In April, I wrote a plea for the Columbia University leadership not to appease the Trump administration by giving in to its demands for control over the university’s operations, despite the federal funding that was being held hostage. I wrote as an academic concerned, generally, for the fate of US universities under an authoritarian regime, but also as a member of Columbia’s faculty, concerned for what the university was preparing to do to itself. My dismay has, in part, led me to resign my appointment a year before the end of my contract. While I will miss my colleagues and students, I am not sorry to have left. I do not recognize the institution that I was so excited to join in 2017.
My inability to recognize what Columbia has become is perhaps evidence of my former naiveté. But conversations with faculty colleagues over the past year and a half have suggested to me that a real and substantial change has in fact happened. Columbia’s leaders, like their counterparts at other prominent research universities, have in the past needed to be reminded of the point of scholarship and teaching, activities they have typically either long since given up or, in the case of Columbia’s Acting President Claire Shipman and nearly all of the Board of Trustees from which she was drawn, activities they have not engaged in at all. But it was usually possible to persuade them to support these activities and, more broadly, to exercise their authority on behalf of the faculty, researchers, and students who engage in the work of the university. Respect for academic freedom could be won from such leaders, though it was and is seldom instinctively given.
The craven capitulation of Columbia, which, unlike Harvard University, has declined to pursue relief through the courts despite the illegal withdrawal of funding by the federal government, and the dire terms contained in the settlement that has finally been reached make better sense when one takes into account the evidence that Columbia’s current senior leadership largely agrees with the Trump administration. What I mean is this: while there is no doubt that the Columbia leadership would have preferred to maintain the institution’s independence from the whims of elected officials and political appointees in federal agencies, those in power at Columbia and in Washington, DC appear to share significant elements of a world-view. Both groups seem to agree that pro-Palestinian protests are as such antisemitic and ought to be quashed, that academic inquiry should be suppressed if it is politically inconvenient or undesirable, and that shared governance within universities is a nicety that can be suspended unilaterally by the real bosses of the institution, the Trustees.
Among the most troubling elements of the recent resolution agreement is the expansion in use of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, despite its original drafter Kenneth Stern warning Columbia against using it as a basis for identifying discriminatory speech last Fall. According to the Associated Press, Stern has called the new decision “appalling” in light of its chilling effect: certain ways of criticizing the existence and conduct of the state of Israel, including using historical analogies to understand the ongoing genocide in Gaza, are now off-limits. Antisemitism is hatred for or targeted discrimination against Jews. Nothing in the concept of antisemitism bears directly on the question of the future of Israel-Palestine or the actions of the present Israeli government taken on their own. Yet these are matters that the IHRA definition folds into the notion of antisemitism through its elaborating examples, as when it claims that “[d]enying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is antisemitic, given that anti-Zionists, including many Jewish anti-Zionists, might well defend this claim if it comes at the expense of a Palestinian state.
Let us consider a parallel example with the US. It is not anti-American bias to say that the current US government is a threat to freedom and prosperity around the world, for instance. I am a proud American and I sadly think this statement is true. It is also reasonable to hold the US to higher standards than other nations given its history, including chattel slavery and the genocide of native Americans, as well as its professed values as a pluralistic and democratic nation. Yet this thought again is not anti-American, whether it is expressed by an American or someone else.
Worse yet, the settlement authorizes individuals to make complaints directly to the Resolution Monitor who will oversee the terms of the settlement. This process will be easy to weaponize, and there are many on campus eager to exact revenge on their political opponents. Where these opponents are teachers in classrooms—and many of my former colleagues have been courageous in speaking out both against the criminal war in Gaza and against the suppression of legitimate speech on campus through internal and external threats and intimidation—it is likely that academic freedom will not be respected.
Academic freedom, as I wrote for the Blog of the APA in April, consists of the twinned freedoms to teach and to learn, which require an environment where inquiry can be pursued without deference to the interests of the powerful or interference from outsiders. I described such an environment as an important negative dimension of academic freedom that allows faculty, researchers, and students to pursue the core activities of the university. When the preservation of prestige displaces the centrality of these activities, as I believe it has at Columbia even apart from the present crisis, accommodation with powerful outsiders who threaten the institution’s ‘brand value’ makes sense. But if scholars and students choose to go elsewhere to pursue their work, the institution will, in time, be hollowed out. Trading intellectual vibrancy for prestige is a fool’s bargain.
Likewise disturbing is the resolution agreement’s affirmation of the measures taken by the University’s leadership earlier this year to bring to heel wayward scholars who work on the Middle East. These scholars’ academic judgment—and the professional judgment of their colleagues—will continue to be subject to extraordinary oversight by a special Senior Vice Provost, outside the usual governance structure of the university. In a suitably Kafkaesque touch, the Provost’s remit has expanded to “excellence in regional studies.” To excel, in the relevant sense, is not to upset the university’s masters: wealthy donors, those with political power in Washington, and the outrage merchants in the press who peddle the lie that humanities scholars are, as a class, hateful activists bent on indoctrinating successive generations.
We should expect that these arrangements will outlast the Trump administration, since they solve a problem for the university leadership, which has eagerly opened global centers in Istanbul, Amman, Beijing, and Mumbai (as well as six other cities) since 2009 and still plans to expand the network to Tel Aviv. While these centers sponsor traditional scholarly activity, they are also meant to facilitate engagement with private enterprise and foreign governments, enmeshing Columbia with authoritarian regimes around the world. Power and prestige are the primary currencies in this vision of a global university shaped by top-down agendas, not the all-too-often inconvenient products of serious scholarly work.
Finally, the measures described by the resolution agreement to control international students are breathtaking in their disregard for these students’ political rights. While both foreign and domestic students are included in the provision that commits the university to “socialize all students to campus norms and values,” this provision is embedded in a sequence that concerns rules about international students and foreign gifts, making its underlying meaning and likely effect clear. The very next provision, in fact, describes a special mechanism for reporting disciplinary actions involving international students to the US government, a clear sign that the university will continue to comply with the Trump administration’s broader scheme of arbitrary visa revocations, detention, and deportation targeting students for their political activism.
The resolution agreement as a whole would make for grim reading even if university leaders had fought against it tooth and nail. Those of us familiar with the leadership of Columbia University and their actions and declarations over the past two years can discern in it something more than just an authoritarian assault on a distinguished private institution of learning: the willing self-destruction of that institution, which has now entirely lost its way. I hope it can, through the efforts of faculty and students, find its way back some day.
Dhananjay Jagannathan
Dhananjay Jagannathan is an assistant professor of philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies of the Classical Studies program at Columbia University. His scholarly work spans ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. His first book Aristotle's Practical Epistemologywas published by Oxford University Press in 2024. He is working on a book on cultural identity and cultural appropriation, provisionally entitled Culture as Conversation, which is under contract with Penguin Press.
