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campus protests
Jewish Students Chain Themselves to Columbia Fence to Protest Khalil Detention
"As Jewish students, we grew up learning about the rise of fascism, learning about how important it is to stand up when you see injustice in the world," said one protester.
Apr 02, 2025
Jewish Columbia University students had chained themselves to a fence on campus for 45 minutes on Wednesday, in protest of the school's cooperation with immigration agents to arrest a leader of last year's pro-Palestinian encampment, when New York City Police officers arrived to break up the nonviolent action.
One student identified as Shea, who was wearing a kippah with a watermelon design and a keffiyeh—symbols of Palestinian solidarity—told independent journalist Meghnad Bose that university trustees are "directly implicated" in Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) targeting of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student who helped lead negotiations demanding Columbia's divestment from Israel last year.
Shea said trustees handed over the names of Khalil and other pro-Palestinian students at Columbia to the government.
"We are here in protest of that to demand that the university tell us which trustees, which members of the university administration, are responsible for this so we can demand immediate consequences for them and hold them accountable for what they've done to our peer," said the undergraduate student.
Shea added that Jewish students were leading the protest because "the attacks on our international students, on students of color, have been so fierce, so dangerous, so disproportionate that we are the only students who can be here right now taking this risk."
Listen in to the student protesters themselves @DropSiteNews pic.twitter.com/R3LIWWQspI
— Meghnad Bose (@MeghnadBose93) April 2, 2025
Plainclothes ICE agents abducted Khalil last month as he was returning home to his apartment in a Columbia-owned building with his pregnant wife. The agents refused to identify themselves and ultimately Khalil was sent to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana. Khalil is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent and had a green card, which has reportedly been revoked by the Trump administration, while his wife—who is pregnant with their first child—is a U.S. citizen.
A federal court in New Jersey ruled Tuesday that the challenge to ICE's unlawful detention of Khalil should continue in the state. His wife responded that "this is an important step towards securing Mahmoud's freedom, but there is still a lot more to be done. As the countdown to our son's birth begins and I inch closer and closer to my due date, I will continue to strongly advocate for Mahmoud’s freedom and for his safe return home so he can be by my side to welcome our first child."
Khalil was detained days after the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million in grants and contracts for Columbia in retaliation for what it claimed was a failure to address antisemitism on campus. The Trump administration has conflated expressions of support for Palestinian rights on college campuses with attacks on Jewish students, as did the Biden administration before it.
Columbia oversaw an aggressive response to the protests last year, allowing NYPD officers to drag students out of a building they occupied and unofficially renamed Hind's Hall after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
An analysis of last year's pro-Palestinian campus protests, many of which were led by Jewish students, found that 97% of them were nonviolent.
A Barnard College student identified as Tali said Wednesday that "as Jewish students, we grew up learning about the rise of fascism, learning about how important it is to stand up when you see injustice in the world."
Campus security quickly cordoned off the area where students had chained themselves to the fence. After the NYPD arrived, security officers used bolt cutters to remove the protesters from the fence.
Breaking: Columbia campus security bring giant bolt cutters to forcibly break the student protesters away from the Columbia gates they had chained themselves to.@DropSiteNews pic.twitter.com/pSROblLjjf
— Meghnad Bose (@MeghnadBose93) April 2, 2025
Bose reported that "in [a] sudden escalation, Columbia campus security aggressively [engaged] student protesters," and tried to take away a banner reading, "Free Mahmoud Khalil."
"Love and solidarity to these courageous Jewish students who have chained themselves to the gates of Columbia in protest of the university turning over their friend Mahmoud Khalil to a fascist administration," said Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of the Jewish-led group IfNotNow.
The students, said Zimmerman, "are taking risks today that they know most of their peers cannot."
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Harvard and Princeton Are the Latest Ivies to Have Their Funding Targeted By Trump
One critic wrote that an email from Harvard University's president about the Trump administration's funding review capitulated to the "bogus premise that this is about 'protecting' students against antisemitism."
Apr 01, 2025
This week, Harvard University learned that Trump administration is reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal grants awarded to the school and Princeton University has had multiple research grants suspended by multiple federal agencies—making the two institutions the latest in series of elite colleges to have their funding threatened by U.S. President Donald Trump.
In the case of Harvard, the scrutiny from the Trump administration is explicitly tied to Trump's pledge to crackdown on what he sees as rampant antisemitism on college campuses.
In the name of opposing antisemitism, Trump has vowed to target foreign-born students who have engaged in pro-Palestine protests, activities that the president has described as "pro-jihadist." Several students who have taken part in pro-Palestine activism have already been targeted for deportation.
According to a Monday statement from the U.S. Department of Education, multiple federal agencies are launching a comprehensive review of federal contracts and grants at Harvard as part of the ongoing efforts of the Trump administration's Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.
The task force will review over $255.6 million in contracts between Harvard, its affiliates, and the federal government, as well as $8.7 billion in multiyear grant commitments to the university and its affiliates to ensure "the university is in compliance with federal regulations, including its civil rights responsibilities."
"Harvard's failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination—all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry—has put its reputation in serious jeopardy. Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus," said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement on Monday.
In a message that was denounced by multiple observers, Harvard's president Alan Garber wrote in a Monday message to the Harvard community that the school has devoted "considerable effort" to addressing antisemitism on its campus over the past 15 months, including by "enhancing training and education on antisemitism."
"We still have much work to do," wrote Garber. "We will engage with members of the federal government's task force to combat antisemitism to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism."
"If this funding is stopped, it will halt lifesaving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation," he also wrote.
Researcher Hannah Gais, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, wrote on Monday that Garber's message "completely caves to the administration and its bogus premise that this is about 'protecting' students against antisemitism."
"What a disgraceful letter from Harvard president Alan Garber, surrendering entirely to Trump and the pernicious nonsense that America's universities, some of the greatest and most Jewish institutions in American life, are rife with antisemitism," wrote historian and editor Sam Haselby on X.
Meanwhile, the president of Princeton told the university community on Tuesday that several research grants to the university have been suspended by the federal government.
"The full rationale for this action is not yet clear, but I want to be clear about the principles that will guide our response," wrote Princeton president Christopher L. Eisgruber on Tuesday, according to The New York Times. "Princeton University will comply with the law. We are committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism."
In February, the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced that it would be investigating 10 universities, including Harvard and Columbia University—which recently had $400 million in federal grants revoked by the Trump administration. That list did not include Princeton, though Princeton was one of 60 colleges that received letters last month from the U.S. Department of Education that warned of potential actions against schools if the government found they had not done enough to protect Jewish students.
After the Trump administration stripped Columbia of the $400 million, the administration announced later in March that it was freezing $175 million in federal funds for the University of Pennsylvania, citing the university's policies on transgender athletes.
In March, Columbia announced a number of changes to the school that aligned with the wishes of the Trump administration as part of negotiations over the rescinded $400 million in federal grants—prompting a wave of criticism of the university.
In an opinion piece for Common Dreamspublished on Tuesday, Steve Striffler, the director of the Labor Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston, argued that it is not wholly accurate to say that Columbia's changes were a "capitulation" to the Trump administration.
Instead, "it seems quite likely that Columbia's leaders accepted Trump's demands not so much because they were forced to (capitulate), or because they saw fighting as either futile or potentially disastrous, but because they welcomed the opportunity and political cover that Trump's order provided," he wrote.
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Capitulation or Complicity? Universities and the Trump Administration
Complicity gets us far closer to a useful explanation of recent actions by campus leaders than capitulation.
Apr 01, 2025
On March 7th the Trump administration announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in government grants and contracts to Columbia University. Less than a week later, his administration followed up with a letter to Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, outlining the steps the university would have to take before negotiations to restore funding could even begin.
Although largely without precedent, Trump’s demands are entirely in line with an evolving authoritarianism that seeks to destroy possible sites of political opposition. The demands included suspending or expelling some of those who participated in pro-Palestinian protests; centralizing disciplinary power within the hands of the university president; banning mask wearing on campus; increasing the numbers and powers of campus police; and putting the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” (a rare move that places a department under external/administrative control, typically because it has become dysfunctional, but in this case because it was not sufficiently pro-Israel).
On March 21st, Columbia’s interim president agreed to the demands. Columbia would not put up a fight. Armstrong’s actions were widely condemned by advocates of higher education, academic freedom, and free speech—most of whom seemed genuinely surprised, even shocked, by Columbia’s decision to simply accept Trump’s terms. On March 28th Armstrong lost her job.
Trump is coming for us because so much of the best that university faculty, staff, and students represent—science, education, reason, knowledge, and informed political engagement—poses a real threat to his project.
It is tempting, as most commentators have, to understand the quick, total, and passive submission of Columbia and other university administrations to Trump’s assault through the lens of “capitulation,” “caving,” or “appeasement.” I get the impulse. Surely liberal institutions of higher learning, with time-honored commitments to free speech and academic freedom, would not possibly agree to Trump’s outrageous demands unless they had a financial gun pointed directly at them? Campus leaders must—so the logic goes—be churning on the inside, desperately wanting to fight back even as they reluctantly recognize that capitulation is the only alternative. Fighting back poses too great a risk.
Capitulation as an explanation, however, is far too generous and rests on the false premise that—when faced with a profound threat to democracy—core institutions such as universities have, currently are, or will fight to protect our basic political norms.
The question we should be asking ourselves—especially those of us who live in academia and should know better—is why would we expect universities, or more accurately the administrators who run them, to protect free speech, academic freedom, and dissent at all, especially during moments of crisis when doing so entails taking real risks? University administrations, from the 1960s through the present, have a very thin track record of doing so. The reality is that most have worked overtime, often at the behest of the trustees that control them, to limit or crush our freedoms with such consistency, and over such a long period of time, that it is baffling that anyone would expect anything different as we race towards authoritarianism.
Complicity gets us far closer to a useful explanation of recent actions by campus leaders than capitulation. We need only listen to Columbia’s interim president. In explaining the university’s acceptance of the Trump administration’s demands for restoring the flow of federal dollars, Armstrong noted in an open letter to the campus community that the university’s actions were in line with the path it had been following in the past year and were “guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.” Armstrong is correct when she suggests that Trump’s demands coincide with university values as defined by top campus leaders. It’s just that those values do not include, and never really did, academic freedom and free expression.
Understood this way, it seems quite likely that Columbia’s leaders accepted Trump’s demands not so much because they were forced to (capitulate), or because they saw fighting as either futile or potentially disastrous, but because they welcomed the opportunity and political cover that Trump’s order provided—to get rid of “unruly” students, increase the university’s capacity to limit protest and discipline students, staff, and faculty, and (bonus!) gain control over a department that by its very subject matter might prove troublesome. That’s complicity, not capitulation. It’s also right in line with what we have seen from university administrations, including Columbia’s, in the recent and not so recent past. Indeed, the current era of complicity started under Biden with the draconian response to pro-Palestine protests from universities throughout the country in 2024 (and of course has a much longer history dating at least to the 1950s).
The speed with which university administrations have abandoned DEI policies and practices must be seen in this light as well. The administrative commitment to very limited sets of DEI policies was always paper thin, or about as deep as their commitment to academic freedom. It’s more a marketing ploy and opportunity for virtue signaling than any sort of real political commitment. The fact that many universities scrubbed websites and academic units, in some cases overnight, of almost any mention of DEI when the political winds shifted is hardly surprising.
This is not to say that most campus leaders like or fully embrace Trump’s gestapo-like tactics (though some seem to be getting quite comfortable with it). But it is also the case—especially after the 2024 campus protests around Palestine—that most were on board with some sort of “course correction,” not unlike the position one finds on the opinion pages of the New York Times, which essentially argues that student protests went too far, faculty are too liberal, universities need to rein it in, and Trump has a point (for a good example of this “commonsense” drivel, see Greg Weiner’s piece).
To be sure, we should not downplay the distinction between Trump’s authoritarianism, which tends to see those on college campuses as dangerous radicals who need to be removed, from the liberal “course correction” that pushes reforms to “take politics out” of higher education. And yet, as soon as one starts to accept Trump’s fascist tactics for getting there, which increasingly embraces a grab-them-off-the-streets approach reminiscent of Central America paramilitaries in the 1980s, the distinction probably feels a bit like splitting hairs to those on the wrong end of it. Complicity, not capitulation.
The silver lining, if there is one, is that although highly paid administrators officially speak for universities, and have considerable power over university policies, they are not “universities” any more than are the boards of trustees that control them. Katrina Armstrong, or whoever replaces her, is not Columbia University. The students, faculty, and staff who make up the institution, as well as the communities they serve, are “the university.”
Put another way, to suggest that there is no reason to expect university administrators to be natural defenders of free speech and political dissent, and that history tells us that many of them will in fact be complicit with Trump’s brand of fascism, is not to say that we should not try to hold them accountable or that the fight is over and universities have been politically neutered. It is to say that we—“the university”—have to continue the fight that so many of us are already engaged in. Trump is coming for us because so much of the best that university faculty, staff, and students represent—science, education, reason, knowledge, and informed political engagement—poses a real threat to his project. Campus leaders may opt for complicity. Let’s make sure we are neither complicit nor capitulate.
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