Many of us at Columbia University had lost hope in our struggle with the Trump administration. At the beginning of February, the federal Department of Education announced the school was under investigation. A month later, the Trump administration started canceling the grants and contracts that fund our research labs and medical trials, without producing evidence of wrongdoing. To fend off the White House, Columbia then announced a series of changes, many of which had been long in the works.
Then came the circular firing squad. By mid-April, 2,000 people and more than 75 organizations, most of them faculty groups, had signed onto a boycott of our events, and said they would refuse to work with Columbia scholars, like myself, a vice dean, who hold administrative positions.
It is easy to kick people when they are down. I’m a historian, and two of my government grants, which funded a program to help archivists and scholars maintain records that would otherwise be lost to history, have just been canceled.
Columbia has collectively trained thousands of professors and research scientists, including some of the people now refusing to associate with us. Where were these petition signers when we needed help defending First Amendment rights and our vulnerable students and staff members? Why did they not call on leaders of educational institutions to demand that the Trump administration stop overriding the rule of law? Only a handful of university leaders chose to speak out, notably Wesleyan’s president, Michael Roth, out of some 4,000 American colleges and universities.
One of the main organizers of the boycott, the City University of New York anthropologist Gary Wilder, has struggled to explain this strange form of solidarity. He says he took it upon himself to act even though “Columbia faculty are exhausted, besieged, demoralized and threatened.” It is true that we are besieged and threatened. It is also true that Columbia professors and students have been calling on others to stand with us.
Boycott organizers insisted Columbia was “fully capitulating to the conditions imposed by the Trump administration.” In fact, many of the actions the Columbia administration announced on March 21 are similar to those originally proposed last August by more than 200 faculty members.
Some of my colleagues were troubled by what the agreement appeared to portend. Others thought it entirely reasonable — in fact, long overdue — to enforce rules governing how protests happen on our campus. Disrupting classes while wearing masks to avoid any consequences, a tactic of some Gaza war protesters, is hardly conduct to be defended at all costs. Would we tolerate such behavior by MAGA-hatted Trump supporters?
Columbia would not allow any government to deny professors their rightful role in personnel decisions or to dictate the content of our curricula. Nor would we collaborate with government agents intent on deporting our students and faculty members simply because they exercised their First Amendment rights. At no point did our leadership concede any of these essential principles, which is surely why Columbia has been under Department of Justice investigation “for harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus.”
The boycotters’ allegation that Columbia “participated in an authoritarian assault” might better fit the universities that have chosen to comply even without an explicit order, such as by shuttering diversity offices and canceling events that might provoke controversy. Shall we now boycott one another? Why stop with refusing to attend events? Will we refuse to read one another’s scholarship and scientific research? Will the boycott include university hospitals and lifesaving medical trials? Will we also punish one another’s graduates, just as pro-Israel critics of Columbia vowed to do last spring?
An earlier boycott came about because Columbia was accused of being too lenient toward protesters of the war in Gaza. So now we have been boycotted by both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian debate. Both have treated Columbia — indeed, higher education as a whole — as collateral damage in the Middle Eastern conflict. It would be bizarre were it not so serious. After all, nearly 14,000 international students and over 3,000 faculty members and researchers at Columbia depend on government-issued visas and green cards.
Now that Harvard University has decided to defy the Trump administration, the stage is set for an epic struggle, one that has already defied the expectations of cynics on both sides. After being presented with new demands, Columbia is refusing to comply. No thanks to our fair-weather friends, our acting president, Claire Shipman, has vowed to reject any agreement in which “the government dictates what we teach, research or who we hire” as well as one that would “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution.” Columbia alumni are rallying in support.
The greatness of American universities is at risk because anti-intellectuals are undermining the foundation of academic excellence: the ability of teachers and researchers to work without political micromanagement in the pursuit of truth, even when these truths are unpopular. Colleges and universities should join a mutual defense pact, as faculty members at several universities, including Rutgers and Indiana University have proposed. If we speak with one voice, we can better articulate the essential importance of universities to the American way of life.
As Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Columbia president, argued: “The true purpose of education is to prepare young men and women for effective citizenship in a free form of government.” Eisenhower knew that universities are vital to national defense and economic prosperity. Columbia alone has more than 500 students who are military veterans, more than the rest of the Ivy League. Just one Columbia department, biomedical engineering, produced more than 140 inventions in the past five years that lead to over 30 industry licenses. Altogether, 87 Columbia researchers, faculty members and alumni have won Nobel Prizes.
We have now seen that the Trump administration manages the economy with the same expertise and competence it manages higher education, and as a result we might begin to rally the American people. If, instead, academics choose to boycott colleagues rather than stand with them, they become accomplices in the very assault on academic freedom they wish to oppose.
Matthew Connelly is a professor of history at Columbia University, a vice dean for artificial intelligence initiatives and an alumnus of Columbia College.
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