A Columbia professor’s warning for the University of Minnesota

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During my 35 years on the faculty of Columbia University’s renowned journalism school, I’ve occasionally referred to myself as its resident “Midwest explainer.” Though I grew up amid the strip malls and chemical plants of New Jersey, I went to college in Wisconsin and worked as a reporter in suburban Chicago. For the past decade, I’ve spent a chunk of each year living in Minneapolis, where I did much of the research for a book about Hubert Humphrey’s early political career.

So I’m the guy at the J School (as we affectionately call it) who can call out a student for stating that Des Moines is adjacent to Iowa City. I’m the guy who, during Tim Walz’s campaign for the vice presidency, corrected students and colleagues who thought Minnesota Nice actually meant nice. More seriously, I could talk about how diverse this supposedly white-bread state actually is with its growing populations of immigrants and refugees.

But now, for a tragic reason, I need to translate in the other geographical direction, from my longtime academic home back east to the university here that graciously supported my Humphrey work with library access and office space. To be all Upper Midwest about it, and to mix a metaphor, think of me as someone who barely survived a tornado and is trying to warn the folks up the road in its path.

On March 21, Columbia capitulated to an extortion plan hatched and executed by President Donald Trump. Under the threat of losing $400 million in federal funding, much of it for potentially life-saving medical research, Columbia essentially submitted to the Trump administration’s nine demands concerning campus protests, academic freedom, and future hiring and admissions decisions.

In exchange, Columbia got precisely nothing. The $400 million will not be restored. All the Trump administration has offered for this act of unconditional surrender is to open up negotiations with the university about federal funding. It’s not irrational to anticipate that those negotiations will consist of the triumphant Trumpites demanding more concessions and more.

The implications of Columbia’s cowardice for the University of Minnesota could hardly be clearer and more ominous. The U was one of 10 universities, including Columbia, targeted by a Trump administration task force for investigation and potential defunding on the pretext of eradicating “antisemitic harassment.” Let’s leave aside for the moment the monumental hypocrisy of a MAGA movement riddled with Jew-hatred offering itself as my tribe’s protector.

Anyone who has followed the news since Oct. 7, 2023, much less been working or studying on a college campus, understands perfectly well the explosion of pro-Palestinian protests that followed Hamas’ mass murder and kidnapping of Israelis and Israel’s massively disproportionate military response, which has led to an estimated 50,000 Palestinian deaths.

In a way that I fully recognize from my undergraduate years in famously leftist Madison, Wis., some of those otherwise legitimate protests luxuriated in performative radicalism and included the intimidation of Jewish students. Columbia became the national face of the protest movement at its principled best and hateful worst.

But it is completely inaccurate, no matter how widely believed, that Columbia blithely stood by as its Jews were terrorized. The university called the New York Police Department onto campus to make arrests twice last academic year, long before Trump had been re-elected. A university disciplinary board meted out punishments as severe as expulsion several weeks ago, without a fiscal gun to its head.

Far more than the public universities on Trump’s hit list — the U, UCLA and Cal-Berkeley among them — Columbia was and is uniquely prepared to resist an autocrat’s diktat. It need not deal with often-hostile legislators to get state funding. It has an endowment of nearly $15 billion — almost three times the University of Minnesota’s, despite having far fewer students. Columbia is the largest private landowner in New York City.

In other words, Columbia could have covered the loss in federal aid while also mounting a vigorous legal battle. There is an established legal process for settling allegations that a given school has violated the Title VI protections against discrimination, and the Trump fiat almost certainly defied that process.

Had Columbia done so, it would have stood up for its peer research universities, including the U, indeed for higher education itself. Instead, Columbia followed the abysmal example of the elite, wealthy law firm Paul Weiss in caving in to Trump and thereby inviting more attacks on similar institutions. And in an insult to the intelligence of the Columbia community, statements by the university’s interim president and Board of Trustees attempted to portray their acquiescence as a defense of academic integrity.

It will now fall to the U, and the other universities singled out by Trump, to summon up the fortitude and muster the resources that Columbia, to my lasting shame, failed to do. Minnesotans can take strength and direction from a former president of a Big Ten institution, Lee Bollinger, who went from the University of Michigan to Columbia, where he served from 2002 until 2023.

“We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government,” Bollinger recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in the most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of 10 books, most recently “Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.”