The Trump administration recently announced its intention to pull $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University. Details have yet to be provided, but it is anticipated that funding will be taken from multiple departments, including funds for ongoing scientific and medical research.
Nine other universities are also under investigation. Columbia, however, was the only university under investigation by three separate government agencies: the Departments of Justice, Education and Health and Human Services.
The ostensible justification for the withdrawal of funds is Columbia’s failure to adequately address antisemitism and to protect Jewish students and faculty in the wake of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus sparked by the Gaza War.
Already on Oct. 7, 2023 — the day of the Hamas massacres in southern Israel — Columbia’s campus was beset with chants of “From the river to sea.” Students and professors alike spoke out in praise of Hamas. Months of protests ensued. Columbia’s main quads were occupied, as was venerable Hamilton Hall, the site of student takeovers in the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam War. Commencement ceremonies in May 2024 were cancelled due to the protests. More recently, the library at Barnard College (a Columbia affiliate) was occupied by pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
It is beyond dispute that Jewish students were harassed last year at Columbia, many made to feel unsafe and unwelcome. Similar sentiments were expressed by those who lived in the university’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. It is also beyond dispute that the protestors were supported by outside organizations and that many in the protest encampments were not Columbia students.
Claims of “outside agitators” are eerily reminiscent of opponents of the Civil Rights movement. But the reported evidence is that significant numbers of people arrested at campus protests were not connected to the university. At Columbia, the New York Police Department estimated that 29 percent of those arrested during the protests were not affiliated with the school, and at the City College of New York the figure was 60 percent.
Sanctioning Columbia or other schools for a spineless response to antisemitism is subterfuge — and must be seen as such. The Trump administration’s actions are part of a concerted assault on key institutions critical to the functioning of government and democracy — and, without being hyperbolic, what had been an American way of life. From the National Park Service to the Veterans Administration to the National Institutes of Health to the FBI to the Centers for Disease Control to the intelligence community to siding with Putin over NATO, Columbia is an another incident in the Trump administration’s rapid-fire offensive against American institutions.
Antisemitism at Columbia — and elsewhere — is real, but let us recall that Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago with the prominent Holocaust denier and antisemite Nick Fuentes, who was a guest of Kanye West, a self-professed Nazi who recently sold T-shirts emblazoned with a swastika.
Jewish students — and Muslim students — at Columbia are entitled to attend school without fear and harassment. At the same time, all students are entitled to protest lawfully without harassing or being harassed, and without disrupting the functioning of the university. All students are entitled to attend classes without disruption and harassment. Further, residents of the area must also be free to live without fear of the protests and the protesters. On many of these points, Columbia failed last year.
But the university took its obligations seriously. Columbia examined its responses to antisemitism and published two substantial reports on them, which included finding “an urgent need to reshape everyday social norms across the campuses of Columbia University” and that “the problems we found are serious and pervasive.”
So what is the real motive here? Is this a precursor to defund universities for teaching evolutionary biology? Or for teaching climate science? Or to defund a university because its hospital center performed an abortion to save the life of a mother? Or to defund a university because of protests against the Trump administration — a thought that is clearly not beyond the pale?
This is the proverbial slippery slope. So I say to all who are pleased about the Columbia sanctions, be careful what you wish for — because it will come back around in ways you cannot even imagine.
Today it is ostensibly to combat antisemitism. Tomorrow it may be to combat science or even the right to protest. Beware.
Jonathan D. Strum is an international lawyer and businessman based in Washington and the Middle East. From 1991 to 2005, he was an adjunct professor of Israeli law at Georgetown University Law Center. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel to a graduate school focused on national security in Washington.
