Last Friday, Columbia University released an unsigned program of concessions to recover $400 million in federal funds canceled after a Justice Department investigation found that the university had failed to protect civil rights on campus.
Among other reforms, Columbia, which receives over $1 billion in federal funds annually, pledged to strengthen disciplinary and antidiscrimination policies, review admissions procedures, ban identity-concealing masks, create a security force empowered to arrest violent protesters, and appoint an unnamed “senior vice provost” to review regional studies programs, starting with Columbia’s controversial programs in Middle East Studies.
In this announcement and other recent statements, Columbia has claimed to recognize what it calls “legitimate concerns” about its abysmal failure to protect Jewish students and normal campus life, especially since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The reforms may sound promising — and the Trump administration has publicly welcomed them as a positive first step in a longer process to restore the funds — but government authorities must remain vigilant and realize that even the most abject, Ivy League-level groveling may not address the university’s many deficiencies.
Will Columbia follow through on its promised reforms?
It is entirely possible that it will not.
The New York Times reported that “many members of the faculty” are “stunned and dismayed” by the reforms, while observers both at and outside the university have characterized them as a humiliating cave-in to Trump and an assault on academic freedom.
According to a Wall Street Journal report of a weekend meeting with Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, one faculty member denounced the situation as “the biggest crisis since the founding of the republic.”
On Monday, Columbia’s former provost, Jonathan Cole, charged in the Times that the university’s preliminary embrace of reform “obliterates its leadership in defending free inquiry” and risks creating a situation in which “we are no longer a free university.”
Later that day, dozens of dour Columbia faculty members held a dreary “vigil” at which they pledged to resist the reforms, recruit colleagues to their cause, and start a national resistance movement.
Alongside radicalized staff members and students, Columbia’s disgruntled faculty could try to disrupt the reforms, conspire to limit their effect, or simply wait out Trump’s term in the hope that a future Democrat administration will reverse its requirements.
The campus resistance knows that it can proceed under the aegis of university administrators who, studies have shown, tend to be more politically radical than faculty members.
Recall that before Jan. 20, Columbia’s administrators were long content to overlook, downplay, and prevaricate about antisemitic threats, violence, vandalism, and other forms of discriminatory, dangerous, and even criminal conduct.
Controversies linking Columbia’s Middle East Studies programs to alleged antisemitic discrimination and pro-terrorist sentiment, moreover, date back more than 20 years with barely any corrective action.
Some of the implicated faculty members and administrators still seem to be there, apparently teaching, publishing, and pontificating with all the protections of tenure.
Despite the rhetoric about the university’s supposed cave-in to Trump, any rational analysis would observe that the university took action only when it was confronted with catastrophic financial loss and conclude that it would otherwise never have embraced any form of change.
As Flannery O’Connor might have put it in this centennial year of her birth, Columbia would be a good university if Trump were there to cut its funding every minute of its existence.
Higher education is already hemorrhaging evidence that internal obstruction will be a fact of life.
Even as Columbia’s drama has unfolded, a senior administrator at the University of South Florida’s medical school resigned after he appeared to admit in an audio recording that he superficially changed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) terminology to evade state laws, federal guidances, and Trump’s executive order prohibiting it.
An internal message from the University of Pennsylvania’s law dean informed the faculty that despite the new requirements “a familiar and dedicated team” staffing its newly created Office of Equal Opportunity and Engagement will essentially continue its old DEI work under a new name. This came less than a week after the feds froze $175 million in Penn’s funds for violating gender antidiscrimination policies.
A week before Columbia’s announcement, Georgetown’s law dean advanced a questionable First Amendment argument to cover his alleged refusal to dismantle DEI programs, even after the District of Columbia’s interim U.S. attorney informed him that failing to do so would bar Georgetown law graduates from employment in his office.
Earlier this month, Cornell restored explicit DEI language to its website after a campus outcry over its federally mandated removal. Citing a “clerical error,” it later watered down the changes but still maintained DEI references that are arguably illegal.
The Trump administration must bear in mind that Columbia is no different.
According to the Journal’s report, Armstrong has privately described her institution’s plight as an “impossible situation” in which she feels it has been portrayed unfairly.
This belies her earlier public acknowledgment that the Trump administration’s concerns are “legitimate.” And she and her staff already appear to be undermining the announced reforms, apparently telling faculty that masks are not, in fact, banned and that the new administrator overseeing Middle East Studies will not affect operations.
Beyond the immediate reforms, Columbia’s sprawling, DEI-infused infrastructure accommodates large numbers of potentially bad actors who sincerely believe that resisting even the most minor institutional reform is not merely a good idea but a moral and existential imperative.
The only mitigating authority is a university leadership that has already been embarrassingly lax in judgment, hesitant in its commitments, and likely to do the bare minimum necessary to get its funds back.
If real institution reform is to be achieved, the bar to recover those funds must be set very high and watched for years to come.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University. Read more — Here.
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