Columbia University made headlines for accepting the Trump administration’s demands: in exchange for the restoration of over $400 million in federal funding — which the federal government revoked from Columbia due to its failure to address violent campus anti-Semitism, a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the university will expel disruptive students, increase campus security, review its admissions policy, and place certain departments under academic receivership.
The mainstream is, unsurprisingly, aghast. “Columbia has capitulated to the bullies,” read a statement from the ACLU of New York.
It’s an interesting choice of word, “bullies,” and, for Columbia, rather convenient. Based on leaked internal conversations from Columbia, administrators likely would prefer to seem as though they were rapidly bullied into submission by the big bad Republican President of the United States than be forced to admit the reality: that they had been bullied into submission by their own students and faculty over the course of a decade, and now finally have an opportunity to excise extremism from their ranks.
Indeed, the story of the past 15 years or so of American academic life is a story of profound cowardice: people who should have known better and who, in the case of tenured faculty, had the power to act per their conscience without risking their livelihoods, chose instead to give in to a small group of entitled campus radicals who made increasingly deranged demands — campus inquisitions for the accused, struggle sessions for dissidents, a near-total shutdown of academic freedom — while demonstrating poor behavior and poor scholarship that in a saner era would not only have gotten them expelled or fired, but publicly ridiculed.
Eventually, as the dust from the COVID era began to settle and the failures of liberal orthodoxy became apparent, it became more acceptable to discuss internal problems. By 2022, professors began to admit publicly that their students were worse off emotionally and academically after the pandemic, and that colleges had tossed out expectations for them, beginning in the admissions department; that spring, MIT became the first elite university to bring back its standardized testing requirement after relaxing it during the pandemic.
But the real watershed moment on American campuses was October 7, 2023, as college students across the country cheered for murderous Hamas terrorists. For the first time since the Obama administration, there was real internal debate within the liberal mainstream about what had happened to academia, not just with respect to Israel but with respect to the entire toxic sludge of ideology that long preceded the Hamas attack. In December of 2023, the Chronicle of Higher Education, perhaps the nation’s most prominent academic newspaper, published a story titled, “A Decade of Ideological Transformation Comes Undone.” Wrote Lee Gutkin, “College leaders have discovered, maybe too late, that the habit of validation has left them incapable of managing institutions in which real and deep disagreements exist.”
Gutkin was right: when Columbia and other universities were confronted in the spring of the 2023-24 academic year with protests far more objectionable than in the fall, administrators failed to act. At Columbia, things got so bad that even non-Jewish janitors are now filing a Title VI complaint, claiming they were called “Jew lovers” by an antisemitic mob and forced to scrub swastikas and other antisemitic graffiti.
Columbia, specifically, did too little too late, disciplining only 40 of the hundreds of students involved and then restoring 38 of them to campus the following academic year. While the university’s schizophrenic actions led to allegations of unfair treatment by both sides, they mostly just showed spinelessness.
It appears now that administrators had been hoping for an out. Columbia’s plan goes far deeper than the Trump administration’s demands of cracking down on anti-Semitism and physical violence: the university is also committing to institutional neutrality, hiring more intellectually diverse faculty, creating spaces for open discourse, and reviewing its admissions practices.
These are not the actions of a university that is begrudgingly complying with a hostile government; they are the actions of administrators who have found an excellent excuse — money — to disregard the activists they were previously beholden to and recommit themselves to the teaching and research that they should have been focusing on all along. As the co-chair of Columbia’s anti-Semitism task force told The New York Times, “What’s fascinating to me is a lot of these are things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly.”
While there is not a single university that actively wants its federal funding revoked, the looming threat of losing federal funding — one that the Trump administration has now made clear it is willing to make good on — may be excuse enough for the saner voices in universities to attempt to deradicalize. Whatever university administrators may say publicly, they may very well silently be thanking the Trump administration.
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Neeraja Deshpande is an education policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum (iwf.org).
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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