It was shocking enough on March 7 when the Trump administration announced it was pulling $400 million in federal funds from Columbia University over the school’s alleged failure to stanch antisemitism on campus. Now the administration is threatening the Ivy League school with a permanent end to federal funding unless it places a key department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years.” Officials from a trio of federal agencies also demanded that the school ban masks that are meant to conceal the wearer’s identity “or intimidate others” and that it deliver a plan to “reform undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admissions practices.” “We expect your immediate compliance with these critical next steps,” they brusquely added. On Thursday, Columbia was seemingly close to a deal in which it would abide by the demands. It was the day after the $400 million for Columbia was canceled that federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil , a former Columbia graduate student who has been active in anti-Israel protests. Despite being a legal resident — the possessor of a green card — he was slated for deportation, but a federal judge put that on hold. Khalil is currently being held in Louisiana pending resolution of the government case against him. Then, on March 13, Department of Homeland Security personnel, armed with judicial search warrants, searched two student rooms. Predictably, there has been a cacophony of alarms. Free speech advocates cast the administration’s moves as a brazen assault on the First Amendment, and the White House has been accused of waging war on higher education. Kristen Shahverdian, of PEN America, called the administration’s demands of Columbia University “an unprecedented assault on free speech, academic freedom and institutional autonomy.” “If the federal government can show up and demand a university department be shut down or restructured,” bewailed Joseph Howley, a Columbia professor of classics, “then we don’t have universities in this country.” Columbia journalism graduate student Mariana deJesus declaimed about students’ right “to be protesting all the time without a [expletive] huge line forming on Broadway” and called it “annoying and … sort of intimidating to be walking into school and having all these weenie police officers just like ‘ID out!’ and being super aggressive when we’re just going to school.” Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong wrote to students that the dorm raid had left her “heartbroken.” Reality check: No university has an innate entitlement to federal funds. Asking Columbia to make changes in order to qualify for taxpayers’ cash is no assault on free speech. It’s a decision by government to not fund what it has deemed dangerous to citizens. And, with all due respect to deJesus’s annoyance over having to show her student ID, outside agitators have repeatedly fomented disruptions on campuses , including Columbia’s, and deserve to be stopped at the university gate. The inconvenience to legitimate students — genteel or vulgar — is rather minor. As to Armstrong’s heartbreak at the dorm raid, she can take solace in the fact that, as she herself noted, “no items were removed, and no further action was taken.” President Trump has a habit — or perhaps it’s a stratagem — of overreaching, of delivering an immediate dose of “shock and awe” to spur a reset in situations in need of one. His proposal for the Gaza Strip — which others dubbed “Mar-a-Gaza” — sounded to some ears like ethnic cleansing; it has since been walked back to a plan of voluntary resettlement of homeless Gazans. Broad tariffs declared to have no exceptions were then fine-tuned to include, well, exceptions. Something similar may lie in the administration’s recent moves regarding the anti-Israel domain, a sea of seething hatred and anger in which antisemites like to swim. Khalil’s case will be decided in a court, perhaps the highest one. The government hasn’t laid out its case against the Algerian national in any detail, but the law does allow permanent residency to be revoked if a resident “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” The student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest advocates for the “total eradication of Western civilization” and for “global intifada,” and supports “armed resistance” by Hamas. Khalil says that the government believes that he “was the leader of CUAD or the social media person ,” which he calls “very far from reality.” How far from reality, and whether any rhetoric of his (he has defended Palestinian “armed resistance” as “legitimate” ) or actions he has taken are grounds for revocation of his green card, will, again, be determined not by loud protests on his behalf but by judges. None of the administration’s recent actions, though, should be allowed to obscure a pertinent fact: Jews on campuses have been made to feel physically threatened by protesters against Israel who either openly or subtly support the murderous group Hamas. The popular chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an old Hamas slogan; it advocates the destruction of the Jewish state. And, as has been demonstrated by countless attacks on synagogues, Jewish institutions, and random Jews worldwide, Israel has become a convenient, one might say “kosher,” proxy for Jews. Hey, history, here we go again. Were it 1940 and the screams and placards were in support of the Third Reich or — leave Jews aside — were it 1920 and university students were chanting KKK slogans advocating lynchings, would we be extolling the glories of free speech? Would we be outraged by lawful efforts to quell the expressions of hatred? Those are questions we do well to ask ourselves today.
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