Columbia’s White Flag is a Disaster for Democracy

Columbia University’s capitulation to the Trump administration will echo throughout higher education—and far beyond

Today, Columbia University gave in to outrageous demands from the Trump Administration. The university announced it would do what the administration demanded in a letter sent on March 13.

Writing in The Guardian, Professor Sheldon Pollock aptly described the administration’s challenge as the “most dangerous letter in the history of higher education in America…Like a ransom note, the government letter insists that Columbia comply with a list of Trump administration demands in order to even have a chance at recovering the $400m in federal funding for scientific research that the government canceled on 7 March.”

As I have noted, the letter demanded that “Columbia change its admissions practices and its disciplinary process, including mandating the ‘arrest and removal of agitators who foster an unsafe or hostile work or study environment.’” The Trump Administration also told the university to ban masks “intended to conceal identity or intimidate others,” and “put its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Department in academic receivership.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, "Columbia agreed to ban masks, empower 36 campus police officers with new powers to arrest students and appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies." It did not call that authority a form of receivership, but it is receivership by another name; no one should be fooled.

By acquiescing to such heavy-handed and intrusive demands, Columbia University has become almost an arm of the federal government, not an independent center of learning and a home to free thought. Its decision will only embolden the administration in Washington, D.C., propel further attacks on universities, and undermine and demoralize those working to preserve American democracy.

By running up a white flag, Columbia has set a model for how the administration will deal with Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and many others. Unfortunately, we know how this ends.

Michael Ignatieff, former president of what once was Hungary’s Central European University, is right to say that “The real challenge, whenever an authoritarian government attacks a university, is that they have already prepared the ground, portraying universities as privileged enclaves of the entitled and the condescending, trapped in their own self-regarding bubble of wokeness. These politicians play expertly on the resentments of those who don’t have college degrees.”

“They grab hold of the flag of academic freedom,” Ignatieff writes, “and wave it in the face of university administrators struggling to balance the imperatives of campus order and civility against their First Amendment obligations.”

Sound familiar?

This is precisely the playbook Trump and his colleagues have followed in their now successful effort to bring a great university to its knees.

In Hungary, Victor Orban financially starved institutions, including Ignatieff’s, until, one after another, they accepted his terms.

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains, strongmen like Orban “don't only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning to reinforce their ideological agendas, but also seek to remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.”

If they can do so, they can silence “public voices…that could serve as vocal counterpoints to the autocratic faction.”

The attack on Columbia is more than an attack on higher education. It is a testing ground for, and part of, a multipronged effort to undermine civil society and the infrastructure of democracy it provides.

It is also a blow to everyone mobilizing or thinking of doing so in defense of democracy and the rule of law.

Over the past week, I have been trying to rally people to fight for Columbia. I circulated a letter of solidarity and support for the university, which quickly attracted many signatories. But as rumors of Columbia’s decision to acquiesce spread and how upset many of its faculty were by that decision, it didn’t make sense to finish the effort.

One colleague wrote, “I don’t know if I can keep my name on this letter. It appears that the university admin has chosen one part of the faculty over another part of the faculty. The line of antagonism is not Trump versus the university. The line of antagonism is Trump and some parts of the university against other parts of the university.”

They are right. It is hard to convince people to join the fight for an institution when it won’t fight for itself and when one of its constituent elements feels betrayed by its decision. After Columbia's deal with the Trump Administration, it will be harder to get people to risk resistance in any sphere lest they, too, be betrayed.

When powerful institutions like Columbia give in to threats and pressure tactics, others get the message: Resistance is futile. To get along, you have to go along. Rather than wait to be threatened themselves, people feel encouraged to do what Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance.”

Authoritarians pick targets that they can use as examples. That’s why, early in their efforts to consolidate power, they go after the strong, not just the vulnerable. Columbia and the law firms the Trump administration has put on its enemies list serve as showcase targets whose downfall or acquiescence will attract attention.

The president and his colleagues are using what the Hungarian communist leader Matyos Rakosi once called “salami tactics.” That approach overthrows democracy slowly, “slicing away… a sliver at a time.”

It also slices away at the greatness of an institution like Columbia. That Ivy League gem will be forever tarnished—diminished, not preserved, by its shameful surrender. It will be a symbol of the infamy that attaches to “trading away… moral authority and academic independence for federal funds.”

Ultimately, by taking down Columbia, the Trump Administration has succeeded in slicing away more than a sliver of its institutional opposition. The damage has left all Americans more vulnerable.

---

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.