Statement of Columbia Alumni for Academic Freedom on the Settlement Agreement between the Trump Administration and Columbia University

BY COLUMBIA ALUMNI FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM The Trump Administration’s abuses have placed Columbia University leadership in an agonizing position, pitting the welfare of Columbia’s faculty, staff, and students – and the fate of critical research projects – against considerations of institutional independence, academic freedom, constitutional democracy and rule of law.  We recognize that, in reaching…

View from the side of bronze "alma mater" statue at Columbia University, showing the allegorical figure of a woman wearing a laurel wreath on her head and flowing ropes and holding a scepter in her right hand

Government Intrusion at Columbia Has Only Just Begun

BY AARON NISENSON The Trump administration has successfully buried a key component of the Columbia settlement agreement. The focus on monetary damages paid by the university and restrictions on campus protests and diversity policies obscures the Trump administration’s imposition of the right to interfere directly in university admissions, hiring, and promotion decisions. The Trump administration…

A Columbia Alum Writes to President Shipman

BY HILTON OBENZINGER Dear Claire Shipman, President, Columbia University. I received your letter and other notices about Columbia’s settlement with the Trump administration, and I’m disappointed and angry.  I know you have a tough job, but perhaps unwittingly you harmed me.  By agreeing to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, you have turned…

An Agreement That Settles Nothing

BY THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CHAPTER OF THE AAUP The Agreement between the federal government and Columbia University announced on July 24, 2025, has been presented as a settlement of Title VI violations, specifically the university’s alleged failure to curtail bias and harassment directed toward Jewish faculty, staff, and students.  However, as has been pointed out by…

Nine red pushpins are inserted askew and crowded onto a single date, the 22nd of an unspecified month, on a spiral-hinged calendar that appears in soft focus in the background.

Double Booking Against Higher Education

BY ANTHONY DAVID VERNON What is proper duty? For Chinese philosopher Xunzi, proper duty included “the way of the ritual . . . and return to order.” Double booking breaks rituals and deviates from order. It is problematic for all parties, as we all have what Xunzi refers to as “a sense of duty” or…

Cowardice or Collaboration?

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…