Columbia Pays for Its Sins

National Review Online

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

 

The Trump administration’s task force to combat antisemitism pulled $400 million in federal grants and contracts from Columbia University this month in response to the school’s appalling mismanagement of the abuse of Jewish students by anti-Israel activists. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon stated that Columbia abandoned its legal obligation to protect Jewish students, who have faced “relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment” on campus. The administration presented a list of demands for the university to follow as a condition for restored funding, and the school has since agreed to them. Defenders of academic freedom — some of them sincere — have howled that the university is bending the knee to Donald Trump.

 

Columbia deserves every bit of what it is now facing at Trump’s indelicate hands. While we enjoy witnessing the comeuppance of institutions rotted by left-wing zealotry and hoisted on the petard of their own intolerance as much as the next fellow, the administration needs to proceed with more care in the future. Otherwise, it risks setting precedents that conservatives will live to regret.

 

We do not wish to sound like a broken record on the importance of rules, precedents, and a rigorous process in this area. But they do matter, because free speech and the independence of institutions from government dictates are crucially important. We can best fortify their protection by drawing clear and principled distinctions not only when defending political speech we find appalling but also when explaining what falls outside of that line, and why.

 

We begin with two truths that our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., long ago emphasized about academic freedom: It is ultimately subordinate to the interests of students in pursuing truth, and its invocation as a shibboleth to protect faculty and administrators should not obscure the ends for which societies fund universities in the first place. Columbia failed on both grounds. It allowed disruptive protesters (some of them not even its students) to prevent Jewish students from fully participating in a Columbia education. It vigorously policed speech that was unfashionable on the left, yet applied a completely different standard to lawless acts that terrorized students — punishing “microaggression” while tolerating actual aggression. And it took billions of dollars in public money while acting as if it had no responsibility to the public.

 

It is far too late in the day to pretend that Columbia is disinterestedly allowing students to pursue truth without regard to politics. The climate on campus has long been politically coercive and restrictive of dissent, with faculty and the administration abusing their position of authority over the students in order to indoctrinate them and limit their access to the full spectrum of contending ideas. It is also too late to pretend that this is purely private activity. Not only is Columbia a recipient of massive federal largesse — the very threat to academic freedom that Buckley warned the Ivy League about in 1951 — but its entire structure of admissions and campus discipline has been shaped for decades by government regulation. In placing countervailing government and political pressure on Columbia, Trump may be playing with fire, but he is doing so inside a burning house.

 

The relentless anti-Israel mob at Columbia University engaged in destructive conduct that fits no definition of free speech. The campus grew so chaotic that even the university’s then-president, Minouche Shafik, described it as a “crisis” and switched to remote classes. Elie Buechler, an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia/Barnard and co-director of the school’s Jewish Leaning Initiative on Campus, urged hundreds of Jewish students to go home and remain there until “campus has dramatically improved.” The university had to summon the New York Police Department to break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” resulting in over 100 arrests. Unsurprisingly, the encampment simply respawned. Later, hundreds of NYPD officers in riot gear intervened to remove over 100 people who illegally occupied a campus building; the activists were charged with offenses including burglary, trespass, and criminal mischief. As an academic environment, this resembled less the School of Athens than the trial of Socrates.

 

Columbia now pledges to end lawless violence and intimidation by banning masked protests and allowing campus law enforcement to arrest menacing protesters. This is good, and it limits no freedom we would call academic. It vows to “ensure unbiased admissions processes,” another area in which law and government have long been engaged. While that may be hard to enforce, the goal is salutary. The school will add a vice provost to oversee its department of Middle East, South Asian, and African studies and Center for Palestine Studies in order to “ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced,” and will review its “hiring of non-tenured faculty.” While it is unfortunate that such a thing should be demanded by the government, the demand exists not only because the departments were so politicized as to deny students the pursuit of truth but also because Columbia’s faculty, hired with the aid of its lavish taxpayer funding, has been actively engaged in inciting the antisocial protests. That it now promises to pursue more “institutional neutrality” is progress in the direction of more rather than less genuine free expression on campus. If Columbia wished to run an activist organization instead, it should have chosen to do so without half a billion dollars a year from the American taxpayer.

 

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides a process for cutting off taxpayer funds from a university that violates the civil rights of its students. That process was not followed here. It is not necessarily the case that the Title VI process is the exclusive avenue for the federal government to withhold funds, or that the federal civil rights laws are the only violations that should result in such a decision. But the entirely ad hoc process followed here is one that can easily be abused to dictate terms to universities that have not committed the sorts of pervasive wrongs against student education and physical safety that occurred at Columbia. We would warn against adopting this process as a precedent.

 

The outcome, in this case, is a good one. It was reached for sound reasons that accord entirely with a properly understood First Amendment as well as a properly understood climate of real academic freedom. The next case, however, will demand a more rigorous process precisely because easy cases make bad laws.