Most of the demands that the Trump administration submitted to Columbia University consist of actions the school needs to take in order to stop its slide into irrelevance. This is a Jerry Maguire “Help me help you” situation, where common-sense reforms to restore order to campus and regain a measure of academic discipline are obligations the school should want to meet.
The university administration’s fear of its students has turned the school into an asylum run by the inmates. But what if putting the asylum back in charge of the inmates won’t make much of a difference? The students are acting like feral maniacs, it’s true; but it turns out their professors want them that way.
The Free Press obtained the transcript of a faculty Zoom meeting with interim President Katrina Armstrong in which Armstrong “promised that there would be ‘no change to masking,’ and ‘no change to our admissions procedures,’ both of which the administration has demanded.” Armstrong said the same about other key administration demands, even though the university has signaled to the White House that it will comply.
The Washington Free Beacon goes into some more detail on the meeting:
“Throughout the discussion, Armstrong—who assumed the presidency on an interim basis in August after former Columbia president Minouche Shafik resigned just over a year into the job—fielded questions from furious faculty members. One described the Trump administration’s actions as ‘the most significant assault on academic culture in my lifetime,’ while others pressed her about why the university had not countersued the government.
“None of the faculty members, however, raised concerns about the treatment of Jewish and Israeli students on campus or about the conduct of protesters, which led to the cancellation of in-person classes and the school’s graduation ceremony at the close of the last academic year, as well as to the Trump administration’s concern about the climate on the Morningside Heights campus. Just a year ago, a rabbi affiliated with Columbia urged Jewish students to leave campus to celebrate Passover and not to return until conditions on campus had improved.”
To review, in order to again be eligible for federal funding, Columbia has been told to centralize its disciplinary process; ban masks with health-related and religious exemptions, so that campus rules can be enforced and to reduce student vandalism and hostage-taking; adopt a consistent definition of anti-Semitism so that its rules are clear to all; give its provost oversight powers over its particularly lunacy-ridden Middle East department; and a few others.
The reason all this is being required of Columbia is because the school has been ostentatiously flouting civil-rights law regarding the rights of Jews on campus. With the anti-civil-rights movement among the students being joined in earnest by the faculty, Armstrong is in a difficult position: The institution she ostensibly runs is so resistant to improvement that she will either cede control unofficially by letting the faculty veto the changes or cede control officially by leaving the school once it’s clear she has no institutional support.
Armstrong has resorted to telling the Trump administration and her faculty what they want to hear. That means both the Trump administration and the Columbia faculty understand that she is not telling one of them the truth. Armstrong has been, in private, reassuring her school staff that there wouldn’t really be any significant changes. One faculty member reminded Armstrong that the president would notice if that were true and Columbia would be out its funding: “I think they’re going to realize at some point there weren’t many substantial changes, as you’ve been saying. So how will we respond if they come back to us and say that a lot of this is not really substantive?”
Armstrong didn’t really have an answer, because the faculty member’s question stems from a very important realization that everyone involved has made: The Trump administration is serious about cutting and withholding funding from Columbia and other universities. If there is one thing the Trump team has been consistent on so far, it is its chainsaw approach to what it sees as wasteful spending. Calling Trump’s bluff on this issue is a risky bet that not even the faculty at Columbia want to make. But they have no backup plan, because the faculty also wants the school to remain a nihilist playground for violent students.
