Columbia College ceded to President Donald Trump’s calls for in change for the 400 million {dollars} in federal funding that his administration threatened to withhold—together with guidelines that additional limit and criminalize protesting on campus, based on a memo from the varsity to the White Home.
Earlier this month, Trump had pulled federal funding and contracts from Columbia over claims that the college didn’t shield Jewish college students all through the pro-Palestinian, anti-war demonstrations on campus final yr. The administration introduced Columbia with guidelines to comply with in the event that they needed the cash, and the college agreed to just about all of them.
Because the Wall Avenue Journal first reported, Columbia agreed to ban masks throughout protests on campus, rent 36 new campus cops and empower them to “take away people from campus and/or arrest them when applicable,” appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to supervise the division of Center East, South Asian, and African Research in addition to the Heart for Palestine Research, amongst different issues.
“Columbia College has, all through its storied historical past, confronted many challenges and obstacles. We now have labored arduous to handle the authentic issues raised each from inside and with out our Columbia group, together with by our regulators, with respect to the discrimination, harassment, and antisemitic acts our Jewish group has confronted within the wake of October 7, 2023,” the varsity wrote within the unsigned letter, including that the brand new guidelines would “make our campus safer, extra welcoming, and respectful of the rights of all.”
“Always,” Katrina Armstrong, Columbia’s interim president, wrote in a press release, “we’re guided by our values, placing educational freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all on the fore of each choice we make.”
Many within the Columbia group, together with those that have confronted direct penalties from the college’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, have been outraged on the settlement between Trump and Armstrong.
“Columbia has utterly folded to each demand, exhibiting us all what we already knew: admin is simply doing every little thing it already needed to do,” Grant Miner, one of many college students who says he was expelled for his involvement with pro-Palestine organizing on campus, wrote on X.
“By giving in to the Trump administration’s calls for, Columbia units a harmful precedent that normalizes authorities intrusion on educational freedom and pupil expression,” the New York Civil Liberties Union Government Director Donna Lieberman mentioned in a press release. “As a substitute of standing up for educational freedom, its core mission, and its college and college students, Columbia has capitulated to the bullies. The regulation was on Columbia’s aspect, however the college hasn’t given the slightest public trace of resistance.”
