press, who wrote about it and appear to have shared it with the Trump “Antisemitism Task Force”.

The Free Press is Bari Weiss’s organization, and she’s been at this for twenty years, since her student days at Columbia when she led a campaign to try and get a Palestinian professor fired. What’s going on now is a continuation of this decades-long fight to tar the university as antisemitic and get pro-Palestinian students and faculty removed. The big difference now is that she and her allies (which clearly include at least one of the people on the Zoom) have carte-blanche from Trump to use his dictatorial powers to get them what they want.

Until I heard this story, while I could understand why the university felt it had to as much as possible try to cave-in to the Trump people’s demands, I couldn’t understand why they had decided not to go to court to challenge the obvious illegal confiscation of their funds. I also could not understand why they did not publicly support in any way the multiple students here and elsewhere who were being grabbed off the streets and flown to a prison in Louisiana. Whenever I asked anyone connected with the administration about this, they said that the answer they were hearing to this question was that there was fear that much worse things would happen if they crossed the Trump people. At first I couldn’t understand this, it just appeared to be unusual cravenness.

After hearing about the transcript story, it became clear to me how central feelings about Israel are to what is going on. There have always been people like Bari Weiss who feel that supporters of the Palestinians are a threat to Israel and to the lives of the Jewish people everywhere, a terrifying situation that justifies extreme measures. Starting after Oct. 7, demonstrations at Columbia made the university a target of their ire, and began a process of the university trying to appease them by agreeing with their claims about pro-Palestinian demonstrations as dangerous antisemitism. These appeasement efforts were unsuccessful, and through Trump they now have gotten ahold of the reins of dictatorial power. The Columbia administration has decided it has no choice but to do whatever they ask.

I can’t begin to guess how this will play out over the coming days and weeks. The only thing clear now is that, given the Zoom transcript story, the president and trustees are even less likely than before to inform or consult with deans and department chairs, much less any of the faculty. I can understand why people are organizing boycotts of Columbia, but do keep in mind what the source of the problem is (the Trump dictatorship and those who are using it for their ends).

While the Columbia administration won’t go to court (although it is telling people it might still do so in the future), the AAUP and AFT have now done so, on behalf of affected faculty. The complaint is here.

Update: News last Friday evening from the Columbia president and trustees was that they had agreed to cave-in to the ransom note from the “Antisemitism Task Force”. News this Friday evening is that the Columbia president is now ex-president. No idea what this means, guessing that events of this week have made clear to the trustees that they and the now ex-president made a terrible mistake last week.