Last week, Columbia University announced that it would cave to demands by the Trump administration and adopt sweeping measures against pro-Palestinian activity on campus, including new restrictions on protest and the takeover of an academic department from faculty control.
The news sent shock waves across higher education institutions nationwide for what appeared a stunning capitulation to attacks on academic freedom and the independence of the department of Middle Eastern, south Asian and African studies, or Mesaas, which became a scapegoat for what the administration viewed as a pro-Palestinian climate on campus. It was also a remarkable turn of events for a university that had for years been a home for cutting-edge academic discourse on Palestine, beginning with the scholarship of Edward Said, a leading Palestinian intellectual.
It was precisely that legacy that also made Columbia a target of campaigns to censor Palestinian narratives – long before the protests that kicked off after 7 October 2023 drew the attention of conservatives and others who believe American campuses have become too leftwing. In the latest twist in the drama engulfing the university, its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, announced Friday she was stepping down. She is the second president of the university to resign in eight months.
Columbia’s announcement followed the Trump administration’s cancellation of $400m in federal funding, mostly for scientific research, over what the White House said was the university’s failure to protect faculty and students “from antisemitic violence and harassment”. Notably, Columbia’s bending to the government’s demands did not immediately restore the funding, with Trump administration officials indicating they would continue to monitor adherence to the policies they forced on the university.
Columbia’s submission prompted the condemnation of academic freedom advocates nationwide, who warned of more government interference to come.
“Columbia is the canary in the coalmine of totalitarianism,” said Sheldon Pollock, a Columbia professor and former chair of the Mesaas department. “This is a very worrying development across the board for university faculty.”
Trump had demanded Columbia place the Mesaas department under “receivership” – meaning, outside control, and the university has, at least in part, agreed. The department played no formal role in last year’s protests, and Said and other prominent scholars of Palestine, like Rashid Khalidi, were more closely affiliated with other departments. But Mesaas became a symbol for what was viewed as a pro-Palestinian climate on campus that some faculty note is a function of the university’s longstanding commitment to the humanities, which has long attracted more progressive scholars.
“Columbia has been associated with the Palestinian cause for a long time because it was possible to say things on the Columbia campus that in many places it was not possible to say,” Bruce Robbins, a professor of English literature, who is Jewish, said. “People who were involved in Palestine – in the issue, and in the study of the subject – found a home at Columbia where they might not have found a home somewhere else.”
A history of backlash
Columbia scholars have been studying the Middle East since the 18th century, when the university appointed its first professor of “Oriental languages”, as the academy at the time referred to the study of non-western cultures. Two hundred years later, Said’s book Orientalism became a foundational work of postcolonial scholarship. But it was his writing about the Middle East, and Palestine in particular, that established him as an icon for Palestinian scholarship.
In one of his seminal works, The Question of Palestine, Said wrote that discussion of the Arab world, and Palestinians in particular, was “so confused and unfairly slanted in the west that a great effort has to be made to see things as, for better or worse, they actually are”. Elsewhere, he noted that there was no “permission to narrate” the Palestinian experience in western discourse, and that those who tried were punished. In dozens of articles and books, Said forcefully insisted on the need for Palestinians to reclaim dominant narratives of their history, fundamentally reframing what was then a discourse largely echoing the Israeli perspective.
But what made his work so groundbreaking also made him, and Columbia, where he spent his entire career, a target.
On multiple occasions, Said’s office at Columbia was raided and vandalized. The FBI kept tabs on him. And he was often the subject of smear campaigns, including an article in the conservative Jewish magazine Commentary, which memorably called him “Professor of Terror”.
Said’s career coincided with – and likely contributed to – the gradual shifting of American students’ views on Israel, particularly following the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the two intifadas, or Palestinian uprisings. When he died in 2003, the backlash shifted on to Columbia itself, and other critics of Zionism who had found a home there, like the Mesaas professors Hamid Dabashi and Joseph Massad. (Neither responded to an interview request.)
In 2004, four Columbia undergraduates were interviewed in a documentary, Columbia Unbecoming, in which they accused three university professors with what at the time was the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department, or Mealac – including Dabashi and Massad – of unfair treatment and intimidation over their pro-Israel views. The documentary was produced by the David Project, a Boston-based group created to counter negative narratives about Israel on US campuses. The documentary ignited a sweeping controversy and calls on Columbia to fire its faculty, including from the then congressman Anthony Weiner. Some of the students featured in the film, as well as the conservative journalist Bari Weiss, who was an undergraduate at Columbia at the time, launched an initiative called Columbians for Academic Freedom, which represented students who said they had been intimidated by their professors for their views.
Following the Columbia Unbecoming controversy, the university convened a panel to investigate the allegations and found no misconduct. But it also reorganized the Mealac department, tacking on south Asian and later African studies and cross-appointing faculty from other disciplines to expand its scope. Now called Mesaas, it remained a cosmopolitan home for critical theory, the academic critique of social structures and systems of power. But it is only one of several venues in which Columbia students are exposed to scholarship on Palestine, which is also hosted by the university’s Middle East Institute and Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies, established in 2010 as the first of its kind at a US university. (The center is also to be placed under receivership.)
Antisemitism accusations
Since Israel’s war in Gaza started after the 7 October Hamas attacks, Columbia has been at the forefront of the debate over alleged antisemitism on campuses. A conversation that had previously centered on “tolerance” of pro-Israel views had made way for mounting allegations of antisemitism, a strategy that has been increasingly pursued by pro-Israel groups. Such allegations have resulted in congressional hearings, several lawsuits, the former president Minouche Shafik’s resignation, faculty and student expulsions, and the targeting by immigration authorities of foreign students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.
There was internal pushback as well, including a letter last month signed by about 200 Columbia faculty calling on the university to implement “concrete action” to protect the Jewish community on campus. That letter included many of the same demands later presented by the Trump administration, including a mask ban and the adoption of a definition of antisemitism that critics argue wrongly conflates some criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. It also asked for an investigation of Massad, who faced backlash and calls on the university to remove him after an op-ed he published in the Electronic Intifada a day after the Hamas attacks, referring to scenes from the attacks as “awesome” and “stunning”.
The letter also called for measures against faculty who participated in last year’s encampment, the expulsion of students who “disrupt teaching”, and the hiring of at least three tenured “pro-Israel” faculty at Mesaas “to allow ideological diversity and to combat indoctrination against the west and Israel under the guise of ‘academic independence’”. (It did not, however, call for the department to be put under receivership. The Guardian reached out to the four faculty who led the letter effort but got no response. The only Mesaas faculty member who signed it, the retired professor Nehama Bershon, declined to comment.)
Last year, Robbins, the English professor, taught a class on literary representations of atrocity. The syllabus included a week dedicated to the war in Gaza, which happened to coincide with the protest encampment. Robbins took his students to visit the encampment, offering those who didn’t want to go the possibility to opt out. The timing was a “historical coincidence”, he said. “It would almost be crazy not to take advantage of this.” In response, two students filed a formal complaint, accusing Robbins of interfering with their education by holding the class at the encampment. The university has launched an investigation, and Robbins is “awaiting judgment”, he says.
“I got into the profession thinking that making students uncomfortable is part of my job description.”
A canary in the mine
Many Columbia faculty and students were away for spring break last week and were stunned by the news that the university would bend to the Trump administration’s demands. On Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers, two unions representing faculty, sued the Trump administration on behalf of their members at Columbia over the cancellation of federal funding. Faculty have also talked about a possible strike. Some scholars outside Columbia have called for a boycott of the university.
Pollock said that a chill was sweeping through faculty. “People are beginning to wonder who is vetting their syllabus, who may be listening in class and reporting on them; colleagues who are green card holders have looked at the Mahmoud Khalil attack as a test case,” he said. (The Guardian reached out to several scholars affiliated with Mesaas and other departments, but few agreed to talk on the record, with one senior professor citing a “dangerous” situation on campus.)
What is clear to all is that this is just the beginning, said Jeremy Young, a historian and higher education advocate who until recently worked as the director of state and higher education policy at PEN America.
“It’s a terrible precedent to set,” he said of the Trump administration’s demands and Columbia’s response. “The government is acting like a bully, and if a bully gets what they want from using bullying tactics, they’re just going to keep going until someone stands up to them. And that wasn’t Columbia, but I hope it’ll be another institution.”
