On Friday, March 21, Columbia University proved to the American public that pedagogical backbones can be easily snapped if one happens to be in control of $400 million. Unfortunately, as a person who is not in the top 1 percent, I have to resort to less effective ways of influencing higher education than financial blackmail.
Regardless of why Columbia decided to bow to God King Donald McDuck, their agreement to Trump’s demands has some ruinous implications for higher education in this country. As The New York Times eloquently understated in a March 17 article: “[Columbia’s] response has concerned some legal scholars because they believe the government has drastically overstepped its authority.” This “overstep” is an incredibly dangerous precedent for the federal government’s ability to use funding as leverage against colleges and universities.
The letter justified these provisions by stating that Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” further citing their “alleged” violations of Titles VI (Nondiscrimination in federally assisted programs) and VII (Equal employment opportunity) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These accusations aren’t elaborated on in the letter, but I trust that they were thorough in their investigations.
Last year, Elon Musk posted a video of Trump establishing his intentions for higher education institutions. Although I can’t disagree with him about tuition costs “absolutely exploding,”
I must label his claim that colleges have become “dominated by Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics” as just a smidgen inflammatory. Nevertheless, Trump’s intention to impose what he regards as “real standards on colleges once again and once and for all” through the accreditation system is becoming a doomful reality.
This isn’t just impacting Columbia, though — the reform of higher education seems to be chugging along the Mid-Atlantic region at a fast clip. The University of Pennsylvania is under investigation by the Department of Education following a 175 million dollar suspension of funds, primarily over the university allowing a transgender athlete to compete on their swim team in 2022.
Carnegie Mellon, as of March 19, has come under fire from The Select Committee On The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a letter titled “National Security Risks Posed by Chinese Nationals in STEM Programs,” written by John Moolenar, the committee’s Chairman. Unsurprisingly, it’s peppered with wildly xenophobic sentiments and generally feels like it should have been published during the Space Race. The committee refers to international students seeking higher education as a “brain drain of critical expertise,” drawing the conclusion that Carnegie Mellon’s “reliance on foreign students” will allow the Chinese government to “outcompete and surpass the United States.”
In anticipation of the possible fiscal manipulation of Carnegie Mellon by President Trump’s goons, let me walk you through Columbia University’s new regime-compliant “preconditions” set by Josh Gruenbaum, Thomas E. Wheeler, and Sean R. Keveney in their follow-up ransom note.
Article 1: Enforce existing disciplinary policies
Did you know that “meaningful discipline” in higher education is defined as expulsion or multi-year suspension? Me neither! In addition to the letter’s very first revamp of common English phrasing, it specifically mentions “Hamilton Hall and encampments” participants as volunteers for the new programming. Hamilton Hall was also occupied by Columbia activists in 1968, 1972, 1985, 1992, and 1996. I find the inclusion of both the Hamilton Hall occupiers and general encampment participants in this worrying — the radius of those at fault seems to be increasing by the day.
Article 2: Primacy of the president in disciplinary matters
Do you fantasize about being the judge, jury, and executioner of your very own Ivy League University? If so, too bad you aren’t Katrina Armstrong. The second bullet point demands that Columbia “abolish the University Judicial Board” and “empower the Office of the President to suspend or expel students”. “But wait!”, I hear you cry. “How can students appeal these decisions?” In a well-defined, well-rounded way, of course — “with an appeal process through the Office of the President.” Seemingly, the vision is to model Columbia after the current power structure of the Oval Office (see: Big Balls on Top).
Article 3: Time, place, and manner rules
Do they want a Google Calendar invite? A When To Meet shared between activists and the NYPD? Regardless of how they’re implemented, the “comprehensive time, place, and manner rules” dictating when, where, and how people are allowed to protest or demonstrate will be “permanent”. Ward v. Rock Against Racism, the 1989 Supreme Court case that outlined time, place, and manner restrictions, requires federal decrees to pass a multipart test to be constitutional. The restrictions must “be neutral,” “be based on a significant public interest,” “avoid excessive restrictions that go beyond what’s needed to…avoid harming the rights of others,” and “leave open alternative methods of free expression”.
Article 4: Mask ban
Specifically, the letter states that Columbia must “ban masks that are intended to conceal identity or intimidate others,” and that “any masked individual must wear their Columbia ID on the outside of their clothing.” In an attempt to qualify this demand, the letter also notes that “this is already the policy at Columbia’s Irving Medical Center,” a point that is, at best, tangentially related to this decree. (In my mind, there is probably a fundamental difference between student protesters wearing masks for anonymity and medical staff who are required to wear masks for the health of patients, but I’m not an expert.) Inconveniently for the scriveners, the Supreme Court ruled in 1995’s McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission that “the freedom to publish anonymously is protected by the First Amendment,” a legal umbrella that is typically extended to protest.
Article 5: Deliver plan to hold all student groups accountable
The groups (and individuals) mentioned are those “operating as constituent members of, or providing support for, unrecognized groups engaged in violations of University policy.” This is possibly the vaguest way that they could say “groups we don’t like,” but I personally feel that inexactitude is a fundamental quality of good legalese. They continue that these unspecified groups “must be held accountable through formal investigations, disciplinary proceedings, and expulsion as appropriate.” I assume that these will be carried out by Columbia’s University Judicial Board, which, incidentally, no longer exists.
Article 6: Formalize, adopt, and promulgate a definition of antisemitism
This section, rather than just offering a definition, name-drops a first-term Trump decree on “Combating Anti-Semitism” (Executive Order 13899). The letter says that the order “uses the IHRA definition,” referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “Working definition of antisemitism” which is blatantly labeled on their website as “non-legally binding”.
Article 7: Empower internal law enforcement
According to CNN, Columbia is “hiring 36 new campus police officers, specifically trained to deal with protests, with powers to remove or arrest protesters.” The letter did not, exactly, call for new officers, but it did state that “the University must ensure that Columbia security has full law enforcement authority,” designating that these powers must include the arrest of “agitators who foster an unsafe or hostile work or study environment, or otherwise interfere with classroom instruction or the functioning of the university.” This is an incredibly unspecific and wildly subjective range of justifiable arrests for a public safety department whose mission statement includes “maintaining a secure and open environment where the safety of all is balanced with the rights of the individual.”
Article 8: MESAAS Department — Academic Receivership
“MESAAS” stands for Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies — the department, in its current form, has existed at Columbia since 2009, although its history began in 1784. For those who don’t know, academic receivership “is a situation in which the department is judged incapable of governing itself; and an outside chair is imposed upon the department by the dean, provost, or college/university president.” Willfully missing from this definition, provided by the Department of Education’s Education Resources Information Center, is the ability of the federal government to force this condition on an educational institution.
The letter demands that Columbia places the department under this condition for “a minimum of five years” — notably, it does not overtly state why this department, in particular, is being subjected to this relatively rare provision. The Cato Institute characterized this demand as “a frank assault on a private university’s freedom to maintain an academic department that federal overseers regard as ideologically hostile,” which seems correct.
Article 9: Deliver a plan for comprehensive admissions reform
If you thought the past eight points were unnecessarily vague, here’s the ninth’s text in its entirety: “The plan must include a strategy to reform undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admissions practices to conform with federal law and policy.”
If you’re confused as to what this means, don’t despair! I have read a mind-numbing amount of articles on this over the past week, and no one seems to have a consensus about what, exactly, the Trump Administration is asking of Columbia admissions. If I allow myself to speculate, which I will, I’d say that this will follow a similar pattern to Moolenaar’s letter to President Jahanian — accusing international and immigrant students of espionage, information leaking, and general anti-American antics, and using that accusation as grounds to actively discriminate against non-native students in Ivy League admissions.
Conclusion: The art of negotiation
If the prior paragraphs weren’t enough, the brief statement before the sign-off is just flat-out audacious. After reiterating that the government expects Columbia’s “immediate compliance” to the demands, they close the letter with a sentence that is just exasperating: “…we hope to open a conversation about immediate long-term structural reforms that will return Columbia to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence.”I’ve had middle school breakup texts with less oblivious ways of cushioning the blow. The sheer tone-deafness displayed in this letter is an achievement in itself. Unfortunately for the authors of this great literary work, though, I have to say that Moolenaar’s letter takes the cake for the most overtly bigoted federal manipulation tactic of the week. Hopefully, Columbia’s choice to sacrifice its independence as an institution for the sake of research funding does not set a precedent for Carnegie Mellon and the five other institutions targeted for so-called security concerns, but only time will tell how the federal government will attempt to debase higher education next.
By: Adrien Marenco
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