BY HANK REICHMAN
Given the daily fire hose of mostly unconstitutional (if not simply illegal) assaults by the Trump regime on the rights of immigrants, on “DEI,” on trans people, on the legal profession, on the judiciary, on social security and the Veterans’ Administration, and, of course, of most direct concern to readers of this blog, on higher education, the AAUP’s January warning against anticipatory obedience has proven more than timely. Sadly, however, too many have engaged in precisely the sort of behavior against which that statement warned. Web sites have been peremptorily scrubbed of references to “DEI.” Lists are being compiled. Cowardice and complicity have been awkwardly hidden behind a facade of “neutrality.” In one case, tenure has apparently been denied.
At a number of institutions, however, demands for obedience no longer have to be anticipated. And in the face of such demands some simply capitulate, the administration and trustees of my alma mater, Columbia University, most famously.
There can be little doubt that Columbia had a strong legal basis on which to challenge the government’s broad cancellation of some $400 million in grants, as members of the university’s own law faculty and a remarkable assemblage of leading constitutional scholars, conservative and liberal, confidently explained. Yet when confronted with a list of outrageous demands — merely “a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government” — Columbia, for all intents and purposes, agreed to them all. Still, a lawyer in the Justice Department crowed that Columbia was “not even close to having those funds unfrozen.”
The move has been subjected to withering criticism from within and without the university. Jonathan Cole wrote:
I have spent almost 65 years at Columbia. I entered as an undergraduate in 1960, received my doctorate there and never left. Yes, universities are contentious places, but they are supposed to be places where criticism takes place — whether political, humanistic or scientific disputes. When I became provost and dean of faculties, serving 14 years as Columbia’s chief academic officer, I dealt, alongside my colleagues, with student protests almost every year. When the federal government threatened Columbia with arrests or withdrawal of federal funds after the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, we defended academic freedom and free inquiry.
Today the stakes are higher. We are in a fight for survival, and appeasement never works. Despite platitudes to the contrary, Columbia’s leaders have weakened our community and our leadership among the greatest educational institutions in the world. This is not the way to fight Mr. Trump’s efforts at silencing our great American universities. If we don’t resist collectively by all legal means and by social influence and legislative pressure, we are apt to see the destruction of our most revered institutions and the enormous benefits they accrue to America.
Why did Columbia yield? Was it cowardice? Could be. After all, as one faculty defender of the decision told the New York Times, “There is no scenario in which Columbia can exist in any way in its current form if the government funding is completely withdrawn.” And when the Chronicle of Higher Education asked the heads of some sixty other institutions on the government’s hit list how they would respond to such demands not a single one volunteered an answer. As University of Chicago legal scholar Genevieve Lakier told the Chronicle, “What’s incredible is that in such a short amount of time so many powerful and protected actors and institutions are afraid of speaking up because of the consequences.” At the same time, Lakier suggested, maybe Columbia’s administration foolishly thought the Trumpists might be “manipulated, so you give them things that aren’t very significant things and then they’ll go away.” That might not have been so improbable given Trump’s history of making blustering threats that culminate in dramatic declarations of victory after only the smallest of concessions, but hardly admirable or, for that matter, a strategy likely to succeed.
But the explanation could even be worse. Might Columbia’s leadership have seen the government’s demands not as a threat but as an opportunity? Len Gutkin fears that might be the case: “Many of the Trump administration’s demands — a ban on masks, for example, which would permit the university more easily to identity and punish rule-breakers — will give cover to Columbia for establishing disciplinary mechanisms its administrators may already have been planning to introduce.” Moreover, if Trump’s political agenda aims to establish a “unitary” and highly centralized federal executive, the agenda of an increasing number of university presidents and their boards seeks something similar for their institutions. This is a point Lakier makes that is worth repeating:
There is a way to think that the [Columbia] administration is not terribly unhappy — obviously it was not happy to lose $400-million dollars in federal funding — because one of the demands, quite explicitly, is to expand presidential power, to give the president of Columbia ultimate authority over the disciplinary process. I don’t think this is coincidental. I don’t think this is secondary; it’s a central part of what the Trump administration is trying to do with universities and what universities had themselves already been doing.
Indeed, it may well be more useful — if far more depressing — to understand Columbia’s actions as motivated less by a spirit of cowardice and more by one of at least partial collaboration.
And here it is essential to recognize the actual nature of the contemporary major research university. Columbia’s reputation — indeed, the reputation of dozens of similar institutions — may be shaped by its historical role in undergraduate education and, for that matter, in the education of graduate students in the humanities, the social sciences, and the more theoretical natural sciences. But those roles no longer define the university. As far back as the protests of the late 1960s in which I participated it was common to note that Columbia had become less an educational institution than a government contractor and real estate empire with corporate connections far more influential on its policies than were its faculty and students. Moreover, today Columbia’s medical, dental and nursing schools and especially their connected hospitals and other medical facilities — including New York-Presbyterian Hospital, “one of the largest hospitals in the world,” — may collectively outweigh the arts and sciences in the scheme of the university’s priorities. It’s hardly a coincidence that when Columbia looked for internal leadership after the failed presidency of Minouche Shafik, the trustees turned to the dean of the medical center, Interim President Katrina Armstrong. Indeed, it might not be much of a distortion to describe Columbia — and quite a few other similar institutions — as first and foremost a real estate and health services business with sidelines in professional, graduate and (bringing up the rear) undergraduate education.
Yet undergraduate education still matters, a point that was driven home to me by Columbia classicist Joseph Howley’s exquisite and powerful piece in The Nation, “Reading King Lear at Columbia in the Wake of Mahmoud Khalil’s Kidnapping.” Columbia is famed for its core curriculum, a series of required “great books” (and great works of art and music) classes that have evolved over the years to include more than the traditional “canon.” Those courses have, ironically, in the past been upheld as models of “anti-woke” education by some of the same conservatives now attacking Columbia for its alleged “woke” antisemitism. I’ve always been more than skeptical of claims — from the Right or the Left — that college curricula mold students’ political views. But I will say that my own experience of these classes still underpins my approach to scholarship and teaching. Howley, who has emerged as a powerful Jewish voice of critical reason at Columbia, regularly teaches in the literature humanities course (and what a privilege for those students who get to study with him!) and he was teaching Lear when the Trump regime kidnapped student activist Mahmoud Khalil from his Columbia housing. Brilliantly interweaving analysis of the play with incisive commentary on the Columbia events, on antisemitism and Islamophobia, and on the meaning of student protest, Howley reaches a profound conclusion:
My favorite thing about King Lear, as someone who is hardly an expert in Shakespeare but has taught it for years, is that it has neither villains and nor heroes. Edmund gives a classic and compelling “I’m a villain” speech, but his plan could not succeed without Gloucester’s gullibility. Regan and Goneril connive and instigate, but they would be powerless without the fecklessness and complicity of their ambitious but morally weak husbands Cornwall and Albany. Only this year did Lear snap into clarify for me as a political caution not about bad actors but about those who fail to stop them.
The hour grows late. The threat, I would think, is clearer than it has ever been. Not only are these terrible things—students being detained, universities being threatened—happening, but universities like mine seem unable to even say anything specific about them, let alone speak of resistance. My colleagues roll their eyes now when I quote Edgar: “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’” But it seems significant to me that we have passed through the phase of travesties and into the phase where travesty becomes impermissible to speak of. . . .
As I watch Trump’s kidnappers and repo men circle my campus, carrying off our students and preparing to strip our institution for parts or remake us into Trump University, I find that after a decade and a half of teaching Lear, I have a new sense of the most chilling line in the play. I’m no longer most haunted by Cornwall’s “Out, vile jelly!” as he blinds Gloucester, or Edgar’s pathetic “Look up, my lord!” over the cooling corpse of the king.
Instead, I find myself dwelling on the end of Act I, Scene 4. Goneril has announced to her husband, Albany, the pretext on which she will dispossess and betray her father, spinning a fantasy of violent threat where none exists. Here, in this moment, the casus belli of looming catastrophe is made plain. Albany, with the power to check his wife’s plot, sees that something is wrong. But he hems and he haws: “Well, well,” he mutters, “th’ event,” meaning something like, “I guess we’ll see what happens.”
And so officials hem and haw. They couch lukewarm expressions of concern for Khalil in lies about him. Democratic senators—who unanimously approved Marco Rubio as secretary of state, only to watch him sign off on Khalil’s deportation—help Trump pass his budget and say nothing about his attacks on universities. And I find myself with the most contempt, the most disdain, and the most impatience, not for the Regans and Gonerils and Edmunds who put Trump in the White House and Mahmoud Khalil in a freezing cell, but for the Albanys who have the power to do something but wait to see how things turn out.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out this month.
