This is the fourth post World-Outlook has published since we announced a “summer break” on July 26. The evolution of world events, such as those described below and in the previous three articles, has made it irresistible for us to set vacation plans aside and respond to the news of the day to the best of our abilities. We will continue with our regular publication schedule for the foreseeable future.

The following was first published by the British daily The Guardian on August 1, 2025. It is an open letter by Rashid Khalidi to the administration of Columbia University in New York City.

Khalidi recently retired from Columbia, where he served as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies. During his 23-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.

“Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a ‘special lecturer’ but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June,” Khalidi wrote in his open letter reproduced below.

Columbia announced the last week of July that it would pay more than $200 million in a settlement with the federal government after the White House claimed the university failed to adequately address alleged antisemitism on campus, amid protests over Israel’s unrelenting slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. The White House had threatened to pull significant funding.

Columbia is not the only school to face Trump’s wrath. The White House has accused several major U.S. academic institutions of failing to “punish antisemitism” during pro-Palestinian protests and sought to cut millions of dollars in federal funding, largely earmarked for research, if the schools fail to submit to the government’s demands.

Columbia was the site of major protests over the war in Gaza throughout 2024. The university has served as a test case in the administration’s efforts to gain greater control over higher education across the United States and simultaneously clamp down on pro-Palestinian advocacy, and, more broadly, on free speech.

Under the White House-Columbia deal, which will be overseen by an “independent monitor” who will report to the government, the university has agreed to expand its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and review its Middle East curriculum.

Columbia also pledged to cut programs promoting “unlawful efforts” related to diversity. Along with the $200 million, Columbia will pay $21 million to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over alleged civil rights violations of Jewish employees.

The agreement has drawn loud opposition from faculty, students, and alumni who argue it amounts to capitulation that will have significant negative repercussions for academic freedom, hamper the university’s independence, and restrict pro-Palestinian speech.

In his open letter, Khalidi fiercely criticized the agreement.

Columbia chose to adopt a definition of antisemitism that “conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews,” Khalidi said. The definition makes it impossible to teach honestly about the creation of Israel or the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the Israeli government, he wrote.

Khalidi has been outspoken in the increasingly sharp debate that has broken out over the last two years on what is antisemitism, or to use a more accurate term — Jew hatred, explaining time after time why opposition to Zionism is not antisemitism.

The deal Columbia signed will infringe upon faculty members’ academic freedom and speech, as well as that of teaching assistants and students, Khalidi said in his open letter.

Faculty and students alike will be forced to constrain their speech and activities in order to evade “the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel, and to crack down on alleged discrimination — which at this moment in history almost invariably amounts simply to opposition to this genocide,” Khalidi wrote.

Agreeing to submit the syllabuses and scholarship of prominent academics for review by outside actors is “abhorrent” he added.

He concluded: “Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can say and teach, under penalty of severe sanctions.” [Emphasis added.]

World-Outlook is publishing the open letter that follows for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, photo, and text below are from the original.

— World-Outlook editors

*

Opinion | Columbia University

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump

The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

Fri. Aug 1, 2025, 06.00 EDT

By Rashid Khalidi

Dear Acting President Shipman,

I am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a similar fashion.

These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia.

Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.

Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews.

Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.

Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.

The Armenian genocide, the nature of the absolute monarchies and military dictatorships that blight most of the Arab world, the undemocratic theocracy in Iran, the incipient dictatorial regime in Türkiye, the fanaticism of Wahhabism [a strict interpretation of Islam originating in the 18th century with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, emphasizing a return to what it considers the original, pure form of Islam. It is closely associated with Saudi Arabia, where it has been the dominant form of Sunni Islam since the kingdom’s founding — W-O editors]: all of these are subject to detailed analysis in my course lectures and readings.

However, a simple description of the discriminatory nature of Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law — which states that only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in Israel, half of whose subjects are Palestinian — or of the apartheid nature of its control over millions of Palestinians who have been under military occupation for 58 years would be impossible in a Middle East history course under the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

“Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self ”

It is not only faculty members’ academic freedom and freedom of speech that is infringed upon by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s diktat. Teaching assistants would be seriously constrained in leading discussion sections, as would students in their questions and discussions, by the constant fear that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel, and to crack down on alleged discrimination — which at this moment in history almost invariably amounts simply to opposition to this genocide.

Scores of students and many faculty members have been subjected to these kangaroo courts, students such as Mahmoud Khalil have been snatched from their university housing, and Columbia has now promised to render this repressive system even more draconian and opaque.

You have stated that no “red lines” have been crossed by these decisions. However, Columbia has appointed a vice-provost initially tasked with surveilling Middle Eastern studies, and it has ordained that faculty and staff must submit to “trainings” on antisemitism from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League, for whom virtually any critique of Zionism or Israel is antisemitic, and Project Shema, whose trainings link many anti-Zionist critiques to antisemitism.

It has accepted an “independent” monitor of “compliance” of faculty and student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor of Israel. According to Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration, this “Monitor will have timely access to interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit all Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of Agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews”. Classrooms are pointedly NOT excluded from possible visits from these external non academics.

The idea that the teaching, syllabuses and scholarship of some of the most prominent academics in their fields should be vetted by such a vice-provost, such “trainers” or an outside monitor from such a firm is abhorrent. It constitutes the antithesis of the academic freedom that you have disingenuously claimed will not be infringed by this shameful capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces animating the Trump administration.

I regret deeply that Columbia’s decisions have obliged me to deprive the nearly 300 students who have registered for this popular course — as many hundreds of others have done for more than two decades — of the chance to learn about the history of the modern Middle East this fall.

Although I cannot do anything to compensate them fully for depriving them of the opportunity to take this course, I am planning to offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.

Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions.

Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.

— Rashid Khalidi

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

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