For the past two academic years, student protests against the war in Gaza have forced Columbia into a high-stakes balancing act between the competing demands of free speech and student safety.
Last week, the school was pushed from its high wire.
First, the Trump administration
revoked $400 million in federal grants and contracts over what it said was the school’s failure to combat antisemitism, an extraordinary step that Columbia’s interim president said would affect “nearly every corner of the university.”
The next day, immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate, and removed him from university housing. President Trump said he would be stripped of his green card and deported.
The two moves sent shock waves through Columbia — and the world of higher education — and put the school on the front lines of the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on both elite universities and immigrant communities. It was an outcome Columbia had tried hard to avoid.
Dr. Katrina Armstrong, the university’s interim president, acknowledged the pressure on Monday. “All eyes are on Columbia,” she wrote in a letter to the students and faculty.
That had been true for months. One
conservative pundit in December urged Linda McMahon, Trump’s choice for education secretary, to “simply destroy Columbia University.” By Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, was telling reporters that the school had refused to help the administration identify people “engaged in pro-Hamas activities.” Leavitt’s message was stern: “We expect all America’s colleges and universities to comply with this administration’s policy.”
Located a quick subway ride from the newsrooms and broadcast studios of the national news media, Columbia became the epicenter of a national student protest movement last year.
Image
In April, students supportive of the Palestinian liberation movement established an encampment in the center of campus to oppose the war in Gaza and demanded that the university divest from
what they have called “all economic and academic stakes in Israel.” This included Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University.
The encampment inspired similar demonstrations at schools across the United States.
Now, other schools worry that the rescinding of funds and arrest of Mr. Khalil could be a harbinger of a broader assault on universities by the Trump administration and its Republican allies.
“If you were going to get the most bang for your buck, and you did not want to take on some place like Harvard, then Columbia is a very good target,” said Robert McCaughey, an emeritus professor of history at Barnard College who has written a history of Columbia. “Its location in New York is sort of a blessing and a curse.”
Much of the on-campus protest at Columbia was peaceful. But as both the encampment and the students’ fervor grew, some students and members of the faculty said they felt the already much-disputed lines between anti-Zionism and antisemitism were blurring beyond distinction.
Many Jewish students said they felt fearful on campus because of chants, signs and literature at the encampment that sometimes expressed support for the Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. There were also specific
allegations of antisemitism and an uproar when video surfaced online of a student protest leader saying, “
Zionists don’t deserve to live.” (He was later suspended.)
For decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a source of tension and debate at Columbia. There are large groups of students who sympathize with either side of the conflict, a highly regarded Middle Eastern studies department and the
dual degree program with Tel Aviv University.
The university also has a storied history of student activism dating to the 1960s and was long the academic home of Edward Said, the literary scholar who wrote “Orientalism” and was a high-profile spokesman for the Palestinian cause.
In the early 2000s, the school was engulfed in
months of controversy after allegations that pro-Palestinian professors had intimidated pro-Israel students.
A faculty panel found no evidence of antisemitism.
The current crisis dwarfs any of those disputes.
This week, the Department of Education
announced it had sent letters to 60 universities being investigated for violating federal rules protecting against “antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”
The letters warn the schools — including private and public colleges, from Harvard University to the University of Tennessee — of “potential enforcement actions.” But so far, no school has faced the same level of scrutiny as Columbia — or the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds over accusations of antisemitism.
Last week, Dr. Armstrong, the interim president, said the federal funding cut would have far-reaching consequences for “students, faculty, staff, research and patient care.” And on Monday, the National Institutes of Health
said it had canceled more than 400 grants that would have channeled more than $250 million to the school, the biggest chunk of the $400 million cut announced Friday.
Mr. Trump
vowed more arrests of student activists like Mr. Khalil, 30, who was detained by immigration agents despite his status as a legal permanent resident of the United States.
The White House celebrated Mr. Khalil’s arrest, posting his picture beneath the words “Shalom, Mahmoud” on its official social media accounts. Mr. Trump said Mr. Khalil’s green card would be revoked and he would be deported.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted
a statement that accused Mr. Khalil of having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But officials have not explained what that means, and they have not accused Mr. Khalil of having contact with, taking direction from or providing material support to the group.
Instead, the
argument appears to be that the anti-Israel protests at Columbia were antisemitic, and that Mr. Khalil therefore undermined the global fight against antisemitism, which the United States has identified as a foreign policy goal.
Civil rights activists have condemned that rationale.
“It is beyond the pale,” Donna Lieberman, the president of the New York Civil Liberties Union,
said at a rally on Monday. “It’s targeted, retaliatory and an extreme attack on the First Amendment. And it reeks of McCarthyism.”
Columbia is feeling pressure not only from the executive branch. Last month, the House Committee on Education and Workforce sent a letter to Dr. Armstrong and Columbia’s board chairs, David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, outlining “numerous antisemitic incidents” that it said had taken place this academic year.
It asked the university to supply disciplinary records connected to 11 incidents dating to the previous school year, including the student “occupation” of Hamilton Hall last April, the protest against a class taught by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the disruption of an Israeli history class.
“It has been challenging to get very basic information,” said Representative Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan who is chairman of the House committee. “President Armstrong personally promised me twice that new leadership would result in real changes, but I’ve seen nothing but empty promises."
The university said it is juggling its obligations to abide by federal privacy law while working with Mr. Walberg. “We did and will continue to cooperate with the committee’s requests while following our
legal obligations,” a spokeswoman for Dr. Armstrong said.
Columbia did submit disciplinary records but obscured key details in many cases by heavily redacting them, according to an aide on the House committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak about the matter. The committee is continuing to negotiate with the school for the information, the aide said.
Last spring, when the university’s president at the time, Nemat Shafik, was called
to testify before Congress, she avoided the legalistic jargon that her peers, the former presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, used in December 2023 hearings. They resigned after their testimony led lawmakers and the public to question the universities’ commitment to rooting out antisemitism on campus.
Speaking before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Dr. Shafik
adopted a conciliatory tone.
She said action would be taken against students and faculty who violated university rules and gave lawmakers university disciplinary records that are usually confidential. And she said that Columbia respected the exercise of free speech, but that it “cannot and should not tolerate abuse of this privilege.”
The next day, Dr. Shafik called in the city’s Police Department to arrest student protesters on Columbia’s lawn. More than 100 Columbia students were arrested, the largest mass arrests at the school since protests there in 1968.
The arrests plunged the school into a fresh crisis, as outrage from the student body and the world of higher education poured in. Months later, Dr. Shafik
resigned after a brief tenure that was dominated by the protest crisis and criticism of her handling of it.
ut the tensions continued into the new school year.
In the fall, the group that organized last year’s protest
expressed support for “armed resistance” by Hamas and posted an essay online that called the Oct. 7 onslaught a “moral, military and political victory.”
And in recent weeks
protests emerged at Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia, over the expulsion of two students who were disciplined for disrupting a class on the history of Israel.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, said he and his colleagues were trying to make it clear to their students at the town hall that they were in a moment of great risk.
“We were giving a brutally honest rendering of what the landscape is right now,” he said.
