Columbia University Has the Free Speech Problem, Not the Trump Administration

By Charles Fain Lehman

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

 

For the past year, intermittent anarchy has reigned at Columbia University. Anti-Israel protesters—students, faculty, staff, and outsiders—have occupied buildings, disrupted classes, assaulted staff, and defaced property. Law-abiding Columbians have been forced off campus, while Jewish students have been threatened on campus and assaulted in the surrounding neighborhood.

 

Against this backdrop, it is hard to take seriously those who see the Trump administration’s recent actions at Columbia—including the stripping of $400 million in federal funds and its ongoing attempt to deport activist and erstwhile student Mahmoud Khalil—and conclude that it’s the White House that is threatening free speech.

 

Rather, it is Columbia that has been denying many of its students their academic freedom, and coddling those who violate others’ rights. The Trump administration’s actions—which are prudent, careful, and look to be on solid legal ground—are simply an attempt to force Columbia to uphold the values that it professes and the law requires.

 

Columbia’s recent problems began last spring, when students, faculty, and outside agitators set up a “Gaza solidarity encampment” on the university’s green. The protests culminated on April 30, when protesters broke into and occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall. The NYPD eventually entered and shut down the occupation.

 

Tensions flared up again last month when Columbia belatedly expelled two mask-wearing students who barged into a class on modern Israel in an attempt to shut it down. In response to the expulsions, protesters seized a building at Barnard, Columbia’s affiliated women’s college, shutting down classes and assaulting a staff member in the process. Then, just a week ago, protesters occupied a Barnard library.

 

Central to these activities is the organization that Khalil allegedly helped lead, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). The group, which organized the takeover of Hamilton Hall and claimed credit for the Barnard occupations, has said it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” It also endorsed “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance” in a statement that withdrew an apology for a member’s previous assertion that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” CUAD continues to engage in disturbing vandalism, including pouring cement in campus toilets to disrupt campus activities.

 

The seizure of buildings, destruction of property, and threat of violence necessarily impact student life. Indeed, the campus was locked down last spring in response to the encampments, with classes and exams run online through the end of the semester.

 

Jewish students, in particular, have reported a pervasive atmosphere of intimidation and harassment. Video from the encampments showed one protester holding a sign reading “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets” next to a group of Jewish counter-protesters (Al-Qasam is Hamas’s armed faction). A campus rabbi told Jewish students to “return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved.”

 

But it’s not just Jews. Two Columbia janitors recently filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in which they allege that they were not only routinely forced to scrub swastikas from campus walls, but were assaulted during the occupation of Hamilton Hall. When they raised concerns about the graffiti, the two claim, they were told that “the trespassers and vandals were exercising their First Amendment rights.”

 

All of this is not the (often imaginary) gentle campus protest of the 1960s. It is more like what my Manhattan Institute colleague Tal Fortgang has labeled “civil terrorism”—“random acts of lawlessness designed to inconvenience and disrupt as many civilians as possible” in order to effect policy change. CUAD’s behavior—trespassing, threats, vandalism, and violence, combined with explicit endorsement of violent revolution—is archetypical civil terrorism.

 

Such behavior is incompatible with free speech. The ideal of academic freedom requires order and safety—not safety from “dangerous ideas,” but from actual violence. Free speech on campus is only possible if students do not have to fear that their dissenting views will be met with threats. And it is only possible if they can participate in classes or enter buildings without intimidation or disruption—otherwise, discourse is not possible.

 

Columbia’s failure to deter its civil terrorists is what has necessitated the Trump administration’s actions.

 

The Department of Education has explained that its pause on $400 million in funding is because Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations” of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Department of Education’s letter imposes certain requirements on Columbia in exchange for restored funding. Many of these amount to actually having rules: Columbia must “enforce existing disciplinary policies” and deliver a “plan to hold all student groups accountable” for involvement with violation of university policy. It must also “empower internal law enforcement”—the school can no longer abdicate responsibility in the face of student takeovers.

 

Several of the conditions are tailored to check disruptive “speech” that forestalls actual discussion. The demand that Columbia implement “rules to prevent disruption of teaching, research, and campus life” means that student protest doesn’t get to shut down academic life. And the insistence that Columbia impose a ban on masking is—as my Manhattan Institute colleagues Ilya Shapiro, Hannah Meyers, and Tim Rosenberger have argued—consistent with the First Amendment and with the dozens of state laws that recognize public, non-health-related masking as intimidating and deceitful.

 

What about Khalil? The government’s reasons for attempting to deport him remain fuzzy, as different administration officials have given different explanations. We know it relies on an infrequently used provision of immigration law that permits the removal of an alien if the secretary of state believes his “presence or activities” would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

 

Which of Khalil’s “presence or activities” threaten U.S. foreign policy is still unclear—and probably won’t be decisively known until he actually receives an immigration court hearing, currently scheduled for March 27. If, as the Department of Homeland Security has claimed, Khalil was involved in the distribution of Hamas propaganda, that may be enough to send him packing. Or if the government pivots to arguing that Khalil “espoused terrorist activities,” he will be deported on account of his actions—not his speech.

 

But it is possible that Khalil is being deported simply for expressing opinions, including what Secretary of State Marco Rubio has characterized as “pro-Hamas” views. If so, that raises obvious First Amendment questions: Are Khalil’s free-speech rights at risk?

 

In some senses, that’s a question for the courts. As Jed Rubenfeld explained at The Free Press, there are substantial ambiguities in the interplay between the First Amendment and the broad deference courts must grant the executive and legislative branches in immigration matters. Khalil, a green card holder, is a guest of the American government. Whether and how the First Amendment constrains the government’s right to revoke that status is not cut and dry.

 

That’s for good reason. Immigration law has for more than a century acknowledged that no government must tolerate non-citizens who profess radical views in a way that threatens the nation. Consistent with this, current statute establishes the inadmissibility and deportability of members of “totalitarian parties” and any alien who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.”

 

The reason for these provisions is similar to the reason that free speech at Columbia requires a degree of order. While Americans believe fervently in free speech, the denizens of many other nations do not. And America should not be forced to retain those who disagree with it about fundamental constitutional values. Indeed, it would be suicidal to do otherwise. We—a democratic republic—cannot admit nor guarantee residency to people who are opposed to one of the fundamental tenets of democratic republicanism.

 

If Khalil is in fact a supporter of Hamas, then he supports a group that is not, to put it mildly, pro-speech. Ditto if he was a leader of CUAD, as he seems to have been. His deportation, then, would further advance free speech at Columbia, by removing someone who is ideologically opposed to the “western civilization” CUAD decries, and which makes free speech possible.

 

This gets to the heart of what the Trump administration is doing at Columbia: defending free speech on behalf of an institution that has been unwilling to do it itself. Doing so, it turns out, means guaranteeing order, civility, and adherence to rules. And it can mean the removal of people who profess ideologies fundamentally hostile to free speech.

 

So if you’re worried about free speech at Columbia, don’t fear the Trump administration’s agenda. Instead, worry about how things got so bad, and why it took so long for the federal government to act.