Trump Cut Columbia Funds Despite Crackdown on Gaza Protests

Protesters are demonstrating in front of police along the perimeter of the Columbia University campus in New York City, on April 30, 2024. New York City police are arriving in riot gear this evening at the request of the university to conduct a raid to remove pro-Palestine protesters who are occupying a campus building. Students stormed and barricaded Hamilton Hall the previous night in protest of university investments in the context of the Israel-Hamas conflict. According to the university, they are now facing expulsion for their actions. (Photo by Melissa Bender/NurPhoto via AP) — Protesters demonstrate in front of police along the perimeter of the Columbia University campus in NYC on April 30, 2024. Photo: Melissa Bender/NurPhoto via AP

Columbia University could hardly have been more draconian in the last year and a half since students began speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza.

In early November 2023, four months before the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment even began, the university banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. A few hundred students from the groups had had the audacity to walk out from classes and hold a “die-in” protest on campus — some of the most widely celebrated nonviolent protest tactics available.

The crackdown was just getting started.

There is no appeasing a political force like the Trumpian right.

Since then, the university has ordered police raids on campus three times, leading to the arrests of over 100 students. Last week, the school expelled four students, three from Barnard College, one from Columbia. Many dozens of students have faced discipline and suspensions for participating in pro-Palestine protests and speech. Professors have been slandered before Congress, censured, removed from positions, and reportedly pushed into retirement over their support for Palestine and criticism of Israel. The campus has been essentially locked down for almost a year.

Again and again, Columbia has shown a willingness to throw students, faculty, free speech, and academic freedom under the bus in acquiescence to a right-wing, pro-Israel narrative that treats support for Palestinians as an affront to Jewish safety.

For all Columbia’s appeasement, President Donald Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university.

“Columbia has worked overtime to appease,” wrote Layla, a student at Columbia’s School of Social Work, who asked to withhold her last name having faced doxxing attacks and harassment from Zionist groups. “Students are miserable. Campus is a panopticon. And their funding was still cut.”

The Trump administration can be expected to use its perverted conception of antisemitism to further its explicit plans to decimate, corporatize, and re-whiten higher education. The shame here lies with university leaderships — at Columbia and schools nationwide — that have failed to stand up for their purported missions of critical thinking and academic freedom. Instead, they have put some of their most vulnerable community members, particularly international students and students of color, at risk.

There is no appeasing a political force like the Trumpian right, intent on a program of destruction. And there is no appeasing a nationalist Zionist worldview that, defying reason, sees antisemitism in every call for Palestinian freedom. Columbia is proof of the failure of caving in; the administration has offered up a platter of repression for more than a year and is still slated to lose $400 million.

“Number One Priority”

Schools nationwide — especially elite, wealthy institutions like Columbia — have a choice: Take a collective stance in opposing Trump’s assaults on education, or continue their obsequiousness to a government that has already made clear that it wants to destroy them regardless.

Columbia leadership, much to its shame, has made its decision clear.

In a letter to the university community responding to the cuts, Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong appeared unwilling to change course.

“I want to assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” she wrote. “To that end, Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism. This is our number one priority.”

“This is not about antisemitism. It is about crushing dissent.”

Antisemitism is no doubt a legitimate concern in a country led by antisemites; the Trump administration and pro-Israel organizations’ concerns are anything but legitimate. So far, Columbia’s purported crackdown on antisemitism has included anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic repression, the consistent conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and a willingness to only prioritize the concerns of certain Jewish voices, while silencing the dissent of the dozens of anti-Zionist Jews on campus.

“This is not about antisemitism. It is about crushing dissent,” said Reinhold Martin, a Columbia historian of architecture and president of the university’s American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, chapter. “And for those who take the Trump administration’s actions at face value, remember Charlottesville.”

Martin was referring, of course, to the 2017 white supremacist gathering, where neo-Nazis marched with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us,” a fascist murdered an antifascist counter-protester with his car, and Trump responded by calling participants “some very fine people.”

While university campuses have been historic sites of dissent and political critique, it would be a mistake to see the contemporary, neoliberal university as a terrain of liberatory struggle. Universities have become ever more privatized and policed factories for the production of human capital, often appended to massive investment assets. The student-led Gaza encampments were all the more impressive considering how unrevolutionary university life has become.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is waging a counterrevolution against every shred of progress won by Black, Indigenous, queer, and feminist struggle in the last century. Far-right education crusaders like Christopher Rufo are unambiguous about their aims here. Institutions of higher education participate in such a project at their own peril.

“The Trump administration is seeking to deprive universities of fiscal autonomy, to constrain universities politically,” said Martin, the Columbia professor. “To use the lever of government funding to quash dissent, with the expectation that a paradigm emerges out of this of a truly corporate university, in which it will be impossible to dissent, just as one cannot dissent in the boardroom or in the office suite of a real estate development company or a financial institution.”

Columbia is the largest private landowner in New York City and boasts an endowment of $14.8 billion; a significant amount of its income comes from its huge hospital complex, as well as tuition.

As an institution, Columbia can survive the federal cuts, but they would undeniably risk harming certain federally funded research and grants. Trump’s attack on Columbia is also intended to chill other schools more dependent on government money. All the more reason, then, for wealthy institutions to refuse the acquiescence trap.

Celebrating Funding Cuts

In the same letter announcing that the university would continue its crackdown in the face of the funding cuts, Armstrong, the school interim president, called for a “unified Columbia, one that remains focused on our mission and our values.”

Meanwhile, according to an anonymous source, members of the 1,000-plus member-strong Columbia Alumni for Israel WhatsApp group were celebrating Trump’s funding cut as a victory. One group chat member wrote on Friday that they “can’t wait for the rest of the funding to be cut.” This was the same group, which includes professors, whose members were strategizing to get pro-Palestinian foreign students and faculty deported.

As a Jewish professor and Columbia alum myself, who also spent time at the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment, including during a Shabbat dinner service, I am disgusted but not shocked that claims to Jewish safety have been turned into Trumpian weapons to dismantle higher education. And I am dismayed that university administrators and Democratic leaders have so readily laid the ground for these attacks over a year of repressive actions against students protesting a U.S.-backed genocidal war.

There is unity to be found in the educational communities. Many people understand that the Trump regime’s plans to eliminate all anti-racist, anti-colonial, and trans-inclusionary content from educational spaces cannot be disentangled from its attacks on pro-Palestine speech.

If university leaders won’t reverse their repressive course, professors, students, and staff must come together to resist, within and across campuses.