The sheer volume of the vindictiveness and lawlessness flowing daily from the Trump administration makes it difficult to focus on any one transgression. Nevertheless, we should take special note of the extraordinary spectacle of the federal government trying aggressively to destroy Columbia, a major American university. Almost any sentence about Trump can begin with the words “never before,” but still: Never before has anything like this happened in the history of the republic.
After Trump and others intimated for some time that the government planned to go after Columbia, the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, and Education, along with the General Services Administration, announced on Friday the “immediate cancellation” of $400 million in grants to and contracts with the university. Like most announcements coming from the administration, this one was vague, probably unlawful and ominously threatening, hinting at further, even larger reductions in funding to follow. Cuts of the magnitude hinted at in the announcement would at least cripple the university and potentially render it unable to operate in anything like its current form.
The purported reason given for this move is “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Noteworthy even among the outrages of recent months has been the sudden care for Jews professed by people wholly comfortable with white supremacists and neo-Nazis but shocked beyond words by the actions of campus protesters. Antisemitism is real, but it is not limited to higher education and not something about which Donald Trump and the people around him genuinely care. It exists at Columbia; it exists across the country and around the world; it exists in Congress and the White House. As, I should add, do racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and other ingrained biases.
Any attempt to make sense of the Trump administration’s Javert-like pursuit of Columbia needs to begin with the recognition that it is not, in any real sense, about Columbia. Neither is it about antisemitism or free speech. It is not even at its root about education.
It is, rather, about the exercise of raw power to intimidate, enforce obedience and silence dissent. This is how authoritarian regimes work and—as a template for the federal government’s approach to journalism, business and pretty much every sphere of life—it should matter even to those who are indifferent to the fate of Columbia or higher education.
Like many of the actions and proposed policies of the current administration, the attack on Columbia is the product of a group of institutes—American Enterprise, Manhattan, Claremont—that have over the past decade moved from being homes for conservative intellectuals to being sites for something much more radical and disruptive. Claremont, for instance, transitioned from being what one of its former fellows described as a “quirky intellectual outfit” to “one of the main intellectual architects of trying to overthrow the republic.” What was started by students of philosopher Henry Jaffa, a follower of Leo Strauss, became the home of John Eastman, the legal mind behind “stop the steal.”
The foundation for the targeting of Columbia and indeed the blueprint for the administration’s approach to higher education can be found in a piece written this past December by Max Eden, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, entitled “A Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education.” Linda McMahon may be the secretary of education, but people like Eden and Christopher Rufo—who turned the letters “DEI” into a political cudgel with which to beat progressives—are the actual architects of higher education policy in the United States.
Rufo, a deeply dangerous figure who combines political adeptness with a ruthless passion to destroy those he perceives as enemies, advocated in a recent interview for policies that “would mean bankruptcy for many universities … And they should do it. They should actually follow through on the threat in at least one symbolic fight that will then change the incentives everywhere and send people scrambling to comply with the law.”
That symbolic fight is with Columbia.
It appears that the ideas floated by thinkers like Eden and Rufo have been adopted pretty much wholesale by the Trump administration. People have wondered why the proposed cap on indirect costs for National Institutes of Health grants is 15 percent: That is the number that Eden suggests. The Dear Colleague letter that goes far beyond any court ruling in declaring diversity work illegal? Eden and Rufo got there first.
Eden again: “The most interesting actions, though, wouldn’t require Congress. To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.”
Let’s pause for a moment. Full disclosure: Long ago I received my Ph.D. from Columbia, though it has not in the years since been an institution to which I have been in any way connected. It is among the oldest universities in the country, founded as King’s College in 1754. It enrolls more than 35,000 students—a tiny fraction of whom protested against the war in Gaza—and employs about 20,000 people. It operates law and medical schools, among others, and is affiliated with New York–Presbyterian Medical Center. It is an indispensable part of the business and health-care ecosystems in upper Manhattan.
So: Let’s destroy it to prove that we can.
To date the administration has not taken up another of Eden’s recommendations—drumming up reasons to indict its former president, Lee Bollinger—though no doubt some are both tempted and amused by his observation that “college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.” Indeed. These are not people interested in having any sort of serious discussion about education policy.
Columbia is rendered especially attractive as a target because it is in New York, a city whose power brokers have long viewed Trump with contempt and over which, therefore, he wants to exercise as much power as possible. Killing Columbia is another version of killing congestion pricing in Manhattan, which has to date been a remarkable success and which, therefore, Trump is attempting to end. As he put it on Truth Social, “Long Live the King!”
So far, Columbia has remained relatively quiet and compliant in response to the governmental assault, though this might change as the assault intensifies and the battle—like the battles over firing federal workers and cutting foreign aid and reneging on contracts and forbidding words like “diversity” and “gay”—plays out in the courts.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, said in a statement that the university is “committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” the key word in that sentence, of course, being “legitimate.” Sooner rather than later, I hope, the university’s leadership will recognize that the goal of these actions is not compliance but destruction and plan accordingly. Meanwhile, other institutions and organizations, inside and outside higher education, might want to think carefully about their stance of self-protective silence in the face of a government that covets the unchecked power of authoritarianism. Any university, any business, any news organization, could be the next Columbia in the ongoing quest to scare us all straight.
