College Caves in to Pressure, Attacks on Free Speech by Trump Administration

The article below was first published by the British daily The Guardian on March 25, 2025.

Its author, Rashid Khalidi, recently retired from Columbia University, where he served as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies. During his 22-year-long tenure at the college, he also edited or co-edited the Journal of Palestine Studies. He has authored several books, including The Hundred Years War on Palestine.

In his brief essay, Khalidi accurately describes how Columbia is gagging students and faculty who have opposed Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, as university officials are moving further to the right under pressure from the Trump administration.

The university became the epicenter of student encampments and other protests that swept the country last spring opposing the U.S.-backed Israeli war in Gaza and demanding that schools divest from businesses benefiting the Israeli regime.

In the conclusion of his article, Khalidi refers to “Friday’s capitulation” by Columbia. On that day, March 21, Columbia ceded to Trump’s demands to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters after his administration suspended $400 million in federal aid to the school.

“Columbia agreed to ban masks, empower 36 campus police officers with new powers to arrest students and appoint a senior vice provost with broad authority to oversee the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies,” reported an article in the March 21 Wall Street Journal, describing the measures Columbia took in response to Trump’s blackmail.

Prior to these events, on March 13, Columbia announced it had doled out a range of punishments to students who occupied a campus building last spring during pro-Palestinian protests. The sanctions included the firing from his job and expulsion from the school of Grant Miner, a graduate student at Columbia who is Jewish.

As World-Outlook recently reported in Trump’s 2^nd Term: One-Man Rule & the Danger of Incipient Fascism (II), “Trump has launched a dangerous assault on democratic rights, under the guise of ‘combating antisemitism,’ by issuing another executive order that can target any opponent of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. Meanwhile, he makes excuses for the overt antisemitism of his most reactionary supporters.”

Under this pretense, the White House is investigating some 60 universities, aiming to accomplish there what it has already achieved at Columbia. Simultaneously, the Trump administration is carrying out a witch-hunt of international students who have spoken out against the Israeli war in Gaza.

According to the Washington Post, the government is demanding from colleges lists with the names of such students or faculty and their nationalities. The State Department is accusing many of them of “aiding Hamas” or carrying out “antisemitic attacks” and in a number of cases arresting them, revoking their visas or residency papers, and preparing to deport them.

This dragnet includes:

• The arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on March 8 of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia and legal permanent resident of the United States; a federal judge has temporarily blocked the government’s attempt to revoke Khalil’s green card and deport him. Columbia student Ranjani Srinivasan, of Indian origin, left the country after the government revoked her visa. Leqaa Kordia, a third student at Columbia of Palestinian orgin who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, was arrested by ICE and accused of overstaying her student visa, according to a March 14 government news release.
• The arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk by ICE agents on March 26 at Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts, near downtown Boston. Ozturk, a Ph.D. student of Turkish origin, was apparently singled out because she co-authored an op-ed published last year in the Tufts Daily, the school’s student newspaper, that called on the university administration to take a pro-Palestinian stance on the Israeli war in Gaza.
• The arrest by ICE of a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, which described the detention in a March 28 statement as “deeply concerning.”
• The arrest earlier in March of Georgetown University academic Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national.
• Other individuals ICE detained or sought to arrest attended Brown, Cornell, and the University of Alabama, according to an article in the March 28 New York Times.

Referring to the number of students the U.S. government has targeted in this way, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a March 27 press conference, “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

These events represent an escalating assault on democratic rights that has a chilling effect on free speech. Protests such as those opposing the ICE arrests and attempted deportations of Khalil in New York and Ozturk in Massachusetts are a much-needed response.

World-Outlook publishes the article that follows for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, and text below are taken from the original. Photos and endnotes are by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

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Opinion/US news

Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?

Columbia has long been run more as a business empire than as an educational institution. Now it’s acting like Vichy on the Hudson.

Βy Rashid Khalidi

Tue 25 Mar 2025 06.00 EDT

It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to. While partisans of the Israeli-American mass slaughter in Gaza may have been offended by their protests, large numbers of the students whose rights of free speech have been infringed upon via draconian punishments were themselves Jewish.

Many of those faculty members who are about to be deprived of academic freedom and faculty governance, and perhaps fired, are themselves Jewish, indeed some are Israelis. If it were ever really about discrimination, the university would have taken action against the ceaseless harassment of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and faculty, and their allies and supporters, instead of endorsing and enabling it.

This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17-month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland.

These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by the New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university.

These lies are rooted in blatant racism. Frantz Fanon wrote that the Manichaenism of the colonist sometimes “goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal”. Indeed, Israeli minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, in October 2023 called Palestinians “human animals”. Benjamin Netanyahu said of them: “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.” In this colonial war, through this lens, Palestinian lives, like other brown and Black lives, are rendered a worthless, faceless, dehumanized mass, while other lives are uplifted and individually cherished and mourned.

We should hold on to these thoughts as long as we can, because in the dystopian world we have entered, simple mention of race and racism are, or will soon be, violations of the perverse current reading of federal law. Once the quislings who run Columbia University have implemented the diktats of their masters in Washington and on the board of trustees, once these diktats have spread to other universities under threat, teaching and even quoting Fanon will be perilous indeed, as will be mere mention of race and racism, not to speak of gender, disability and much else.

We are approaching the status of Chilean universities under Pinochet,^[1] where on the orders of an authoritarian government, ideas and books were banned, students were expelled and arrested, departments were taken over, and faculty and staff fired.

We should not mourn what Columbia has become, for as great as it may have been, none of this is entirely new. Before the current expulsions and suspension, Columbia once in its history expelled a student for non-violent protest: in 1936 for protesting against offering a platform to Nazis. In 1953 its president signed a letter pronouncing communists unfit to teach. Columbia trustees fired two faculty members for opposing the first world war on pacifist grounds, while student conscientious objectors were arrested and jailed.

Columbia has long been run more like the vast, wealthy business and real estate empire that it is, than as an educational institution. It is a place where trustees, donors and powerful professional schools dictate its policy, not the rest of its faculty.

In the spring of 2024, two-thirds of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted no confidence in a president who bowed to outside pressure, threw her faculty under the bus, and called in the NYPD for the first time since 1968. Her successor has outdone her, further garlanding Columbia’s already rich repressive traditions with groveling obeisance to government dictates that were promoted and eagerly seconded by shameless collaborators within the university.

After Friday’s capitulation, Columbia barely merits the name of a university, since its teaching and scholarship on the Middle East, and soon much else, will soon be vetted by a “senior vice provost for inclusive pedagogy”, in reality a senior vice provost for Israeli propaganda. Partisans of Israel, infuriated that scholarship on Palestine had found a place at Columbia, once named it “Bir Zeit on the Hudson”. But if it any longer merits the name of a university, it should be called Vichy on the Hudson.^[2]

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

NOTES

[1] General Augusto Pinochet is the butcher who presided over the murder and jailing of thousands when he led the overthrow of Chile’s elected government in 1973, with covert U.S. support, and installed himself as the head of a military dictatorship. He ruled the South American country as a dictator from 1973 until 1990.

[2] Vichy is a city in the Allier department of central France. It is known for the French regime that collaborated with the Nazis while ruling the country’s unoccupied zone during World War II, from 1940 to 1944. After France’s defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940, the French government, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, established itself in Vichy. Pétain’s regime colluded with the Nazis in carrying out antisemitic policies and deporting Jews.

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