By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS
Trump’s defunding campaign is having an impact. But don’t be fooled into thinking that elite schools like Columbia or media that have been captured by woke leftists can really change.
Faith in humankind and its ability, despite missteps and temporary detours, to march on an inevitable path toward progress rests at the heart of classical liberalism. However, American institutions such as universities, which were once largely dedicated to the promotion of the values at the heart of that set of beliefs about individual rights and economic and political freedom, have long since been captured by so-called progressives who have no use for the classical liberal project.
The question is whether or not they can be saved. If even efforts to strip those schools of federal funds that stick to the woke leftist agenda they embraced in recent decades fails to change them, then what should we think about their efforts not merely to survive but to continue to serve as the gold standard of American education?
President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back the woke tide that swept over America in the last few years since the moral panic of the 2020 summer of “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots are a long-postponed reckoning for these institutions. But as we saw this past week with Columbia University in the City of New York—the first such major school to be targeted by the government for its toleration and encouragement of antisemitism on campus—its administration and faculty have no intention to do what is needed to ensure that the atmosphere of Jew-hatred has ended, even after the threat of federal defunding was made real.
It’s not clear whether Columbia or the other schools now being put on notice that they must change or lose the federal money that enables them to survive can get away with defying Trump or prevaricating about compliance long enough to evade punishment. Either way, recent events should cause the supporters of these institutions, as well as those who are still desperate to send their children there, to question whether reform is even possible.
The appeal of these schools, as well as those sectors of journalism, the arts and other professions to which their graduates gravitate, remains strong. That’s especially true for those who wish to use them to enable their advancement through the elitist networks that are still perceived as running the country.
Can they change?
While it’s possible to imagine Trump’s anti-woke campaign succeeding in fundamentally changing them, the possibility of the resistance to this initiative prevailing requires us to ask an increasingly pertinent question. Would the country be better off if they were greatly diminished or without them altogether, and their replacement by new institutions not compromised by progressive ideology?
The question was urgently brought to my attention recently when I spoke at the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Global Student Summit in New York City. I was inspired by the conversations I had there with students from across the country—both Jewish and non-Jewish—who spoke of their courageous efforts to fight back against the spirit of intolerance and antisemitism on their campuses since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But I was concerned by comments I heard there from those who still believe that schools and the mainstream corporate liberal media that have helped normalize hatred for Israel and Jews are truly capable of reversing these trends.
Over the course of the last few decades, the purveyors of toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality, settler-colonialism and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) embarked on a long march that took them from the margins of scholarly thought to a position where their belief system became the new orthodoxy from which no dissent was allowed. And since their twisted belief system falsely labels Israel and Jews as “white oppressors,” the way campuses erupted in a storm of pro-Hamas protests, illegal encampments and building takeovers was no surprise.
It followed naturally from the way DEI policies encouraged the recruitment of student “activists,” whether from the United States or foreign nations where antisemitism is normative. It was also a product of their academic offerings. In Middle Eastern studies, where hatred for Israel and the Jews is mainstreamed, and the rest of the humanities, scholars who are supporters of classical liberalism, conservatives or Zionists are becoming an extinct species.
Columbia plans on prevaricating
Trump is trying to do something about that. The administration has demanded that Columbia make drastic changes in its admissions and disciplinary policies, as well as to place one of its most problematic departments—the one devoted to Middle Eastern studies—under “academic receivership” for at least five years. And it made it clear that if Columbia didn’t comply, then the school would lose every penny of the $1.2 billion it receives annually from the federal government. Just as important as reforming the Ivy League school so as to return it to a position where it is no longer a hostile environment for Jews was the signal this sent to the rest of academia, where similar problems exist.
But while Columbia quickly folded in the face of Trump’s threat, it soon emerged that it was not intending to abide by the promises it made to the government. As The Free Press reported, in a private Zoom call with 75 faculty members, university president Katrina Armstrong told them the school planned on reneging on its pledges.
Armstrong was under fire from fellow administrators, faculty and students who were horrified by the school’s surrender to Trump and the way it seemed to be complying with Washington’s efforts to deport foreign students who had violated the terms of their visas—or in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of the pro-Hamas disturbances, his green card. Anger at her predecessor, Minouche Shafik, who had presided over the worst of the antisemitic outrages on campus after Oct. 7 but provoked the rage of the antisemitic mob, had forced her resignation.
So, Armstrong sent a message that Columbia's agreement to Trump’s terms was just a tactic aimed at hoodwinking the administration. There would be, she said, “no change to masking” in which “activists” would be allowed to continue going about intimidating Jewish students or otherwise violating school regulations while concealing their identity. There would also be “no change to our admissions procedures,” which both discouraged the presence of non-leftist students and rolled out the welcome mat for Hamas supporters. The school would also not alter its disciplinary process that had so conspicuously failed to deal with the spread of antisemitism.
Just as important, she said Columbia’s controversial Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies program, which is one of the key academic centers where the movement to destroy Israel has been mainstreamed, would also not be put under “academic receivership” for a minimum of five years.
In other words, the school planned to conduct business as usual and thought it could get away with defying Trump.
When news of her defiance spread, it created a different set of problems that endangered the school’s fiscal future than the ones the leftist mob there could engender. By the end of the week, Armstrong had resigned and was replaced with former journalist and Columbia board member Claire Shipman, making the latter the third head of the school in less than a year.
No doubt Columbia’s board hopes that Shipman’s expert communication skills honed during her years as a member of the Washington journalism establishment would enable her to succeed where both Shafik and Armstrong had failed.
Compromised institutions
Anyone who thinks that Shipman will be any more interested in reforming Columbia, as opposed to enabling it not to change but without losing any federal money for doing so, is dreaming. As she made clear last year in a text message to university leaders that was obtained by the U.S. House of Representatives’ investigation of college antisemitism, she considers the probe of what happened on campuses to Jews to be “Capitol Hill nonsense.” The same report also revealed that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was giving Columbia the same advice.
It remains to be seen whether the university will get away with evading the Trump administration’s efforts to force it to change. But whether it goes through the motions of doing so or not, it will take a long and difficult struggle to alter the dynamic of that campus, and most others like it, when it comes to their embrace of leftist theories. How could it be otherwise when the existing administrators and faculty have all been busy spreading woke intolerance of classical liberal values and contempt for the canon of Western civilization that they should be imparting to subsequent generations?
The same applies to any hope that other societal institutions—most particularly, the media, which helps set the tone for the nation—will be transformed by efforts to topple the progressive stranglehold there.
Trump’s efforts may well be a historic turning point in this battle to save not just American education but the rest of society when it comes to corporations, the media and the arts. These sectors, including the federal government during the Biden administration, become bastions of woke beliefs that falsely claim that America is an irredeemably racist nation, and that Israel and the Jews are oppressors rather than targets of a genocidal war. Indeed, places like The New York Times, which many Jews still foolishly look to as an authoritative source of information, are not only hostile environments for Jews who are not in sync with the progressive mindset. Their business plan is predicated on appealing solely to the left-leaning, upscale, credentialed elites that comprise most of their readers, in addition to the base of a Democratic Party that has been similarly captured by the left. That is why veteran liberals and Free Press founder Bari Weiss were hounded out of their newsroom and sent either into retirement or off to work at alternative outlets.
Columbia and schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many others are also so badly compromised by the progressives that it’s hard to imagine them truly changing.
Replacement rather than reform
Seen in that light, anyone who encourages young people to believe that they can thrive as committed Zionists and supporters of classical liberal beliefs at institutions that are now committed to the destruction of those values is doing them no favor.
What Trump is striving for is a necessary and long-needed program to stop the federal funding of institutions that are harming the country and working to topple the beliefs that are the foundation of both the West and the American republic. While it may be possible to reform some of them, the left is so entrenched at the most powerful of these entities, like Ivy League schools, as to render them impervious to such efforts.
That is why the primary focus of those who understand the grave nature of this threat to American society should be on replacing these powerful schools, not the vain hope of their reform. Doing so won’t be easy, but it is only by the creation of new institutions dedicated to Western values, like the University of Austin, or the way existing schools that were once lightly regarded might eventually replace the Ivies as the most desirable destination for students, can this struggle be won.
Just as the media has been altered by the creation of alternatives to mainstream liberal establishment outlets—whether it be cable-news channels like Fox News, Newsmax and others, or web news sources like The Free Press or JNS—so, too, must American higher education. It is time to stop worrying about saving institutions that are already lost and concentrate on building new and different ones where Western ideas will flourish and Jewish students are safe.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
