Columbia University is “one of the most premier research and teaching institutions in the world, and that institution dies tomorrow.”
That’s recently retired Columbia Professor of Law Katherine M. Franke in a video she posted online yesterday about the plans of the Trump administration to place Columbia into a consent decree.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
A consent decree, which can last for years, would give a federal judge responsibility for ensuring Columbia changes its practices along lines laid out by the federal government. If such a decree is in place, Columbia would have to comply with it. If a judge determines the school is out of compliance, it could be held in contempt of court, punishable by penalties including fines.
Franke says she has heard that Columbia will be going along with Trump’s plans:
What I am hearing is that tomorrow we will learn that the university has agreed a form of formal oversight and governance by the Trump administration.
Last month, the Trump administration withheld $400 million in federal funding from Columbia and demanded it comply with a list of specific changes. At the time, Columbia responded by saying it would indeed comply, but its money has not been restored—in fact it was hit again last week when NIH froze all funding to the university. After Columbia’s initial response, I wrote:
That such overreach may not have been so bad for Columbia this time around will be no comfort when—the precedent having been set, the power-grab politically normalized—things get worse later for it and other institutions.
It turns out later may be much sooner than anyone thought.
Again, the WSJ:
A consent decree would be a major escalation of how the federal government normally resolves education-related civil-rights issues…
For a consent decree to take effect, Columbia would have to agree to enter it. It is unclear whether the university board has discussed the possibility.
Columbia could fight the move in court; the Justice Department would need to prove that the arrangement is warranted. But a court case could take years, and Columbia would likely lose federal funding in the interim—and might ultimately lose. Opposing the move would also open the school up to required depositions and legal fact-finding, which could keep the school’s campus politics in the spotlight.
If Franke is correct, the university board will agree (or already has agreed) to the consent decree—the details of which are not yet available. If you happen to know more, please share it in the comments.
In the deluge of Trump Season 2 these individual developments can seem minor. But they’re ground breaking. We are witnessing an authoritarian takeover of American research and knowledge institutions that do not toe the MAGA line.
It’s entirely fair and reasonable to heap criticism on the Trump administration for this, and for so much else. But we are missing part of the plot if we don’t also turn our crosshairs on schools like Columbia that are exercising, to borrow Timothy Snyder’s phrase, anticipatory obedience.
It seems like an Emperor Has No Clothes moment when immensely wealthy research institutions, like Columbia, ostensibly founded in enlightenment ideals of reason, autonomy, evidence, inquiry and freedom, give up these ideals to kowtow to raw power, with nary a fight.
There are hundreds of thousands of smart, well-meaning people working in universities because they believe in these values. Watching their institutions fold like cheap tweed smoker jackets confirms some of the most cynical views that higher education is a business rather than an institution or, even, a public good.
It’s disgusting, and university administrators who endorse this grovelling do not have the moral courage and character required to work within and to defend liberal institutions. Though of course anyone paying attention to the corporatization of higher ed over the last few decades will already know this.
I appreciate your take but, personally, would go further, in terms of cynicism. The idea that Columbia was “founded in enlightenment ideals of reason, autonomy, evidence, inquiry and freedom” feels so dated I almost cringe. I’m in my 7th (and final, thank God) year of a phd program, and what I’ve learned in my time in academia is that all the highfalutin stuff academics repeat ad naseum about the values of higher ed is Frankfurtian B.S.
Frankly, I am not at all surprised by Columbia’s (expected) capitulation. There’s long been a shocking gap between what universities preach and what they do.
Thanks for your reply. I see what you mean. My short retort is that you left out from your quotation of me the word ‘ostensibly,’ which covers all the logical ground you’ve covered.
My more constructive reply is that I largely agree with you, and each of your examples I myself have launched more than once. But I don’t go so far to condemn these institutions outright, consigning them to the bin of hopelessness. I believe there is a special kernel within the idea of The University, and even though I too graduated my PhD disgusted and resigned, I haven’t given up on the idea that we can have institutions where truth-seeking people congregate to learn and grow.
So I think it’s on that score that these capitulations boil my blood.
Moreover, it is up to faculty to make good on these ideals. Fortunately, while many of the problems you mention are real and almost all institutions are prone to favor external goods over internal ones, professors are still afforded a fair amount of freedom to model these ideals in and outside the classroom. So, if you do find yourself in academia, please do the work to make these ideals real to your students and support adjunct faculty when you can.
Unsurprisingly, universities and the humans working in them don’t live up to the ideal of the Humboldtian university. But this is very different from the current situation concerning Columbia and the threat to academic freedom in the US and by implication, worldwide. Trying to cover over the qualitative difference between the two only plays into the authoritarians’ hands.
If the Federal Government does successfully take over Columbia University, may I humbly suggest renaming it back to King’s College?
On the Humboldtian model there is indeed a foundation in enlightenment ideals, but surely, this model has been long dead in the US. These universities are really just business enterprises. They might be not-for-profit officially, but their endowment is treated and handled as just another investment fund. So, who’re we kidding? Kowtowing to Trump is just business calculation, so we should approach the decision as one should approach any business decision done for an independently good or bad cause: does it serve Columbia’s (monetized) self-interest to do Trump’s bidding? It is not obvious that it does, certainly in the long-term. There will be, until the rest of the world also turns fascist, significant reputation loss. It is also not clear, looking at past examples, that the quality of research (that will be allowed to continue) won’t seriously suffer. The MAGA line is largely crazy, anti-science stuff, we should not forget. And so on. I think this is much more surprising about Columbia. My guess is that they miscalculated for some reason not understanding the nature of authoritarianism. They though that if they appease Trump, he will let them live in piece in return for some compromises and symbolic acts of submission. Why they believed this is beyond me. But evidently, they did.
Meanwhile, here’s how you stand up to a bully instead of capitulating to them: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/15/nation/harvard-resistance-trump-administration-demands/
Harvard has just shown Columbia just how shameful its cowardice is.
A former International Mr. Bootblack once explained to me that caring for boots properly requires six different products. Four of them are highly toxic, and it is not advisable to ingest any of them. No matter how carefully the leather has been buffed, there will always be a residue of polish on the surface.
A well-polished pair of boots may look appealing, but bootlicking is not safe or sane.