Columbia Crumbles | Power Line

Money talks, even when you have a $15 billion endowment. So Columbia has acceded to the Trump administration’s demands to get back the $400 million in federal funding that Trump revoked over the university’s anti-Semitism. The liberal Wall Street Journal reports, sympathetically:

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.
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The Trump administration laid out nine demands [see original for link] for the university to meet as a precondition to start talks about the federal funding. On top of those nine demands, Columbia now says it is already taking additional actions to encourage more intellectual diversity at the historically left-leaning institution.

There are other indications that the administration’s demands were warranted:

A Columbia senior administrator said the school considered legal options to challenge the Trump team but ultimately determined the federal government has so many available levers to claw back money, it would be a difficult fight. Additionally the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.

Columbia had been considering some reforms on the Trump list since last summer.

More on the steps that Columbia is taking, all of which seem appropriate, at the link.

You might think $15 billion would buy you independence from the feds, but apparently not:

Although Columbia stands among the country’s wealthiest universities, with an endowment of about $15 billion, it wouldn’t take long for it to cease to operate in any recognizable form without government money.

Which I suppose explains why all of the major universities are statist institutions.

The gnashing of teeth by left-wing academics is, as you would expect, nauseating:

Schools nationwide are watching Columbia with alarm; many fear a demand for similar concessions. Their primary concern: without freedom to follow their intellectual curiosity, the discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy will decline or even grind to a halt.

Yes, the “intellectual curiosity” to vandalize buildings and beat up Jews. It’s a pity: no doubt Mahmoud Khalil was just about to discover a cure for cancer. Now Syria or Algeria will get the benefit of his intellectual curiosity and spirit of innovation.