Trump’s Ultimatum to Columbia University Was Deserved

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 24, 2025

 

By April of last year, it was clear that Columbia University needed help.

 

The cultural tide in America had turned against the permissive atmosphere on America’s campuses, which tolerated the roving bands of menacing, occasionally violent anti-Israel mobs that had transformed their institutions from centers of learning to gauntlets. That month, Columbia President Nemat Shafik abandoned the defiant posture that typified the stance Ivy League presidents had previously assumed. She confessed that conditions on her campus were “not acceptable” and would not be “tolerated,” and that the treatment to which Jewish students had been subjected violated her university’s code of conduct.

 

Democrats, including state Attorney General Letitia James, joined Republicans in calling on the institution to more vigorously protect students against harassment. Two weeks later, she invited New York City police onto her campus to roll up the bivouac populated by radical students and outsiders alike. The operation was violently resisted. One hundred arrests were made, graduation was canceled, and the academic year ended on a tense note.

 

The attempt to restore sanity did not take. In August, Shafik resigned. That fall, the encampments returned, which should have been expected. As GOP-led House report found, Columbia’s refusal to discipline violent demonstrators and its failed attempt to appease its radicals all but invited the disruptions that plagued the institution. By January, it was clear that the problem persisted in more or less its original form. Keffiyeh-clad students were still invading classrooms. They were still distributing inflammatory literature calling to “burn Zionism to the ground” and featuring images of the October 7 terrorists meant to terrorize their targets. Some demonstrators even bragged that they had “shut down business-as-usual” on their campus by cementing sewage lines.

 

Whether because of institutional capture or its lethargic leadership, it had become unavoidably clear that Columbia could not restore a climate of free inquiry to its campus on its own. So, the Trump administration gave it a push.

 

The president put an ultimatum to the school: In the absence of reforms, the administration would pull $400 million in research grants and other federally administered dispensations, with more cuts on the way. One week after the threat was issued, interim Columbia President Katrina Armstrong consented to the administration’s demands.

 

Illustrative of the pressures that prevented the university from engaging in acts of elementary academic hygiene prior to Trump’s intervention, university educators and administrators across the country are fit to be tied over Columbia’s capitulation.

 

“Today, the pre-eminence of the American research university is under severe attack from the federal government,” read a New York Times op-ed from Columbia professor Jonathan Cole. His essay exemplifies the professoriate’s anxiety over the administration’s imperious subversion of what he regards as little more than academic freedom. “If Columbia allows authoritarian-minded leaders to dictate what we can teach, then the federal government will dictate what we can read, what books we may have in our libraries, what art we can display, what problems scientists can explore,” Cole wrote.

 

The piece focuses on the grand historical arc of the American university, its mission in a world defined by competition between America and China, and the threat to U.S. preeminence if this White House invites a brain-drain by making life for academics impossibly irritating. All that is worth keeping in mind, but it’s beside the point. Cole’s piece ascends to 30,000 feet, perhaps, because a more granular examination of the reforms the Trump administration demanded and to which Armstrong consented are more defensible than the author lets on.

 

The White House called for Columbia to prohibit masking on campus “for the purposes of concealing one’s identity,” which is reasonable. Masking — with either surgical masks or Bedouin-style headscarves — long ago evolved from an expression of individual apprehension and concern for others into a symbol of menace and an instrument of criminality. School administrators and public safety officers should know the difference, and they should not go on pretending otherwise.

 

The school will review and revise its rules that bar protests inside academic buildings and the disciplinary process that covers violations of its standards. It will establish and promulgate clear rules that govern protests and establish unambiguous frameworks that distinguish protected expression from campaigns of intimidation designed not to promote free speech but stifle it. It will adopt a form of “institutional neutrality” modeled on the University of Chicago’s gold-standard approach to promoting academic curiosity. That paradigm encourages inquiry by prohibiting deans, presidents, provosts, department chairs, and the like from establishing dubious and controversial “official” positions on hot-button issues of the day, intimidating dissenters and leading objectors to self-censor. Perhaps most importantly, Columbia will review its “hiring of non-tenured faculty,” which alludes to an activist class of non-faculty instructors who have been accused of inciting disruptions on their campuses not by their Republican critics but their colleagues.

 

In a qualified celebration of the Trump administration’s heavy-handed but justifiable coercion, the Wall Street Journal editorial board offers a note of caution for conservatives who welcome the results it has produced. “Conservatives should also be wary of government dictation of curricula because the left will do the same thing if it returns to power,” they warn. “Do we want the next secretary of Education telling Notre Dame or Yeshiva how much religion can influence their courses of study?”

 

As a rule, practitioners of politics should not forge new weapons for use in the culture wars lest they are prepared to see them deployed against their creators. Yet, the reforms to which Columbia is now committed do not cut against the grain of American culture but with it.

 

It was the universities, of which Columbia is just one example, that incubated an aggressively insular culture utterly apart from and hostile to the nation in which those institutions were situated and upon which they depended for funding and relevance. In much the same way that America’s corporate culture did not object to its liberation from the costly extortion racket into which diversity, equity, and inclusion programs evolved, Columbia folded so quickly not because it was muscled into it. The college’s administration merely lacked the courage to slough off the shackles against which they were already struggling.

 

There’s no guarantee that these reforms will do the trick, but they have the advantage of allowing college administrators to reimpose discipline on their charges while claiming their hands were tied. And if a future Democratic administration attempts to reverse this progress, it will do so in opposition to a measurable public consensus and with the understanding that it is contributing to the conditions that led the party into the wilderness in the first place.

 

All this is to say that conservatism’s laudable refusal to write off the prospect of anticipated consequences and tradeoffs shouldn’t stop the administration from reimposing prudence on America’s humanities departments. Ensuring that the country’s campuses protect the rights of all their students is of vital importance, and this is a step in the right direction.