Of all the awful things that have happened in recent months as the Trump Administration has laid siege to free speech rights on college campuses, one of the most awful may be what happened in mid-March at New York University.
Dr. Joanne Liu, the former international head of Doctors Without Borders, was scheduled to give a talk on challenges in humanitarian crises. The night before the planned event, she got a call from an NYU official who fretted that images Liu intended to show dealing with the casualties in Gaza and Trump’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development “could be perceived as antisemitic” and “anti-governmental.”
Liu, who had already traveled to New York City from Montreal, Canada, where she is a pediatric emergency physician at a local hospital and a professor at McGill University, offered to amend her presentation, but NYU decided that the risk was just too great. Her talk was canceled, and a university spokesperson essentially blamed Liu by saying that “guest speakers at our institution are given clear guidelines at the outset” and “per our policy, we cannot host speakers who don’t comply.”
It was a demonstration not of the authoritarian predilections of the Trump Administration, which are everywhere in evidence, but rather of the cowardly capitulations of people in academia who are supposed to protect freedom of thought, speech, and inquiry. And it is this sort of self-censorship—this “obeying in advance” that historian Timothy Snyder has warned about—that may, in the end, cause the gravest damage.
Make no mistake: Donald Trump, unburdened of the restraint that supposedly marked his first term in office, poses a danger to institutions of higher learning that is real, present, and existential. The President and his henchpeople have launched investigations into dozens of universities and colleges, using the threatened loss of federal funding and other sticks to pummel them into submission. And they are scooping up international students and sending them to detention facilities in other states.
The first such abduction happened on March 8 in New York City, when Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia University who had completed work on a master’s degree, was arrested by federal agents in front of his wife, a U.S. citizen then eight months pregnant. Khalil was targeted solely because of his leadership role in protests against Israel’s savage war in Gaza—a war which has caused the deaths of more than 50,000 people, about a third of them children.
On March 25, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national working on a doctoral degree at Tufts University, was snatched off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, by masked, plainclothes federal immigration agents who handcuffed and placed her under arrest. Her offense? Having co-authored an op-ed last year in the student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to the carnage in Gaza.
As of mid-April, the Trump Administration had revoked the visas of more than 1,000 international students, putting them at risk of immediate deportation—sometimes for years-old minor offenses including traffic tickets, sometimes for no reason at all.
As this issue of The Progressive went to press, the fates of Khalil, Öztürk, and others remained tied up in litigation. Khalil was barred from attending the birth of his son. Öztürk was released after six weeks of detention on May 9 and returned to Massachusetts the following day, but a deportation procedure against her remains ongoing.
It remains unclear whether and to what extent the courts—particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, with its conservative supermajority—will provide an effective check on Trump’s wholesale and flagrant abuse of executive power. What is certain is that his chances of success magnify greatly if his overreach is met with fear, cowardice, and submission.
But that, unfortunately, is what happened at Columbia University.
On March 7, the day before Khalil’s abduction, the Trump Administration announced that it was immediately canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia due to its alleged “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” a charge for which there is a notable paucity of evidence. The announcement made clear that this would be, as one Justice Department flack put it, “only the beginning” of such actions at campuses across the country.
Having thus been identified as a test case for a much broader assault on academic freedom, Columbia responded with a pitiful display of acquiescence. It agreed to restrict face masks on campus, to expand the authority of campus security to arrest protesters, and to effectively put its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department into academic receivership—that is, outside control, presumably so it can teach in accordance with what Trump wants.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, resigned a few days later, writing that “the freedom of universities is tied to the freedom of every other institution in a thriving democracy,” without offering a specific critique of what had just occurred. It was yet another blown opportunity to stand up to the bully in the White House and his tyrannical agenda.
Clearly this was a battle Columbia could have won, had it been up for a fight, which no doubt scores of pro bono lawyers would have gladly taken on. And even if it wasn’t able to claw back the $400 million, the university, established in 1754, probably could have weathered the storm, given its $14.8 billion endowment.
The anger over Columbia’s surrender is considerable—and justified. “We are appalled that Columbia’s leadership has colluded with the authoritarian suppression of its students by fully capitulating to the conditions imposed by the Trump Administration,” declares a petition calling for a boycott of the university. “We call on Columbia University to reinstate disenrolled, suspended, and expelled students, and reverse all changes made in compliance with the Trump Administration’s harmful and illegitimate demands.” If only.
Trump and his minions, apparently emboldened by Columbia’s spinelessness, ramped up their attacks. They halted $210 million in research grants to Princeton University on the vague accusation that it was somehow condoning “antisemitic harassment.” They yanked $175 million from the University of Pennsylvania for having allowed a transgender swimmer to compete in 2022. They froze $1 billion in federal funding to Cornell University and $790 million to Northwestern University.
And then came Harvard.
On Friday, April 11, Trump Administration officials sent a letter to Harvard University President Alan Garber, demanding changes in how the school makes admissions, hiring, and governance decisions, including the eradication of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and saying that almost $9 billion in grants and contracts were at risk. The next day, about 300 protesters gathered on the Cambridge Common for a “Stand Up, Harvard!” rally urging the university to not give in without a fight.
The following Monday, the fight was on. The university’s lawyers responded to the officials, saying, “Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.” In a letter that same day to the Harvard community, Garber drove this point home: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its Constitutional rights,” he wrote. “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Sure, Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment does give it some breathing room, but there is more going on here than just cost-calculating. Harvard, founded in 1636, seems to be standing on principle for all the right reasons, including that this is what the public wants.
Prior to Harvard saying no to Trump’s extortion, a number of groups representing college professors and university diversity officers had sued the Trump Administration. But, as The Guardian noted, “the pushback from institutions themselves has been minimal.”
Trump, predictably, reacted to Harvard’s defiance with fresh threats, including prodding the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. But Harvard’s response has also generated standing-ovation levels of popular support and served to strengthen the spines of others in academia. Even Columbia made some noise about how it would henceforth “reject any agreement that would require us to relinquish our independence.” Harvard also pushed back, suing the government for the canceled research grants.
Among those applauding from the sidelines is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, who said in a statement, “Federal funding for universities must not depend on a loyalty oath.” Roth has long called on institutions of higher learning to fight the Trump Administration’s censorious agenda. Indeed, he’s described it as their obligation.
“It’s not like we’re speaking out to attack President Trump. We’re speaking out to defend the missions of our schools. That’s our job,” Roth told Politico. “I’m not interested in just mouthing off. But I am interested in protecting the mission of the school and the students who enroll in it.” And that means using “the legal means at our disposal to resist any extra-legal efforts from federal law enforcement.”
He’s right. Now is not the time to duck and cover. University administrators and students alike need to respond with clear-headed and nonviolent resistance. Instead of caving to the administration’s conniptions about what it considers the wrong kind of speech, universities ought to be defending the free speech rights of all students, as well as their own.
Might some of these institutions lose some federal funding as a result? Perhaps. But the price they’ll pay if they don’t fight back is much greater.
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Editor's note: An earlier version of this story used the word "ban" in a reference to Columbia University's new policy on wearing face masks on campus. We have changed it to read "restrict" to more accurately reflect the wording of this policy and its impact.