Columbia Agrees To Trump's Demands

Title: Columbia Agrees To Trump's Demands

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. As you've almost no doubt heard, Columbia University on Friday afternoon announced steps that it's taking to address antisemitism on campus. This is a big deal for multiple reasons, of which fighting antisemitism is only one. The New York Times, for example, describes the set of actions as a concession to a roster of government demands as the school sought to restore about $400 million in federal funding suspended by the Trump administration.

The Columbia student newspaper, the Daily Spectator headline on Friday was Columbia to Acquiesce to Trump Administration's Demands Amid Federal Funding Threats. The Spectator notes that most of the $400 million at stake came out of grants from the National Institutes of Health, and the implications go way beyond Columbia. The Times reports the concessions are instantly being seen as a watershed in Washington's relationships with the nation's colleges overall.

Columbia's actions include adoption of an official definition of antisemitism, giving 36 new campus security officers the power to make arrests, banning masks in certain circumstances, and placing the school's Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under the supervision of a university provost. Trump had demanded a status called receivership, a word the university announcement does not use. We'll see how much our guests think this is that or turns control of the department over to the federal government.

In this segment, we'll have two short interviews with two Columbia faculty members who have had different relationships to the protest movement on campus since October 7th, 2023, and to the issue of campus antisemitism, one is a former leader of the group Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. The other is a leader on the task force that issued a report about campus antisemitism and drafted a working definition of it, the one that the school may now adopt.

After we hear from each of them, we'll talk to two journalists from the Chronicle of Higher Education about the implications of the Trump vs. Columbia developments for colleges and universities nationwide, and we will invite your phone calls and texts on any of it at that time. With us first is Joseph Howley, associate professor of Classics. He has an article in The Nation today called Reading King Lear at Columbia in the Wake of Mahmoud Khalil's Arrest.

Among other things, he is part of what he describes as a loose collective of Jewish faculty who have spoken out against the instrumentalization of antisemitism charges to suppress dissent and further the right wing attacks on universities. Thank you for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Joseph Howley: Always nice to talk to you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: What's your basic reaction to the actions announced by the university on Friday?

Joseph Howley: I think, a lot of my colleagues, there's confusion. We don't really know what this means, but we know what it looks like to some of us, what it looks like to the rest of the world. We know what it looks like to the people who are gunning for our institution. We're looking at attacks here on the university that are threatening free speech, free inquiry. I think we have to understand these concessions or these steps that we've announced as being part and parcel of what we've seen the last few weeks. $400 million in federal funding ended.

Our students disappeared by ICE agents, and now the attempt to extract changes to our policies. I think it's important to note that a lot of the initiatives the university announced on Friday are how I think our leaders would like to do things, not how Trump is asking us to do things, but I think it still raises a lot of questions about our ability to be a great university in New York City and in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you acknowledge, I guess, what the university has said, which is that many of these things, or maybe all of these things, are things they were working on anyway, that they just think are right, that they started working on during the Biden administration. Do you support any of the actions?

Joseph Howley: It's hard for me to say what I support or don't support because I still don't understand them and I've read the document and I work here, but let me flag, for example, the question of MESAAS, the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. As you said, the federal government came in and demanded that that department be put under academic receivership, which is something that you do when a department is basically dysfunctional.

As far as I'm aware, this is like a world-class department with popular professors, popular classes. There was not even a basis for the feds attacking MESAAS. MESAAS has not been part of any of the protests or any controversy on campus this year. In fact, no one was really talking about MESAAS until this federal shakedown letter came out talking about it. Now, what the university seems to be saying is not that we're going to put it in receivership, but that we are going to set up a new senior vice provost for oversight in Area Studies, who's going to review everything that's going on in all the programs that teach in that part of the world.

I've had colleagues here and elsewhere saying, "In other countries, they call that job political officer," which I think is harsh, but jury is out on whether it's fair, but there's two things we need to say. One, the federal government coming into private universities and demanding the right to rearrange departments, change what's taught or studied or how. That's the kind of thing that happens in authoritarian, deeply illiberal regimes. I am not in that department, but I was not aware of any ongoing conversations about that department needing any kind of extra oversight.

The fact is I think that the attack on MESAAS reveals part of what's going on, which is the people who are really fixated on MESAAS are people who are still mad about blow-ups over Israel, Palestine on this campus 20 years ago, who have suddenly found a way to enlist the federal government to come in and rearrange our university to address grudges that they've been nursing for decades.

Brian Lehrer: Two follow-ups on that.

Joseph Howley: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: One, in your view, how much is this the same as or different from the receivership the Trump administration demanded?

Joseph Howley: Well, on paper, it looks very different. On paper, it looks like saying we have oversight processes for making sure our departments and programs are working the way that they should, and we're going to initiate one of those processes here. Receivership was an outrageous demand. I think it remains to be seen whether this is a reasonable way of responding. Personally, I would have thought that this kind of demand would be a bright red line for the board of trustees, but apparently, there's a desire to find a way to make it negotiable, but here's my question.

My department isn't directly affected, but if the Trump administration of the Muslim ban however many years ago can come in and say, "The Department of Middle Eastern Studies needs new oversight," and the university can say, "Yes, we're going to do that," what's to stop them from coming back a week later and demanding new oversight or interference in how we teach climate or race or gender or anything else.

Brian Lehrer: On how long the dissatisfaction by some people with that department has been a thing and their particular problems with it. You said you don't teach in that department, so you tell me when I'm reaching the limits of your knowledge, but on creating new coursework, for example, which is part of the university statement on Friday, it refers to many concerns about how the history of Israel and Zionism is taught.

I gather from what I've read, that the concern is generally that it's only or overwhelmingly being taught as a settler colonial movement and settler colonial state, and the university doesn't want to censor any current faculty member from teaching it their way. They just want to make sure that in a contentious situation, as the Israel-Palestine conflict of course has been, the Israeli view of history is fairly represented as well. Do you disagree or object to that concern as it's being expressed?

Joseph Howley: I think that academic departments and academics should decide how academic subjects should be taught and how academic programs should be run. As far as I'm aware, that department and other departments have a lot of coursework on the history of the modern state of Israel and on Zionism. I don't think we want to get too into the settler colonial thing, but that's not just something people say because of feelings or vibes. That's an expert point of view cultivated in the field.

If scholars find that a productive way of illuminating the history of the state of Israel, they should be allowed to do so, but more importantly, we have processes at free universities for determining whether our curriculum and our teaching needs are adequate to our values and our goals, and those processes should be run by academic faculty from the area, certainly not by Trump appointees.

Brian Lehrer: I think those concerned would say they're not asking for any faculty member to stop teaching from that expert point of view, just that if there are other expert points of view, they want those included, and they assert that they've been locked out. Do you--

Joseph Howley: Well, they can assert that, but I think we have processes for determining that, and more importantly, Brian, the Trump administration says they're issuing these demands with a knife to our throat to the tune of billions of dollars in the name of combating antisemitism and making Jewish students safer. I don't see how rewriting our curriculum on the Middle East makes Jewish students safer, and I certainly don't see how opening the door to letting someone else come and rewrite our curriculum on gender, race, climate, vaccines, whatever makes anyone safer.

Brian Lehrer: You believe Trump is weaponizing antisemitism in pursuit of a larger goal of harming Columbia or colleges and universities generally, or ones that he doesn't see as consistent with his values. Correct?

Joseph Howley: Yes. I mean, I think scholars, historians of authoritarianism, a lot of people would say that universities are a natural site for resistance to authoritarian politics, and that makes them, just like law firms and media organizations, an attractive early target for Trump. I think you also just have to look at him and the people around him to see that these are not people with credible concerns about antisemitism.

I mean, he's letting the federal government be disassembled by a car salesman who does Hitler salutes on TV. His allies in Congress subscribe to the great replacement theory. This is not a political movement with genuine concerns about antisemitism, but yes, a lot of us have been warning for over a year now that what's happening is that very kind of narrow and ideological and inaccurate framings of what's been happening on our campus and other campuses are being advanced in order to provide a kind of pretext for an attack on higher education that the Republican Party has been waging for years.

You just have to look at what's happened in, say, Florida, to the Florida college system under Republican control there to see that actually there's just people in this country who don't think universities should be free to teach whatever they want to. In the awful pain of the last year, they found a new wedge to crack open the door here.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Even if Trump is weaponizing antisemitism and disingenuous about it and all the ways that you say, do you acknowledge that it exists on the Columbia campus in a way or to an extent that needs to be addressed more than it was being addressed?

Joseph Howley: Yes, I think there's two things to say about this. One, I think it's preposterous to say that the university hasn't done enough. I mean, in addition to the task force, we have this new Office of Institutional Equity that's been very well resourced. We've all had to do new trainings. They're doing a ton of investigations. I think you could only look at university and say it hasn't done enough about antisemitism if what you meant by that is actually like crushing dissent. Let me talk about this the way an academic would think about it. When you've got a bunch of data points and you're trying to build a model to explain it, you want to go with the model that explains the most data points, right?

Here are some of the data points I see. There has been this terrible war on for like almost a year and a half now, and there have been huge protests in response to it, protests that have been very diverse. They've included a lot of Jewish students and faculty, some of us who have been targeted ourselves as Jews for taking part in or being around these protests. In addition to these protests, you've had some real harassment and unpleasant climate for Jewish and Israeli students and for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.

Now, you could kind of draw an awkward sort of gerrymander around some of those data points and point to the harassment of Jewish and Israeli students, which is real, although I think not widespread the way the media sometimes represents it. Then you could point to the protests and claim that they're all somehow anti-Jewish and say, "Oh, yes, we have a some sort of structural problem with antisemitism," but you could draw a different circle that encompasses all the data points, a model that explains everything. I think it would go something like this. There's a terrible war on, and in free societies, when you have wars, you have protests.

This latest round of hostility started with an Islamist group killing hundreds of people in the name of Palestinian liberation, and that has prompted harassment and prejudice against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. The state of Israel has responded by killing tens of thousands of people in the name of Jewish safety wrapped in our holiest symbols, and that prompts harassment and prejudice against Jews and Israelis, but it's all a result of the war, right? It's all a result of a conflict in another country on a very international and diverse campus.

I think the folks who have come in and tried to draw this gerrymander that says, "Well, the only real problem here is antisemitism, and that problem is coterminous with the protest movement, and so we just need to crush that, and then we'll have saved, protected all the Jews." I think that's disingenuous and it's actually keeping us from helping anyone on this campus and it's opening the door for this Trump attack.

Brian Lehrer: Certainly the university statement does not say that it wants to crush the protest movement per se, that they want to crush the antisemitism that has sometimes come along in parts of it. Let me read you a few particular data points, as you call them from press reporting. The Atlantic magazine staff writer Franklin Foer had an article last week titled Columbia University's Antisemitism Problem. He writes, "During a two-week period during the encampment last spring, nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as 'Globalize the intifada' and 'We don't want any Zionists here' and 'Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.'"

He then describes a class being taught on the history of modern Israel, which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives about his native country's founding, but he writes, "About 30 minutes into the first session of the seminar, four people, their faces shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into the classroom that his in the previous sentence referred to, I guess, the professor. A protester circled the seminar table, flinging flyers in front of the students. One flyer bore an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow."

As Foer reports it, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella group that organized the protest, posted a video of the action, with the caption, "We Disrupted a Zionist Class and You Should Too." One more from the Washington Post, which reports, "On October 7, 2024, the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel, masked protesters converged on campus. Around that time, CUAD changed its rhetoric. The group announced its celebration of the 'al-Aqsa Flood,' using the name Hamas has given for the October 2023 attack, and praised the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah (otherwise known as the Houthis), groups the United States has designated as terrorist organizations.

I guess one last thing in this very long question. The Spectator student newspaper reports that a university official confirmed to it that the task force had encouraged the university to appoint another task force to address Islamophobia also. However, when former President Shafik approached faculty about participating in the group, they turned it down because they "didn't want to be window dressing."

If that's your understanding too, the way you're talking about where the lines get drawn around the data, does it affect your view of that at all, the seriousness of those incidents as reported in The Atlantic and the Washington Post, and the fact that the university was at first interested in drawing lines around both antisemitism and Islamophobia?

Joseph Howley: Well, you've just given me a ton to respond to, Brian, not all of which I in any way responsible for, but I was just at UCLA last week where they do have one of these task forces on anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination. Apparently, that task force has issued a number of reports, and the chancellor of the University of California system has said that he hasn't read them and won't read them. I think we have to be mindful that that's the climate all this is happening, and I don't know anyone who was approached to be on that task force. I have no interest in answering someone else's questions about a student group that I'm not affiliated with.

I will say that the classroom disruption that you talked about. My views on that action are a matter of public record. I and others have come out publicly. We find that to be an unacceptable form of protest for a number of reasons. I mean, look, I think Franklin Foer has his own agenda. His article tracks a lot with talking points that have been circulated by the anti-protest crowd on campus, and frankly, with the federal shakedown letter, I understand that last year people walking across campus might have seen flags or heard slogans that make them uncomfortable.

I live in the Upper West Side. I can't walk to the grocery store without seeing graffiti that says "Am Yisrael Chai," which, frankly, offends me and makes me uncomfortable. I think part of living in a free society is having that experience. You just have to look at the Columbia University statutes that say that in order to be a free university where we are free to interrogate received wisdom that we do not rule any speech out of order on this campus, even if it is offensive or hateful to other people.

That is a commitment that we have made as a free university in a free society. You've just thrown a bunch of mishmash stuff at me. When we're talking about data points, one of the things we have to be most careful about is not cherry-picking a few data points that seem particularly egregious or activating and making them representative of the entire situation. As someone who has put my name out in public to defend students' right to protest, even when I don't agree with what they're saying, I have paid close attention to the protest movement on campus all year last year. I have seen a lot of ugly stuff, frankly, from the counter-protesters and the pro-Israel students who have harassed me personally.

I have seen students doing things that I think are like stupid tactics or saying things I don't agree with, but I think that on the whole, an accurate assessment of what's been happening on campus by people who have actually been present around protest would have to acknowledge that it's been a very difficult and painful year for a lot of people, but that this remains fundamentally a safe campus, one that is not just safe to walk around but one where it's safe to speak freely.

It's only in recent months that I have been hearing from instructors I supervise, from their students, that they no longer feel safe talking in class about current events because they think one of their fellow students is going to dox them on social media, the way Mahmoud Khalil was doxed and then got him disappeared by DHS, or that they're going to be reported for antisemitism to our Office of Institutional Equity.

If we want to talk about the climate on campus and how it's been changing, I think that the kinds of measures that have been pushed in the name of being tough on antisemitism and the kind of political culture that's been cultivated around social media in particular is actually having a really terrible effect on our classroom environment and on our students just based on the conversations I'm having.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Joseph Howley from the Classics Department of Columbia, and among other things, he has an article in The Nation just published today, Reading King Lear After the Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil. Thank you so much for joining us.

Joseph Howley: Thanks, Brian. Take it easy.

Brian Lehrer: We'll hear next from another faculty member from Columbia, co-chair of the Antisemitism Task force. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're talking about Columbia University's response on Friday to the Trump administration's demands regarding antisemitism in order to get back $400 million in federal grants that Trump had suspended. Now, Ester Fuchs, professor in Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and co-chair of the Task Force on Antisemitism appointed during the protests of last school year by former university president Minouche Shafik. Thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ester Fuchs: Thanks, Brian, for having me.

Brian Lehrer: What's your basic reaction to the actions announced by the university on Friday, and do you oppose any of them?

Ester Fuchs: I personally do not oppose any of the reaction that the university has presented in its documents, and I think part of the issue now is people having trouble keeping two ideas in their heads at the same time, which is to say that there is antisemitism on the Columbia campus. Part of what our task force did was have 20 listening sessions which we conducted. Over 500 students showed up. We invited every single student, Jews and not-Jews, to these listening sessions. Frankly, the results were disturbing, and for me, personally, heartbreaking. I went to eight of these sessions and I listened to students. I would tell everybody to read the first and second reports of the task force.

In the second report, we document these students' experiences, these real and lived experiences of students on Columbia's campus, and so it is first a legitimate goal to reduce antisemitism on campus. We need to do that. The university has been working on that for the past 16 months, but the second point that I think people have a hard time dealing with and conflating is that, personally, disagree with the methods of cutting university funding, of threatening the university in any way to achieve these goals, is simply wrong, but the idea that we have these goals to achieve, and we're doing it now, yes. That is fundamentally a good thing and a right thing and a thing that the university should be doing.

Brian Lehrer: You've heard the objections to this as a landmark breaking of faith with the American notion of academic freedom. Even if you think the university has been biased in the past in its course offerings or not disciplining or stopping students committing acts of antisemitism, why not stand on the principle that that's an internal debate for university faculty and leaders to have, not something that should ever be imposed to capitulate to a president who you probably think is bending the US toward authoritarian rule. I don't want to put words in your mouth, though.

Ester Fuchs: No, you've got it correctly. You know me long enough to know that that is my view. This is, you know what? You're getting at the heart of the problem for many of us now, which is that the way the Trump administration has approached this, we believe, many of us, that it's wrong. Of course, we should not be in any way allowing the federal government to infringe on academic freedom. There's nothing in what the university agreed to that involves infringement on academic freedom.

I would say that the task force consistently supported academic freedom and free speech. We say it in all of our documents. The right to explore ideas and express these views are fundamental to the way the university has to operate. At the same time, all of the interruptions of classes that you pointed to, the demonstrations in academic buildings, those are actually not permitted by university rules. One of my colleagues on the task force, David Schizer, who is a former dean of the Law School, helped me understand this, and he said it so well, which is, free speech rights of some members of our community cannot interfere with the rights of others to speak, teach, research, and learn. That's what's been happening.

That has nothing to do with the Trump administration, other issues that involve the Trump administration, of course. I mean, I am completely in opposition of the way the Trump administration has approached this. This is my personal view, and I want to state that very clearly. Holding the university up for ransom is not the way to help us do our process. We have a process. We've been doing it reasonably effectively. It's not over. We're not done. I mean, that's part of what I think needs to be understood.

Brian Lehrer: Two follow-ups on that.

Ester Fuchs: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: One, if Trump is holding the university for ransom, as you put it, and the university appears to be capitulating to the demand, many people have asked, what's to stop him now from holding up the university for ransom? Because they want something different on DEI, they want something different on climate, or now, other universities that Columbia has set a precedent for.

Ester Fuchs: Right. This is a really important question. Appears to be capitulating. Appears to be capitulating is not capitulation. The things that the university is doing around antisemitism needs to be done.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that all of these things would have been done and announced around this time anyway were it not for the $400 million that's being held over Columbia?

Ester Fuchs: Okay. My personal view is that the process would have been slower, but we would have gotten to all of these things. Absolutely. I prefer the university process, frankly. That's why I personally thought this was the wrong approach for the Trump administration to take. They could deal with Title VI. That's the role of the federal government to make sure that we enforce Title VI. That's one of the things we hope they continue doing, but approaching the problem the way they have has created internal problems within the university that now are linked to the antisemitism problem. This is really dysfunctional for us.

We needed to go through our process, build coalitions, help people understand what's going on. This is an institutional problem. These are structural problems of antisemitism that now I understand has really been on this campus for 20 years, 20 years this is building. There was a report written in 2003 on antisemitism. Nothing was done. It focused primarily on that Middle Eastern studies department which was then reconfigured, but nothing was done. There's an imbalance in the curriculum. There are students who are feeling hate and discriminated against in the classroom.

We have issues in the classroom and in the curriculum where faculty are propagandizing and advocating, which is, by the way, against the faculty handbook. Now, from my personal point of view, I don't believe we should fire any faculty, but we need to rebalance the curriculum and offer the opportunity for other points of view, which, by the way, do not exist now.

I could give you a good example. Middle East Politics was taught in the Political Science department for years and years by a tenured faculty member. We have no one in Political Science teaching Middle East Politics. It's taught in MESAAS by one point of view. We understand that there are divergent points of view. We believe that divergent points of view should be taught. They're not being taught now. That department has been turning down faculty who they view as "supportive of the state of Israel" for years now. They've been turning them down. There's a record of that.

Brian Lehrer: My other follow-up to your previous answer refers back to the previous guest. When you talk about the need for this kind of action by the university, irregardless of Trump, he said that the frame is inaccurate.

It makes it look like Columbia is basically an unsafe place for Jewish students when that's not the case, and that antisemitism is the only-- which he denounces and he acknowledged those incidents in general that I cited from the Washington Post and The Atlantic, but that there's also now a chill being felt by students who support the Palestinian cause because they're afraid with this report and the new pressure from Washington and the administration acting consistent with what they want, that they feel chilled in raising criticisms of Israel in class or on campus. Your reaction to whether the frame should be broader for what the university is doing now?

Ester Fuchs: Well, in fact, the frame is broader, and in the review that the university agreed to do with the new vice provost, it's reviewing all Area Studies, including the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, which, by the way, is not a department like the other department, so the review is across the board. I just want to go back for a second to the creation of our task force and when Minouche Shafik not only appointed an antisemitism task force but tried to create an Islamophobia task force, a task force on hate, Arab hate and Islamic hate, she could not get one single faculty person to sit on that task force.

In fact, on the record, the people she asked said, "Well, I don't want to be window dressing." You're only window dressing if you choose to be window dressing. Brian, you know that I've been accused of being window dressing for agreeing to sit on an antisemitism task force by right wing people. We have been accused of everything under the sun from the right and the left because we said we want to sit down within the university and fix our own problems, work on this as a university.

We welcomed that task force, and they refused. What does that tell you about those faculty? That's depressing to the nth degree as far as I'm concerned about the views of those faculty. They were not helping their students by not working to fix this problem internally. You can move that conversation into a different direction, but it's just unacceptable from my point of view.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, we could keep going back and forth with different members of the faculty with different points of view on this, but we've now heard from two, Joseph Howley previously and Ester Fuchs here from the School of International and Public affairs and co-chair of the Antisemitism Task Force. Thank you so much for joining us.

Ester Fuchs: Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: After a break, we'll put everything you've been hearing from the two different Columbia faculty members with different relationships to all this into national context, the implications for every school not named Columbia University with a reporter and an editor from The Chronicle of Higher Education, and we invite your calls with comments or questions about any of it. 212-433-WNYC. Especially if you're in the Columbia University community in any way, students, faculty or staff, parents, alumni, or anyone else. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text as we continue after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now for our remaining minutes, we'll put everything you've been hearing from the two different Columbia faculty members with different relationships to the antisemitism and university response to Trump's demands into national context, the implications for every school not named Columbia University with a reporter and editor from The Chronicle of Higher Education, and we'll take some phone calls from you, especially if you're a member of the Columbia community in any way. 212-433-WNYC. Our guests are Chronicle of Higher Education news editor Sarah Brown and Chronicle reporter Kate Hidalgo Bellows. Kate and Sarah, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

?Sarah Brown: Thank you.

?Kate Hidalgo Bellows: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Kate, you had an article Friday called, "We Asked Colleges How They Would React to Demands From Trump. They Wouldn't Say." That was the headline. What do you mean they wouldn't say?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows: We reached out to about 60 colleges that received a letter from the Trump administration telling them, well, for some reminding them that they were under investigation, and for others, this came as a surprise, and that they need to apply Title VI to Jewish college students. When they received the letter, we were asking them what they would do if they received a letter from the Trump administration, asking them to do what Trump has asked Columbia to do, and they didn't tell us.

Most people didn't respond. There were a lot of institutions that weren't super affected by this because they're no longer under investigation, but for the rest, we just didn't hear from them. I think a lot of institutions don't think that they will be asked, but we're certainly on the lookout for that.

Brian Lehrer: Sarah, have you been gathering reactions from schools around the country, and what have you been hearing about national implications? I see you had an article called "New Education Department Guidance on Race and DEI Tells Colleges Which Programs It Might Consider Illegal In Those Areas," and you may have heard it come up in our conversation with the professors that maybe what Columbia is doing in the face of Trump's demand is now going to get generalized to all kinds of other schools on other things.

Sarah Brown: Right. I think if you look at what Princeton University's president actually wrote in The Atlantic last week about this, and he wrote, "Nobody should suppose that this will stop at Columbia or with the specific academic programs targeted by the government's letter," referring to the letter of demands that Columbia has now effectively agreed to many of those requests.

Eisgruber, the president of Princeton, continued by saying, "If government officials think it's permissible to stifle ideas they don't like, 'some people in authority will inevitably yield to the temptation to do so.'" This raises this sort of broader question about if you're a college leader in this situation, how should you react? One sort of window into this is from actually Columbia University's previous president,

Lee Bollinger, who did his first interview since leaving office with our colleagues in the Chronicle Review. He said universities should have special protections under the First Amendment to advance understanding and knowledge free from government interference. He also said universities need to articulate that special role and defend it. Now, what we haven't seen much of so far is college leaders actually speaking up and defending it because they don't want to put a target on their back.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here is Stu, alumni of Columbia, he says, in Providence, Rhode Island. Stu, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Stu: Thank you for having me. One of the problems in this whole discussion that you were having with Professor Fuchs is she and you both didn't define antisemitism. The definition that Columbia is now going to use is the IHRA definition, International Holocaust Remembrance Association. They define antisemitism in part by your reaction to Israel. For example, I'll read one, "Denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination," for example. This is theirs, "by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor." That makes you an antisemite according to them. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Well, let me jump in just to read, because I do have it. The definition of antisemitism that the school will adopt, that was written by the task force, which I don't think includes the words that you just said.

It says, "Antisemitism is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis. Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards apply to Israel."

Now, I think what's broken out, and we didn't get to this with the professors, there were so many aspects of this agreement to touch on in our available time, but I know that one of the controversies that's broken out about this definition is those last words, "Certain double standards apply to Israel" without saying what they are, but doesn't go as far as what you were citing from that other definition, but go ahead.

Stu: According to the New York Times, both Harvard and Columbia are adopting the IHRA definition. That's one thing. Secondly, in your example that you gave to the first professor from Franklin Foer, students invading a classroom, which isn't right. I don't agree with that, but they never used the word Jew. They said Zionist, and Zionism does not equal Judaism. I'm a Jew, and I'm an anti-Zionist Jew. If you call shouting out and calling Zionism wrong, antisemitism, that's a whole other issue. I would love you to have a program about the IHRA definition which is accepted by many states and our own State Department, and it's insidious.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Stu. We appreciate your call. Here's Paul Adam in Maplewood, New Jersey on WNYC. Hello, Paul Adam.

Paul Adam: Yes. Hi. Thank you. I really appreciate you taking my call. My mom and my dad are alumni of Columbia University. I really wish I could have asked Professor Howley, but instead I will ask the audience, do you know what it's like to be Jewish? I'm a huge proponent of free speech. However, there's become an increasing amount of antisemitism on campus. Well, it's become bullying as well, which is unacceptable. I'm very--

Brian Lehrer: I hear what you're saying, as I heard what the other caller was saying with a different point of view, but do you have concerns about Columbia doing these things in the face of pressure from the Trump administration, which might now be a model that they will use to pressure other universities to do all kinds of things?

Paul Adam: I'm a little bit iffy, honestly, about the pressuring. I agree with the statement about what defines antisemitism, and I'm grateful that they actually stepped up to that. However, using the federal government, it makes me very iffy about the subject. However, in essence now Jewish and Israeli students are fearing and are fearful and nervous. It's, in essence, the existence of learning while being Jewish. It's similar to driving while being Black.

Brian Lehrer: Paul Adam, thank you very much. Of course, that could open a whole other kind of conversation, but we don't have time for it. We're going to take one more caller and then finish with our Chronicle of Higher Education guests. Here is Spencer who is the university news deputy editor at the Columbia student newspaper The Spectator. Spencer, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Spencer: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: What would you like to add?

Spencer: I think that this is really a turning point for Columbia and you're going to see today a lot of protests at noon outside the Columbia gates at 116th and Broadway. The American Association of University Professors here at Columbia is holding a vigil. Then at 1:00, immediately following it, you're going to have the Student Workers of Columbia, which is the union, hold an information session. You're really going to see a lot of things coming out of Columbia's campus today coming back from break.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for calling as a reporter. What do you think they hope will come from these demonstrations?

Spencer: You won't really know until the demonstrations happen, but clearly, branding it a vigil for academic freedom means that they believe that, what took place with the Trump administration dictating Columbia's moves ends academic freedom in their opinion.

Brian Lehrer: Spencer, thank you very much for calling the show and chiming in.

Spencer: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: I've been following the Spectator's reporting on this, and as you heard, I cited it several times in my interview with the professors. Thank you very much. Kate Hidalgo Bellows from The Chronicle of Higher Education. I want to play a clip of Education Secretary Linda McMahon on CNN yesterday apparently indicating that this isn't over for Columbia. Even with all these things that our various callers and guests have been debating, they're not necessarily getting their $400 million back. Here she is.

Linda McMahon: And I believe that they are on the right track so that we can now move forward.

Dana Bash (CNN Anchor): Does that mean that the money will be unfrozen?

Linda McMahon: That means that we are on the right track now to make sure the final negotiations to unfreeze that money will be in place.

Dana Bash (CNN Anchor): Okay, so not yet?

Linda McMahon: We're working on it.

Brian Lehrer: Linda McMahon with Dana Bash on CNN. Kate, what happens next?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows: This will be really interesting to watch if the administration is going to ask more from Columbia University or maybe announce other federal funds being frozen. I think that one thing that I'm really interested to watch is seeing if universities are going to pre-comply with what they're seeing Trump ask Columbia to do, if they will adopt a definition of antisemitism, adopt institutional neutrality, hire more police officers, something like that. I'm curious if we're going to see that on other college campuses so that they don't become a target of the Trump administration, but as for Columbia, we're waiting to see if there will be litigation.

Brian Lehrer: And if they're going to up the ante even more. So far, the school has declined to sue, rather try to negotiate, I guess. Sarah Brown from The Chronicle in our last 20 seconds or so, now it's another Ivy League school, Penn, which isn't getting as much press as Columbia, but they're withholding almost $200 million from them. What's the demand there? Real quick.

Sarah Brown: It appears to be related to a Title IX issue having to do with the participation of transgender athletes in sports. This was related to, frankly, an issue that played out three years ago with Lia Thomas on the Penn swim team. One thing that we're really following is it's kind of unclear exactly how colleges are going to be able to satisfy the administration's demands, because in this case that situation has played out already, and so-

Brian Lehrer: Already happened, so-

Sarah Brown: -we'll have to wait and see.

Brian Lehrer: -to be continued. Sarah Brown and Kate Hidalgo Bellows from The Chronicle of Higher Education, thank you very much for giving us some perspective today.

?Sarah Brown: Thank you.

?Kate Hidalgo Bellows: Thank you.

 

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