Photo by Sharona Weiss from protest encampment at Wake Forest University.
BY BARRY TRACHTENBERG
Columbia University’s decision to accept and even go beyond the Trump administration’s extortionist demands forces us to recognize a sobering truth that applies not only to Columbia but to far too many of the scholarly spaces within which we work: Their response is neither a surrender nor a capitulation but is a choice that reflects an alignment of interests, and one which reveals that institutional support for academic freedom and equality was always more fragile than we wanted to believe. This decision, triggered by protests demanding recognition of Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians, reveals a fundamental reality. With the mask ripped away, we now see clearly that many of those administrators who trumpeted DEI commitments, LGBTQI+ rights, equal access, and antidiscrimination policies were never acting out of belief—but were only reluctant actors forced to respond to our demands for justice and equality.
Armed with this realization, we must intensify our pressure, knowing that these hard-won rights will only exist when we continue to fight for them. There are no permanent victories, only our constant vigilance. Every lecture, publication, committee meeting, and office hour must become a site of struggle where these values must be fiercely defended every single day.
The same authoritarianism that silences academic voices on Palestine and permits the ongoing genocide in Gaza to continue is now dismantling our institutions’ commitment to scholarly research, free inquiry, and education. We cannot separate these struggles—they are bound together in a single fight for justice, human dignity, and the right to exist without fear. When academic freedom is sacrificed for political and financial expediency, we lose not only our voice but the very foundation of the university as a space for critical inquiry and moral courage.
The question we must ask ourselves is why the Trump administration and its allies are targeting higher education with such unprecedented fervor—why they’ve chosen to punish the entire academic community for standing in solidarity with Palestinians. The answer is both simple and profound: They fear us. Not as individuals but as a collective force dedicated to exposing injustice and cultivating critical thinking. Universities remain one of the few institutional spaces where systemic racism, classism, imperialism, transphobia, homophobia, and other forms of oppression can be named, studied, and challenged through rigorous scholarship and pedagogy.
Our classrooms are spaces where students learn to question received wisdom, interrogate power structures, and imagine alternative futures. Our research disrupts comfortable narratives about American exceptionalism, racial and gender supremacy, meritocracy, and progress. They fear this power—the power to name, to question, to imagine otherwise—and they should because it undermines their logic of racial capitalism and authoritarianism.
The attacks on higher education are not about fiscal responsibility, academic standards, or protecting Jewish students and faculty. They represent a desperate attempt to neutralize sites of resistance at a moment when dominant power structures are being increasingly threatened. This punitive campaign was triggered by our collective refusal to remain silent about Palestinian suffering and Columbia’s institutional complicity in it—but it has expanded into a broader assault on academic freedom itself.
Our universities have for decades been reconfigured according to corporatist logic—prioritizing revenue generation, brand management, and donor relations over their educational and social missions. The marketization of higher education has created institutions more concerned with their U.S. News & World Report rankings than with their moral responsibilities. We categorically reject this transformation. We will not surrender these spaces to market forces that commodify learning and sanitize thought. The university is not a trading floor; it is humanity’s workshop for liberation.
Nevertheless, faculty across disciplines continue to insist on the integrity of our research and teaching. Whether we work in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, or the arts, we have fought to preserve spaces for critical inquiry and to produce knowledge that serves the public good rather than private interests. This resistance spans our institutions, connecting scholars working on climate science with those studying racial justice, those documenting indigenous genocide with those analyzing gender discrimination.
The current moment has exposed what many have long recognized as “the Palestinian exception” to academic freedom. While universities have increasingly embraced diversity and inclusion rhetoric, support for Palestinian rights has remained heavily policed and frequently suppressed. Now, the very act of demanding that our institutions acknowledge their complicity in genocide has become grounds for collective punishment—a crackdown that extends far beyond the issue of Palestine to threaten all justice-oriented work within academia.
In the face of these challenges, our most powerful response is a renewed commitment to rigorous, justice-oriented scholarship and teaching. We must resist the temptation to retreat into political quietism or to moderate our critiques to appease external pressures. Our scholarship is our resistance. Our classrooms are sites of liberation. Our research is a form of bearing witness to injustice and imagining more just alternatives.
The path forward is not easy. We will face backlash, retaliation, and attempts to silence our voices. But we draw strength from knowing that we are part of a long tradition of scholar-activists who have used their knowledge and position to challenge injustice. From the academics who risked their careers to oppose McCarthyism to those who fought for ethnic studies programs and divestment from apartheid South Africa, we have powerful examples of courage and commitment to guide us.
In this moment of crisis, we have an opportunity to reimagine and rebuild the university as a site of democratic knowledge production and social transformation. This vision—of education as liberation rather than credentialing, of scholarship as resistance rather than career advancement—offers a powerful alternative to the status quo.
The struggle for this vision will not be won quickly or easily. But it is a struggle worth undertaking, not just for ourselves but for our students and for all those who believe in the radical possibility of a more just world. We take up this struggle with clear eyes about the forces aligned against us but also with an unshakable commitment to the power of knowledge, solidarity, and collective action. We will not be intimidated. We will not be silenced. We will continue to teach, to research, to speak, and to act in the service of justice, freedom, and human dignity.
Barry Trachtenberg serves on the Academic Board of Jewish Voice for Peace and of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. He is a historian of modern European and American Jewry, and the author of three books, most recently The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (Rutgers, 2022). He holds the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and is a member of Historians for Palestine.
