Dean
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Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
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Indeed. Which is why their former employment does not suffice for why someone should care about their explanation / interpretation on a culture war issue.
'They worked for a smart person' is not a credit that bolsters one's own credibility, particularly when said smart man was known for routinely hiring people he thought were substantially wrong on major issues.
Counts for what to who?
Is 'Scalia' in this context supposed to count as a proxy for 'shares Scalia's worldview and judicial philosophy?' Or does it count more as a talismanic shield, akin to 'he worked for a conservative, therefore he must not be politically biased?' I imagine 'Scalia clerk' counts for either, but to different people.
What else is 'Scalia clerk' supposed to mean? Was Scalia known for only employing clerks who agreed with his philosophy, and thus they are proxies for his professional reputation? Are Scalia law clerks as a class any less prone to culture war shenanigans than the rest of the legal profession? Was Scalia known for characterizing deportation as being cast into Dante's inferno, or viewing deportation as oppression?
If I look up Adam Unikowsky's professional bio, should I expect to see Scalia-esque disagreement with the lawfare practices of the last administration to shape the election, or should I expect to see concurrence as many other respectable professionals felt it was right and proper?
Dean
Flairless
16d ago
We haven't discussed deportations, recently, and appellate litigator (and formula Scalia clerk, for those who care about that sort of thing) Adam Unikowsky posted a good explanation of AARP v Trump/WMM v Trump, this morning. The situation seems pretty Kafka-esque:
Who is Adam Unikowsky and why should anyone trust / care about their explanation / characterizations of a contemporary culture war topic filled with bad and bad-faith explanations / characterizations?
Dean
Flairless
18d ago
If the next administration has to reverse course for Harvard to win, that is simply defining away Harvard's loss.
Alea iacta est, but I know not which way the legal cards will fall in this case.
Over time? Almost certainly against Harvard, especially after the current fiscal year ends in about 3 months.
At the end of the day, Harvard's relationship with the US government runs through the regulatory state, not by statute. There is no law that says Harvard must receive funds, or even that- once approved- Harvard cannot have funds taken away if it is found to no longer meet requirements. Congress (and most legislatures in general, even outside of the US) by design gives the regulatory state significant deference to who, how, and whether to give out grants and funds and determinations to those effects. As this is a pretty well established federal government power, even injunction-inclined judges are working against a dynamic where other parts of the judiciary do not go along with a 'well, it's illegal when Trump does it' approach.
What limits the ability of even sympathetic judges to freeze the status quo with injunctions is that the US government largely spends year-by-year, or the ability to compel future actions.
Even when litigation can successfully freeze currently granted expenditures, there is no legal basis for courts to require future funding. Funding, after all, does not derive from the executive branch in the first place. It derives from the Congress, which puts its own terms and conditions, which include, well, executive discretion on approving grants on a going-forward basis.
Similarly, an injunction doesn't really work on, say, issuing student visas. Harvard can request a freeze on current student visas, to try and protect what it has, but Harvard cannot demand future visas still be granted. For one thing, Harvard doesn't even know who those future visa-holders even are. But more importantly is that in pretty much every country in the world visa issuance is a 'may', not 'must' responsibility of the government, and specifically its embassies. Embassies in turn have considerable discretion when issuing visas, such as if they have reason to believe the visa recipient would be able to keep their status inside the united states... say, for example, that they are requesting a visa on the basis of a specific university that the government is going through a process of invalidating for student visas.
It doesn't even matter if there is a judicial injunction stopping that from being affirmed for the moment. The visa-issuance discretion isn't on the basis of 'the university is ineligible'- it can be issued on the basis of reason to believe that the university will be ineligible during the student's time.
As a result, the current litigation is about stanching the bleeding (losing current grants / foreign students who already have visas), but the real issue is the lack of inputs over a longer term (lack of incoming grants / foreign students).
Dean
Flairless
21d ago
Additionally, if Israel were actually trying to genocide the Palestinians in the motte version of the word- deaths or preventing reproduction- they've been doing a profoundly bad job of it given their available resources and means to do such. They would literally create more casualties if they were less accurate.
It's one of the reasons is why the 'Israel has dropped X bombs!' propaganda line was quietly retired into the first year. The numbers and amounts of bombs dropped versus the number of claimed civilian casualties- even before the UN does things like drastically reduce the estimate of women and children killed to under 5k and 8k respectively- was wildly out of whack. Especially for a 'priority' genocide demographic- if you're out to do genocide the children and women are the most important- the casualties were...
...well, pretty consistent of urban fighting against an urban insurgency that actively uses human shield strategies and casualty reports as a primary media weapon. The Gaza conflict is notable for its duration and international pressure on one of the combatants to not take full direct control of the terrain, but not really total casualties. In the 2017, something like 10,000 civilians were estimated to have died during the battle for Mosul against ISIS. That was less than a year, and against a roughly analogous population size (2 million).
The gazan conflict is tragic, but it's not really exceptional in terms of casualties. Only in terms of global attention. Even when Hamas claims north of 50,000 casualties since the war started, the Sudanese civil war is estimated to seen three times that number die, and that's only about 2,000km from gaza.
Dean
Flairless
21d ago
He's not. If anything, Harvard is getting its turn after Columbia, which was targeted first due to its weaker position.
(Warning - link is not QRD. But it may be interesting.)
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
The cost case and not wanting responsibility of the Palestinians is a strong reason against war. War against Israel ruins the Camp David accord security assistance/entitlement from the US, all-but-certainly disrupts the Suez Canal revenue stream, and various other issues. These cost issues occur win or lose, and even in victory the Egyptians would need to either completely overthrow the state of Israel to provide a place for the gazans- thus risking the nuclear issue- or establish some sort of Egyptian civil control of 'just' Gaza, which renders the war premise of war moot.
Rather than a war against Israel, the far cheaper option is to push the Palestinians on to other areas. Whether it's further west to Libya, to Europe, to other muslim states, or otherwise. Egypt has more options for not-absorbing the Palestinians other than war with Israel.
What does "push" mean here, concretely? Generally, in cases of ethnic cleansing, it means "threaten people with lethal violence unless they move", which is why the term is often just taken to be mostly equivalent to genocide. If the Gazans say "hell no, we won't go", what happens to them?
They continue to be crossfire. But people who don't have such strong views are encouraged/facilitated to leave.
The policy of everyone in the region- regardless of of nominal sympathies- may have been for the Gazans to be stuck in Gaza rather than let into their own country, but that hasn't really a demonstrated desire by the Gazans when border restrictions to Egypt get relaxed. Where the Gazans can buy their way out, non-trivial fractions of the population have, with around 5% of the estimated gazan population- 100,000 of about 2 million- doing so in the war so far. And that has been against Egyptian efforts.
Historically- and in previous iterations earlier in the war- the Gazans saying 'hell no, we won't go, we'd rather fight to the death' are also the ones shooting the gazans who would rather leave. And the Egyptians up-to-literally push back Palestinians caught breaking into the Sinai, occasionally even handing them back to Israelis if the Israelis seize the border checkpoints to mitigate overland smuggling. Israel normally accepts this because of geopolitical preferences that were dominant before October 7.
In the grimmer alternative (for everyone but the Palestinians who don't want to be there), the Israelis shoot the 'hell no' Gazans keeping the would-be refugees in, but don't accept Egyptian push-backs, and then variously open the border crossing gates / ferry willing departees to the gates / even facilitate ways around the gates if the Egyptians are particularly adamant. Short of shooting the Israelis, there's not much the Egyptians can do if the literal gates are closed behind the refugees, and the nature of that firefight is that it probably ends with the Egyptians pushed back to a point where they can no longer push back Gazans who walk through.
This is also partly why Egypt has been categorically denying reports of any consideration of 'temporary' relocation of Gazans into the Sinai as of earlier this year. One of the numbers mooted- half a million- would be about a quarter (25%) of the estimated gazan strip population. If 25% were able to leave- not even 'willing,' but 'able'- then it is very, very hard to prevent the next X% from doing so if they want to.
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
Particularly since one of the obvious- immoral, but obvious- ways to mitigate the need / use for bombs in Gaza is to push the Gazans into the Sinai.
Would this be ethnic cleansing? Yes. Would it result in fewer Gazan deaths than continued war? Also yes, if you believe the claims from the last years that the war itself was genocidal in terms of casualties.
Would the Egyptians or anyone else go to war to shove the gazans back into Gaza? Almost certainly not.
Very disruptive, very destabilizing, very, very immoral and amoral both. But also far more likely than any sort of 'Americans and Europeans cutting ties to the Israelis leads to the Israel succumbing to the intifada.'
This treats the polarization as binary collectives, rather than clusters in a much, much broader sea of actors of various willingness to murder. An example of the distinction is Mexico- there is political polarization, though at the current time one 'pole' has achieved relative dominance, but there is also a heck of a lot of political murder.
Mexico is not generally considered a producer of better leadership, not least because the group they need to not get assassinated by more (Cartels) are not only different from the political outgroup pole, but fractious enough that there is no coherent [Cartel group] as a national level. Which means more potential conflicts, for more potential assassinations, and so on.
Which, notably, caught... people planning the financing of terrorism, assassinations, and bombardment against Israel at the time.
International law objects to many things, but it doesn't render military targets invalid. Rather, the military use of protected sites removes the protected status of normally protected sites.
Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification
It's an interesting day when the lookup for a university-oriented program takes you to an ICE website.
Certification is the process schools go through to receive authorization from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to enroll F and/or M nonimmigrants. Within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), SEVP reviews schools that desire to enroll nonimmigrant students to determine denial or approval of certification.
From a guardian article elaborating the letter-
“The revocation of your Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification means that Harvard is prohibited from having any aliens on F- or J-nonimmigrant status for the 2025-2026 academic school year. This decertification also means that existing aliens on F- or J- nonimmigrant status must transfer to another university in order to maintain their nonimmigrant status,” Noem continued.
Meanwhile, Harvard graduation occurs... a week from today, on 29 May.
My sympathies to foreign students at Harvard thrown into uncertainty by this.
It will, however, be interesting to see how Harvard's position changes. I imagine a court case is imminent. I doubt it will resolve things.
Is it a 'mistake', if it's designed to obfuscate and mislead?
Sure. The phrase 'it was worse than a crime; it was a mistake' comes to mind.
I am all on board that acts and/or policies can both be morally wrong and mistakes in the sense that they do not achieve the ends they were taken to achieve.
Going by Fauci's public statements for why he changed various positions over the course of the pandemic to 'nudge' people into 'better' options, I am fully prepared to believe he was both a bad actor and that he believed doing so would provide a net good on the pandemic outcome.
I think he was generally incompetent in that regards, as I do most people who believe national policy-level lies to be 'white lies' with no bearing on later credibility. I even say this as someone who has a far greater degree of acceptance of state secrets and such than others- part of public credibility is that you need a public's buy in to recognize that you might not share all information, but that what you do share needs to be fundamentally honest/accurate. Failures to maintain this are what lose the trust of those willing to extend tolerance to withholding 'true' information. Fauci's (and other's) technocratic approach to professional credibility is part of why I find him incompetent- he behaved as if the legitimacy and public trust derived from his position, rather than was bestowed by the public he tried to obfuscate and mislead.
People- individually and collectively- have some tolerance for O&M. But it is narrowed, and subject to revocation if abused.
Deaths from COVID and deaths with COVID were both counted and reported in different places.
The insistence on this conflation is probably one of the worse policy mistakes of national health authorities during the COVID years, not least because of (a) how upstream it was for justifying later (bad) policies on the basis of risk-severity, and (b) how obvious the implications of this could be to anyone already inclined towards skepticism with even a passing knowledge of statistical smuggling.
There are absolutely valid reasons to be very concerned about a potentially highly mutable pathogen in a population. You can absolutely believe a quarantine model could be necessary to protect at-risk people. But if you want to retain public trust and deference from a high-skepticism, low-trust, and literate population, you cannot smuggle in nakedly bad data to pad your numbers for public, population-level urgency. Too many discontents will read the data categories, recognize the issue, and spread the awareness. And too many people would be able to find examples of systemic incentives to miscount- even at the level of how some medical institutions could get more money for classifying patients as with-COVID. Which validates concerns / lack of trust in medical objectivity.
This was a (predictable) aspect of the pandemic response, as was the circle-the-wagons response and the partisan appeals to trusting the science. Except it was not science when it was being pushed, but Science. And those who insisted on championing The Science, or that people were bad for not believing policy proscribed on the basis of The Science, or even just that others should defer to those with The Science despite any misdirection from the authorities with The Science, have no basis for their own [current statistic] to be believed.
And a consequence of the inflated numbers is that they lost claim for establishing a shared understanding of what a 'true' number of deaths could be. 1.2 millions Americans died of Covid? Why should anyone believe that? How many 'died with' are smuggled into that? Does the argument from excess deaths also give credit for 'deaths saved' in later years from the people who died earlier but not later, or is it a one-way rachet to imply an above-average death rate in the area of scrutiny but not a lower-than-average death rate afterwards?
And why should anyone be concerned, without a baseline of comparison to establish relative rates? Is 1.2 million 1%, 5%, 100% more than expected? Especially if you use 'during Covid' as a span of time. Okay- what was that span of time, and what would be the 'normal' number of deaths during it? And how are you separating [deaths from COVID] from [deaths from COVID policy]?
Without such a baseline, of distinction between the consequences of bad policy and a bad disease, the main reason to defer to someone's statistic is trust. But trust is precisely what is lost when you conflate [with] and [from].
Dean
Flairless
23d ago
Such purges of the digital past are an increasingly common part of the American electoral cycle.
What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.
Thank ye. That was the goal.
My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing.
My impression is it's not just the students, but the teachers. Part of the article goes into Columbia's self-perceived vulnerability of losing teachers not only the other Ivy Leagues, but foreign universities.
They are (not quite implicitly) concerned that if they go hard on the protestors, the protesting-supporting teachers will go abroad as well. Part of this could be because of 'fascistic' concerns that could be a 'push' factor-
Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.”
-and other parts are the 'pull' factor of other higher education employers. From paras not raised-
After another embittered class has its commencement on May 21, Columbia will lurch into a summer of ugly possibilities. Students are still attempting major disruptions on campus, and the school has laid off 180 employees whose pay relied on federal funding. Scientists are hoarding supplies. “Everything is pretty much being held together with Scotch tape,” the director of a research institute at Columbia said. “The only thing that’s saving us from a wholesale exodus is they’re not funding any new grants at Harvard either, but we’re very worried about the flight of our most outstanding people. The Europeans and Chinese are both circling like mad.”
A lot of the article reflects a subtext / basis of comparison with the other Ivy Leagues, especially Harvard.
Columbia’s feebleness this spring has dismayed the many students, faculty, and alumni who wish it would wage a more principled fight against Trump — as Harvard has done by suing his administration in federal court. But even Trump’s allies failed to predict how much of a pushover it has been. “I was surprised by how quickly and how completely the university folded,” Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who helped develop the strategy to crush Columbia, told me.
Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.
In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay.
In the meantime, the Columbia community is waiting to see whether Shipman can reverse some of the university’s reputational loss. Harvard is basking in the glory of fighting Trump in court, and Princeton’s president, Chris Eisgruber, gave a humiliating interview to the Times offering his fellow Ivy notes on character. “I understand why Columbia might feel that they had to make concessions under the circumstances,” he said. “You have careers at stake. You have jobs at stake. You have the ability to educate your students at stake. And you may say, ‘Look, I wish I could take a stand on principle, but given what’s at stake, I can’t.’ But then you need to say that.” Cogburn, the social-work professor, suggested that the people running the school are too compromised to be credible: “I don’t know what their intentions are, whether they actually want to dismantle the senate or whether they earnestly want to consider the best way to govern, but they are consistently underestimating how much they’ve damaged their reputations and trust.”
And during that final Board-student meeting, I skipped a paragraph (for character limit constraints).
Early on, a student asked, “Why are you not taking action against the government — ” leading to several overlapping calls of “Like Harvard!” “Harvard!” “Harvard!” and “We want you to fight!” Goggin pointed out that Harvard had received more invasive demands from Trump than Columbia had. “If we can do something that we were going to do anyway without having to litigate, and restore the things that we care about here, that is in our opinion — or in my opinion — our best path,” he said. “That is where we are today. It doesn’t mean we’ll be there tomorrow.”
So- in a sense- pride. Or ego.
A Game of Chairs (At Columbia University)
or
How Trump Defeated Columbia University Columbia University Defeated Itself
The Intelligencer, a generally left-leaning American media outlet of the sort to still refer to anti-Trump actors 'the Resistance,' released a long-but-interesting report on many of the internal dynamics of the road to Columbia University's rise to prominence in the US culture war in the last year or so.
A (brief) recap for this year is that Trump Administration's suspended 400 million in grants and contracts on grounds of Civil Rights Act violations (namely anti-semitism related to Gaza War protests). Columbia's public acceptance of the Trump administration terms for restoring funding was under cut the then-President downplaying any impacts from the Federal agreement in a private faculty meeting.
As the strikethrough sub-title implies, the proximal cause, and political attribution that author (or editor) wants you to take away, is that Trump defeated Columbia. The not-so-deep subtext that is more interesting (and perhaps not surprising) is how the Columbia internal politics sabotaged set the stage.
TLDR: Columbia is currently in an unstable leadership vacuum because of how the university distributed internal administrative powers to students and faculty, how a key (but controversial) past President consolidated power in the office of the president rather than the senate, and how the Board attempted to mitigate/reform the Presidential power centralization led to leaders who were unprepared with the politics of the Gaza War. Would-be ambitious university faculty who tried to take advantage did not help.
This is presented because (a) the Columbia dynamics exposed may help people understand the dynamic of 'marching through institutions' across leadership generations, and (b) rabbit holes be fun to share.
///
The Nature of the Columbia Governance Problem
Even by the cats-in-a-bag standard of modern research universities, Columbia is a cursed place to govern. It’s huge, with 17 schools to manage, and its endowment is the second smallest in the Ivy League on a per-student basis, after Cornell. There’s never enough funding, which means Columbia has an extra-toxic version of a common university problem: resentment between the liberal-arts programs, which are prestigious and lose money, and the cash-cow units that subsidize them.
Two don't-call-it-foreshadowing notes here.
1: Remember that money is fungible.
2: Keep track of which department is offering praise or criticism.
(A) Root of the Problem
Then there are the ghosts of Columbia’s uniquely tortured history. After 1968, when antiwar activists took over five buildings, the trustees made a big change to Columbia’s governance structure. They created a senate with a supermajority of faculty and students and gave it the power to oversee discipline and draft university policies. Over the decades, though, many of these delegated powers eroded, replaced by folkways and presidential work-arounds. The result has been that Columbia has shared governance on paper but not really in practice. It was a legitimacy bomb, waiting to go off in a crisis.
As a result of Vietnam War protests, Columbia delegated various institutional powers to a sub-body that gave faculty and students- but particularly faculty and students coordinating together- not just policy power, but disciplinary power.
Columbia Presidential Centralization
In 2002, after decades of financial struggles, the trustees installed Lee Bollinger as president, and he began to make the university bigger and more ambitious in almost every way. He seemed less interested in day-to-day academic management than in pushing Columbia into exciting new fields, like neuroscience, and creating interdisciplinary centers around the world. He developed a new campus in Manhattanville and paid for it with multibillion-dollar capital campaigns. To accomplish this, Bollinger mostly bypassed the senate and his fractious faculties. It earned Bollinger a reputation as the greatest university president of his generation; it came at the cost of professors and deans feeling disenfranchised. An org chart that circulated among deans and the president’s office each year showed a tangle surrounding Bollinger. Dozens of people reported directly to the president, many of them floating off to the side, outside any recognizable hierarchy.
President Bollinger, 2002-2023, centralized administrative power in the office of the President, and sidelined the faculty/student senate institutions.
While not explicit, this is a two-fold basis of an anti-Presidential-deference institutional bias in the student-faculty senate. First, common grievance / loss of influence to bind teachers, and the students they can influence, seeking to regain influence. Second, and less obvious, that the President would decrease efforts to build/maintain a power coalition in the Senate that he does not need the assistance of... in favor of other, more directly influential, influence areas.
Bollinger Influence in the Columbia Board of Trustees
In his two decades leading Columbia, Bollinger outlasted more and more of the trustees, and he was able to shape the group in his image. “Lee basically seizes control,” an alumnus who has interacted with the board over many years said. “If you’re a trustee, you can yell at your chief executive, but your only recourse is to fire him. And Lee basically would say to the trustees, ‘Oh, you want to fire me? Go right ahead. Guess what? Manhattanville is still not done. And anyone whom you hire as a successor is not going to want to spend the first five years of his or her reign fundraising for my legacy.’”
Bollinger's influence matters because the Columbia Board of Trustees in power now is in a post-Bollinger transition. Because...
That spring [of 2024], Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.
Reframed- the current board of trustees is not only Bollinger-era, but were used to a stronger University President who was willing to sideline / ignore the student-and-faculty university senate.
But the recent presidents are not strong Presidents, in part by the Board's own design.
The Board Strikes Back
The trustees weren’t oblivious. They knew that Columbia’s economic position was fragile and that success had masked a worrying level of institutional rot. When Bollinger was finally ready to retire in 2023, the board replaced him with Shafik, then the president of the London School of Economics. That school was small and simple compared to Columbia, but Shafik was sophisticated and had a compellingly globalist biography that matched the political moment. An Egyptian-born member of the British peerage, she’d been educated in America and England and held a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford. She would be Columbia’s first female president and its first of color. Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world while modernizing its operations in Morningside Heights.
In 2023, the Bollinger-era board replaced Bollinger with a new, and more importantly, foreign and less experienced in Columbia politics, University President. Shafik was a 'can appeal to all interests' compromise. She had the the demographic aspects attractive to the liberal-art progressive wing, the economic background to recognize the role / relevance of the 'cash cow' departments, and for the board she was a deliberate break from the Bollinger-style president.
And she was aware of that from the start.
The night before her investiture, Shafik hosted an intimate dinner in the courtyard of the president’s house, a McKim, Mead & White mansion on West 116th Street. In his later years, Bollinger had become notorious for conducting much of his business there and seldom appearing in his office. One attendee recalled a member of Shafik’s family toasting how they had “quite literally pulled back the curtains and let the light in.” From the perspective of Columbia’s senior leaders, there was a plan in place to shore up the school’s foundation. It would just take time.
And then history happened.
Shafik and the Gaza Conflict on Campus
For a moment, it was possible to think that Shafik was well equipped to lead Columbia through the aftermath of October 7. She had superb knowledge of the conflicts in the Middle East: She had been involved in the Oslo peace process and written books about the economic possibilities of a regional accord. But her perspective was from the Davos-y orbit of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, where debate and respect abound because you’re handing out money. Shafik had no experience of the Israel-Palestine issue as it played at Columbia and on the Upper West Side, with the tabloids and Congress watching. The university is home to both a large population of observant Jewish students and a cohort of professors who are avid supporters of Palestinian statehood. Those two groups were not going to wait for their new president to get up to speed.
The relevant point here isn't that the University had strong pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups. The point here is that Shafik was personally involved in the peace process before, which- along with her deliberately non-Columbia Uni/foreign background that went into her hiring- shaped her (eventual) decision to allow New York Police onto the campus to arrest protestor encampments/occupations, after an April 2024 Congressional hearing. (This Columbia-centric hearing followed the disastrous 2023 Congressional hearing that led to the replacement of Harvard's president.)
Skipping forward just a bit for a relevant perspective from her-
Shafik headed back to New York [from the April 2024 Congressional hearing] on the Acela and decided to authorize the New York Police Department to enter campus and break up the encampment. It turned a modest demonstration into an international media spectacle. One professor who spoke with Shafik at her home later on asked why she’d brought in the cops. “She didn’t understand what it meant to call the NYPD,” the professor said. “She was from London. The police in London don’t carry guns.” For her part, Shafik told faculty that anyone who imagined the protests could influence real-world events was delusional: In her World Bank days, when she’d sat in on actual peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, nobody had once mentioned a university.
So Shafik's lived experience- previously considered a virtue in her hiring- led to decisions that ultimately led to her ouster.
But there was more before then, which started the grounds by which the Trump Administration would later invoke the Civil Rights Act against Columbia.
The Rise of the Antisemitism Civil Rights Act Issue
Going back to the immediate aftermath of October 7, even before the Israeli ground incursion...
What happened in those first few weeks, before Israel’s formal counteroffensive, convinced many in the Jewish community that Columbia was home to irredeemably antisemitic faculty and students. One day after 10/7, the most prominent Palestinian advocate on the faculty, Joseph Massad, a professor in MESAAS, wrote an op-ed for The Electronic Intifada that called the Hamas operation “innovative,” “stunning,” “astonishing,” and “incredible.” On the second day, two student groups called for Columbia to divest from Israel and end its academic activity in Tel Aviv, where the university was planning to open a satellite campus. Soon, the first “From the river to the sea” chants were heard at protests. Students, faculty, and outsiders aligned with Israel argue that the pro-Palestinian activists’ claims to be motivated by concern about genocide are false because they showed their colors in this period, before the full invasion of Gaza.
For Shafik and others in university leadership, managing the torrent of activity was not just difficult but perhaps impossible. Every administrative action boomeranged. On October 12, after a protest and counterprotest on campus, public-safety officials directed demonstrators toward separate exits. But that sent the pro-Palestinian side onto West 115th Street, headed toward the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life. The problem was compounded when Jewish students there were locked inside, which several said made them feel unsafe.
This created 2 separate problems for pro-Palestinian institutional interests in Columbia against the office of the President, and the Board of Trustees more generally.
First, the divestment demand went against the Board's mandate for Shafik when they hired her, which is rarely helpful.
Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world
Particularly in the light of the 'liberal-arts are prestigious but unprofitable' tension. Spreading the brand is what allows subsidizing such.
Second, and worse, this created a Civil Rights Act violation risk if Columbia did not respond appropriately.
OCR also issued a notice (1994) that assists school communities in understanding their obligations under Title VI and discusses some considerations for schools when taking action to remediate a hostile environment under Title VI. The existence of a hostile environment based on race, color, or national origin that is created, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or left uncorrected by a school can constitute discrimination in violation of Title VI. When a school is taking action to remediate a hostile environment, just as when taking any other action, Title VI prohibits the school from discriminating against students on the basis of race, color, or national origin.
The 'or' is significant. A CRA hostile environment discrimination does not have to be created by the university. It is enough if you accept, tolerate, or leave uncorrected.
Additionally, anti-semitism is considered a violation of title VI CRA, but anti-anti-semitism is not, because the later is a political position, which is not a protected category, but antisemitism is considered an act against a protected category. This is Trump's fault.
In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand.
So. In the opening days following the October 7 2023 attack, a Columbia faculty member publicly praised the atrocity in glowing terms, campus protestors chanted slogan with known ethnic cleansing connotations, and at a University permitted protest, pro-Palestinian protestors ignored their designated deconfliction exit and instead mobbed a Jewish center and locked jewish students inside.
Also, later, unrepentent protestors did not help.
Back in the spring [2024], in a gesture of moderation, CUAD had distanced itself from one of the saga’s most objectionable characters, a student who had said “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” during his disciplinary hearing. Now, CUAD reversed that position and apologized to the student, writing that “where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.” (CUAD took credit for organizing the May 7 disruption at Butler Library.)
Remember Title VI, and 'or left uncorrected.'
But back in April 24, Shafik went to Congress.
Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.
This probably did not help Shafik's position before Congress. It also may or may not have been predictable what the outcomes would be.
In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay. She agreed that antisemitism was a major problem at Columbia and discussed disciplinary actions against specific professors without reservation. If this placated congressional Republicans for a nanosecond, it permanently lost whatever goodwill she had left with the Columbia rank and file. As a member of the faculty later put it to me, “A couple other Ivy presidents went to Congress and lost their job. Shafik went to Congress and lost a university.”
A second encampment formed spontaneously after the bust-up of the first. Protest leaders refused to meet with Shafik. Representatives from student government rendezvoused with her in a clandestine meeting in a basement, leaving their phones outside so nobody could make a recording, but there was no meaningful progress. Shafik authorized a second police raid to end the students’ takeover of Hamilton Hall and canceled commencement. The year was in ruins. Shafik’s chauffeur tailed her around campus on foot, concerned for her safety.
Shafik resorted to law enforcement against the encampments. During this times, student government- but also teacher government because the Senate is both student-and-teacher dominated- met with Shafik privately, even as protest leaders- presumably a different and 'unconnected' group- refused to meet her at all.
And this is when we get our next governance turnover.
The Board Intervenes (Again)
That spring, Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.
Several people with knowledge of the board’s evolution described a dynamic in which a subset of members was convinced that Columbia had a dangerous concentration of antisemites and that strong action was needed to bring the campus back to order. That circle’s most prominent member is Victor Mendelson, part of a four-generation Columbia lineage, whose father was also a trustee. The billionaire Mendelsons run HEICO, a Florida-based aerospace company and defense contractor. There’s also Shoshana Shendelman, whose child is a current student, and to a quieter degree Greenwald, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who spent his career at Fried Frank and Goldman Sachs. A more moderate set includes Mark Gallogly, who co-founded the investment firm Centerbridge Partners and who has given millions to Democratic candidates for office; Kathy Surace-Smith, a lawyer and partial owner of the Seattle Mariners whose husband is the president of Microsoft; Abigail Black Elbaum, who runs a real-estate management firm; and Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Two others were more clearly identified with the liberal-coded position that antisemitism was a concern but one that was being used disingenuously to stifle speech: Wanda Marie Holland Greene, who runs a progressive school for girls in San Francisco, and Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square who became a billionaire investor.
If you want to take a guess on how many of these identified members are Jewish, have children on campus who are jewish, or otherwise close connections with jewish friends / family, feel free to look up for yourself. The answer is more than two. I only bring this up to note the only time the article actually specifies someone's Jewishness later.
The point now, however, is that the Board has a positional divide between 'anti-semitism is a big problem' and 'anti-semitism is a concern but is disingenuously used to stifle speech.'
The issue that Columbia ran into was that the protestors lost the Free Speech argument with the Bollinger-era board... despite Bollinger being a notable First Amendment advocate himself in his selections.
Or possibly because of his influence.
In April 2024, the New York Post painted Columbia’s board as “ultra-liberal” and “stacked with Democratic apparatchiks and megadonors.” (Mendelson recently visited an undergraduate seminar and told the students that as one of the panel’s few registered Republicans, “I’m the one the White House calls to yell at.”) But that doesn’t capture how the board behaved in private. There was not a set of trustees that argued as vociferously on speech rights or Islamophobia as the Mendelson side did on antisemitism. Bollinger, a noted First Amendment scholar, had stocked the board with people who held expansive views on speech, yet in practice they found it difficult to side with protesters who knowingly violated Columbia’s policies on when and where demonstrations could occur. “It would have been easier for the First Amendment absolutists to defend the students if they had respected the university’s time, place, and manner restrictions,” a trustee told me.
This point here isn't that the pro-Palestinian protestors agitated their way into a losing argument, though they did. The point here is that the pro-Palestinian protestor advocates were running into the Civil Rights Act issue.
Columbia University had stated policies on time, place, and manner restrictions. These were pre-established, and pre-enforced, restrictions. Not equally enforcing them could become a form of favoritism contributing to, well, a Title VI hostile environment under the CRA.
However, the Board didn't come to a consensus as much as a consensus came with timely personnel turnover.
Antisemitism became the prevailing concern. In a minuted meeting, with colleagues who were whispering to right-wing publications and Republicans in Washington, it was difficult for trustees to take the position that antisemitism was a small or medium-size problem — even if they honestly saw it that way. Greene and Li quietly rotated off the board last summer, further tilting the balance. “The board lost two of its strong oppositional voices when they left,” a person who interacts with the group said. During one session, the trustees had a preliminary discussion about granting arrest power to campus security officers. Within hours, it was in The Wall Street Journal — a leak that some interpreted as an effort to lock in that outcome.
A previous gridlock leads to an imbalance in favor of the clamp downs by the Board. However, the Board doesn't have all the formal power here.
Remember the root of the problem paragraph earlier?
The Student-Teach Senate Demands Control Over The Judicial-Disciplinary Process (And Gets It (Back))
Some trustees became obsessively focused on discipline and pushed Shafik to discuss individual students’ files in detail. If that was deeply inappropriate, it was also true that discipline was where Columbia was opening itself up to attack. Students’ cases were progressing slowly and uncertainly. The rules codified after 1968 established two tracks for students accused of transgressions: Dean’s Discipline, for issues like cheating on exams, and the University Judicial Board, for violations related to protest. The senate controlled who was appointed to the latter. But big demonstrations happened only every so often, and the group was convened haphazardly. Cases sometimes followed both tracks in parallel; other times, outside arbiters were called in. Administrators looked down on the Judicial Board because they were entitled to just one of its five seats, with the others going to presumably softhearted students and faculty. All this meant that after the October 7 attacks, Shafik routed discipline cases through a relatively new office that she controlled, the Center for Student Success and Intervention. The senate, appalled by Shafik’s testimony before Congress and the police raids, roused itself and demanded the cases be run through its group. In July 2024, Shafik and the trustees conceded the point, and the majority of cases related to the takeover of Hamilton Hall were transferred to the Judicial Board.
After the Vietnam War Protests, the (presumably then-anti-war Board of Trustees) gave students (and teachers) the right to sanction protest rule violators. However, this was rarely and haphazardly used.
In the aftermath of Oct 7, Shafik used an office that was created during the Bollinger era of centralizing power into the Presidency to handle protest issues.
After the (highly condemned by student and teacher protestors) start of enforcement, Shafik gives up institutional control of the disciplinary process back to the Student and Teacher-dominated senate. This may be partly out of a (doomed) compromise to stable the ship of office, but it is also consistent with Shafik and the Columbia Board of Trustee's desire to dis-empower the Bollinger-era president.
But what Shafik did on her way out the door isn't what mattered. What the Senate did not do was more relevant.
Months passed [without disciplinary progress]. The delays signaled to Columbia’s gathering adversaries that of all American universities, this was the one least able to get its house in order. “There’s some deep-rooted structural problems,” said Ester Fuchs, a professor who co-chairs an internal group Columbia formed to document antisemitism and recommend reforms. “Everything was broken: the whole freaking administrative infrastructure of the university to deal with protest, the security, the disciplinary process. Why did it take us so long to get that discipline done? Because it was broken. There was nothing there.”
Remember Title VI.
The existence of a hostile environment based on race, color, or national origin that is created, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or left uncorrected by a school can constitute discrimination in violation of Title VI.
Shafik started in an environment where Columbia professors (and students) were encouraging a hostile environment, faced with clear speech policy and protest management violations that made non-action against violators a form of acceptance / toleration, and then handed off the disciplinary/correction process to an institution that did not work... after her predecessor had given her office the tools to take actions.
In August 2024, Shafik quit, in what was the then-shortest presidential tenure in more than 200 years.
Enter Katrina Armstrong: The Anti-Anti-Bollinger President
Katrina Armstrong, Shafik's successor, was picked from the in-house university leaders to be an anti-Shafik. Someone who was more familiar with Columbia politics, more sensitive to student interests, and, well...
...well, remember the departments praise and criticism are coming from.
Katrina Armstrong loves a medical metaphor. When the trustees hurriedly tapped her to replace Shafik as acting president, she’d been running Columbia’s vast Irving Medical Center for two years, and she started to reassure people that the school was now in the ER or ICU and efforts were being made to stop the bleeding. She positioned herself as the anti-Shafik, ultracommunicative and accessible to all. Matthew Connelly, a history professor and vice-dean — “the lowliest administrative role you can have” — told me that Armstrong would reply to his emails immediately: “I’ve never had that experience with any other principal at Columbia.” Armstrong had a politician’s instinct for telling different constituencies what they wanted to hear. She helped freshmen move into their dorms, had dinner at the Chabad brownstone, and gave an interview to the Columbia Daily Spectator apologizing to students who felt “hurt” by the police raids.
Peter Bearman, a sociology professor who had helped start a vote of no confidence in Shafik, was surprised when Armstrong reached out to him. “I thought, Oh, she’s smart,” he recalled. The two developed a working relationship. Bearman complained that the color-coded system Columbia used to signal whether campus was open or closed made the place feel like a TSA checkpoint. As a hospitalist, Armstrong appreciated such heuristics, but she took the note and made a change. Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.”
However- and forgive the paragraph separation- Armstrong was not as familiar with Israeli-Palestinian politics as she might (not) have been with institutional politics.
On another occasion, Armstrong called Bearman, who is Jewish, into her office and asked him to explain to her the divide within Jewish faculty — why some felt the school had an unforgivable tolerance for antisemites while others considered the issue overblown, a smoke screen for human-rights abuses in Gaza. At the medical campus Armstrong had run, 50 blocks north of Low Library, Israel-Palestine just hadn’t been an issue her doctors and scientists bothered her with.
In other words: the Columbia Board of Trustees replaced an economist directly familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but insufficiency sensitive to the Columbia protests, with a doctor so unfamiliar with it (or inclined to play the part of ignorant) she had to ask the (it's important to note he's Jewish) Jewish professor who ousted her predecessor for being too hard on pro-Palestinian protestors why other Jewish faculty and students might perceive antisemitism.
The Gathering Enemy Action
A Republican blueprint for assailing higher education, with Columbia as its primary target, was coming together. In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand. At the end of October 2024, Republican staffers in the House released a 325-page report, “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” which relied on more than 40,000 pages of internal Columbia documents. The report is heavy-handed, but for those inclined to believe, it substantiates the allegation that Columbia is a breeding ground for antisemitism. And if there’s antisemitism, the government can now drive a school into bankruptcy.
The 'how' to brankrupcy is another para that refers to an American Enterprise Institute paper by Max Eden. I don't feel the article characterizes it well, so link it for your own review.
However, the point is that financial interests were at risk was raised, and...
The Armstrong Denial
At Columbia, much of the leadership was in denial that an asteroid was heading their way. A group of alumni and faculty had recently formed the Stand Columbia Society, which had excellent back channels to administrators. The group worked up a detailed analysis of Columbia’s exposure to a hostile administration — $250 million in the short term, $3.5 billion in a worst-case scenario — and circulated it as a warning. According to Stand Columbia, senior administrators responded that the math was “cute” but far-fetched.
The Stand Colombia Society does not have much of a public facing position on politics in general. However, in March 2025 it did publish a (paywalled even on internet archive) position paper titled: Issue #037: No, the Endowment Cannot Be Used to “Fight Trump”
The public-facing summary is-
Recently, a new narrative has begun making its way around the higher education commentariat: that Columbia University should “use its $15 billion endowment to fight Trump.” It’s a tempting, feel-good slogan, but here’s the problem: this argument is financially illiterate, institutionally reckless, and strategically suicidal.
Pretty strong words. But why might interim president from the medical center have dismissed even a 'mere' quarter-billion million short-term threat?
Because there could be a bigger-than-that short-term windfall incoming, if Armstrong played her professional self-interest cards right.
Armstrong's Nine-Figure Gamble for the (Columbian) Presidency
The false sense of security may have been encouraged by the common view that Armstrong’s tenure was going well. Most people who interacted with her at the time got the impression she was campaigning to get the presidency on a formal basis. There was, however, a nine-figure hitch. Amid an otherwise bleak year for fundraising, Columbia’s single largest benefactors, Roy and Diana Vagelos, had made a $400 million gift to the medical school. They were enthusiastic fans of Armstrong and made the donation contingent on her returning to the medical complex. But Roy Vagelos, the former chairman of Merck, was 95, and that could probably be sorted out. Columbia’s trustees discussed the matter and came close to making Armstrong an offer.
Roy Vagelos's characterization here is interesting, because it provides some interesting sequencing implications, not least because the Vagelos donation was made public on 22 August with no public acknowledgement of the Armstrong condition. Which just so happened to be aweek after Armstrong took the acting-President position after Shafik's resignation on 14 August 24.
Which created a sequencing dynamic of...
- 14 August 24: Armstrong emerges from the fall of Shafik as the new/acting University President... implicitly as a disconnected / apolitical / temporary choice
- 22 August 24: Within a week of Shafik's ascent, VIP/Biggest Fan donors who love her so much make mega-donation... conditional on Armstrong losing power
Naturally, knowing that the biggest financial windfall of her university's year is conditional on her future exit, Armstrong...
- begins campaigning for her temporary promotion to become permanent
- taking into confidence the (Jewish!) professor who planted the first knife in her predecessor's final fall
- is remarkably engaged with often-overlooked university faculty, including humanities departments, to building teacher support
- begins a campaign for student support, apologizing for / signaling non-support of her predecessor's rule-enforcement (and CRA-compliance) policies
Which continues so that-
- Summer 2024-First Quarter 2025: Armstrong continues this campaign despite the biggest donation of the previous year being explicitly-but-secretly conditional against it
- Summer 2024 On: The 'we care about antisemtic indiscipline' faction grained predominance on the Board
- March 2025: A group of well-connected Columbian institutionalists publish a warning that a hostile incoming Trump administration could cut $250 million in the short term
But really, remember the context.
- $400 million is more than $250 million
- And the donor who set the condition is, like, 95, and will die in a few years
- And the Board- or at least Armstrong's allies/supporters on the Board- think that condition 'could be sorted out'
- So there's not really a risk of losing $400 million!
And Armstrong would look really, really good to the student/teacher protestor block if she heroically stood up to the Trump administration, and held out against to any short-term cuts thanks to her ability to pull in that $400 million mega-donation to cover a year of cuts.
And thus Katrina Armstrong almost got the job of her ambitions, the accolades of her humanity peers, and the support of the Board.
And then the Fire Nation Trump Administration Attacked
Such plans were obliterated when Trump began his assault. On the right, there was a consensus that among elite universities, Columbia was the weakest link. “Columbia is just the least defensible,” Rufo said. “I mean, the conduct at Columbia, the ideologies from Columbia, the response by Columbia were the least defensible. They showed the maximum weakness. And so I think that’s why the president selected them first.”
Initial efforts start small, but escalate week by week.
Trump’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism moved rapidly, from a warning shot about cutting $50 million in funds on March 3 to canceling $400 million on March 7. Federal agents began knocking on students’ doors and waiting in the lobbies of Columbia buildings. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and Fulbright scholar, fled to Canada, and Yunseo Chung, a junior who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, went into hiding. ICE agents arrested Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent spokesperson for the lawn encampments, and flew him to a prison in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings. (Another student, Mohsen Mahdawi, was arrested in April; he has since been released.) On March 13, Trump’s task force delivered what faculty refer to as “the extortion letter” or “the ransom note,” a list of nine demands that had to be met before the government would consider reinstating the money, with a one-week deadline.
Yes, those individuals are non-citizens who were involved in participating or leading the Columbia protests. However, one of the interesting demands from the 'ransom note' list is actually institutional power related..
One of the bold letter demands is Primacy of the President in disciplinary matters, i.e. restoring the Bollinger reform, and reversing the late-Shafik power turnover to the University Senate.
Some held out hope for a defiant university administration. There was just one problem for the 'concede no ground' caucus-
Armstrong's support from the (still-Bollinger-era) Board wasn't as firm as she (probably) presumed.
The Fall of Armstrong
But the idea of a defiant legal response was a fantasy. Columbia’s board was already on the same wavelength as the Trump administration. On several of the task force’s demands — including banning masks, restricting protests, stripping disciplinary powers from the senate, and allowing campus police to arrest demonstrators — the group was ready to concede immediately. On March 21, it [the Board of Trustees] sent a letter to the government essentially surrendering. Perhaps reflecting an understanding that the letter would not go over well with the Columbia community, nobody signed it. Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies and English, was among the faculty aghast at the decision. “It’s more than capitulation,” Halberstam told me a few hours after the letter was released. “It’s anticipating even more demands that might be made and fulfilling them in advance.” The Trump administration’s initial letter hadn’t mentioned “viewpoint diversity,” code words that generally mean hiring more conservatives as professors, but Columbia pledged that searches for new faculty had already begun.
Again- remember the department.
But also- remember the sequencing.
- Armstrong is made temporary President on donor big money condition that Armstrong leave
- Armstrong lobbies hard to be Real President, despite the condition
- Armstrong starts to go directly against the Board's summer 2024 consensus on the issue
- Armstrong relaxes policies against student protestors the Board thinks are Very Concerning
- Armstrong builds ties with faculty opposed to the opposing the protestors
- Armstrong dismisses increasingly unsubtle warnings regarding the incoming Trump administration
- Even after Trump's election, Armstrong thinks she is on track to become President
- The Board encourages this belief, if she'll just hold on a little longer
- One the first and predictable challenge, the Board folds
A sequence-conspiracist might think that- as Armstrong made her political alliances known- she was left to take an easily foreseeable fall.
Armstrong’s fall in these weeks was astonishingly fast. There were rumors that she and other members of the administration would be arrested for harboring immigrants. At one point, John Kluge, whose late father had endowed a program for minority scholars at Columbia with what was then the largest gift in Ivy League history, emailed Armstrong for reassurance that there was a strategy for defending it. Armstrong did not write back for four weeks. Khalil’s wife, who gave birth to their first child while he was incarcerated, has never received a note or offer of assistance from Columbia. The members of the university’s internal antisemitism review, concerned that their work could have lent legitimacy to Trump’s attack, took it upon themselves to write a statement. Administrators never issued it.
John Kluge's Sr.'s gift had been for... $400 million. Back in... 2007.
While $400 mil in 2007 is more than $400 mil in 2024, 2024 is a heck of a lot more recent- and influential- than 2007. And John Kluge Junior is not the one donating in a year Columbia needs money most.
Or, more relevantly, when Armstrong needs support most.
Faculty who interacted with Armstrong in this period say she was genuinely shocked that the world believed Columbia had caved. It made a certain sense, from the point of view of someone simply trying to survive minute by minute in a crisis: There had been a gun pointed at Columbia’s head, and to get it lowered, all she had to do was agree to some things her trustees already wanted.
Elsewhere...
Armstrong is 59, and in her years running Columbia’s medical center, she had cultivated a bedside manner that was upbeat, kinetic, approachable. Her short time triaging the entire university’s problems had taken a visible toll. “She looked like she was on the verge of collapse,” someone who dealt with her regularly said. To another, “she seemed like a person who desperately needed friends and allies and felt like she was very alone.”
Armstrong's finishing moment was, perhaps appropriately, a matter of record when she tried to make it not. Twice, sorta.
In the end, it was another bit of amateur hour that sank Armstrong. At one of the private faculty meetings where she tried to spin the deal with Trump as a win, participants warned that their videoconferencing software was generating a transcript. “The person who’d set up the meeting said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to stop that. Can anybody — is there any tech? Can we get any tech?’ And no tech appeared,” recalled one of the professors present. “They allowed a confidential meeting with the faculty to go on, knowing that there was a transcription being made. And then of course it was leaked. I mean, it was such a shambolic event. She wasn’t in control. Isn’t that just an indication of complete discombobulation in our leadership?”
...
She announced that Columbia would comply. And then, when she nearly blew up the deal by privately telling faculty that it wasn’t a capitulation, that in fact there was some wiggle room, she lost her job. On March 28, the same day Armstrong resigned, she learned that Trump’s task force had demanded she appear in Washington without delay.
In the deposition room, Armstrong seemed determined, most of all, to avoid perjuring herself. She could not recall when she had become acting president. She struggled to say who is truly in charge of Columbia — the president or the trustees. Pressed by Keveney to admit that Columbia was indifferent to antisemitism, Armstrong described her tenure as a “blur” five times and as “challenging” or “difficult” 11 times and said she didn’t recall at least 28 times.
There is some irony in how Armstrong was replaced, though.
Members of the board of trustees give different accounts of who broke up with whom. Some maintain that Armstrong was forced out; others say there was mutual agreement she could not remain. Either way, she was gone. Only a week earlier, the former research-university president had joked to me that Armstrong’s job was secure: “You can’t fire an interim. You’re really not going to be able to hire a president after you do that.” With few good options, the trustees replaced Armstrong with one of their own. Close observers of Columbia’s demons noted that Armstrong, a creature of the profitable medical division, had been knifed by someone from the underfunded liberal arts.
So Armstrong was replaced by a member of the (Bollinger)-era Trustee Board member, Claire Shipman.
And not just any board member- the co-Chair.
What Next for Columbia?
In her early days on the job, Claire Shipman, an acting president replacing an interim president replacing a failed president, is beating expectations. At 62, a former correspondent for NBC and ABC News, she is a confident, mediagenic speaker, and as a board member since 2013, she knows the institution. She met privately with 300 restive faculty in mid-April, heard them out, and didn’t commit any gaffes worth leaking to the press. She is taking actions that are symbolic — mentioning Khalil and Mahdawi’s names for the first time — and structural. Shipman announced reviews of Columbia’s communications office and financial model and started a website with resources for international students fearful of deportation. Most significantly, Shipman is calling for the senate itself to be reconsidered. In a letter emphasizing that “I am deeply committed to shared governance,” Shipman opened the door to doing away with major elements of it.
And as an opening policy, Shipman, and the most direct Bollinger-era Board proxy yet, votes to dissolve the Senate.
In the end, perhaps Bollinger, or at least his influence, will win the Columbia game of chairs after all.
What Columbia should do with its governance structure is a wide-open question. The Stand Columbia Society has called for “fundamental reform” and predicted “the end of the University Senate as we know it.” It would likely ignite yet another round of protest on campus if the trustees were to formally reduce the power that faculty and students wield through the senate. And yet the current system, conceived in crisis half a century ago, is clearly not working.
Or maybe not. Chaos is a ladder, and all that.
Then again...
On a Wednesday evening in April [2025], for the first time, two trustees met publicly with students to hear their concerns about the senate — and everything else that had gone wrong over the past two years. The event was held in the auditorium of the Lee C. Bollinger Forum, a 56,000-square-foot building on West 125th Street designed by Renzo Piano’s firm. It didn’t begin well. There was confusion about the start time, and when a moderator said at 6:40 p.m. that the trustees had to leave at seven, there were angry calls of “Is that a joke?!” One trustee, Keith Goggin, a graduate of the journalism school who went to work on Wall Street, remained and gamely took students’ abuse for an hour. “Please let me get through this so you all understand it and then you can yell at me,” he said. The longest applause of the night came when a student noted that while Columbia had formed its own task force on antisemitism, it had not created one to deal with “the demonization of Palestinians.”
After an hour, Goggin gathered his things. “I think we’ve had a good conversation. You want to yell at me, but I really do appreciate all of you,” he said. Someone in the audience shouted, “Is our money going to kill kids in Gaza or not?” Goggin left to boos. In less than a minute, the students and faculty turned the town hall into an organizing session, and someone was at the microphone calling for a general strike.
I am sure they, and their preferred University leaders, will have the Board's full support.
Dean
Flairless
27d ago
Dean
Flairless
27d ago
I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.
Best of luck with your siesta!
Don't be ashamed of it in the least. It truly can be for the best. Focus on your family, friends, or just take the opportunity to do some half-days of volunteer work improving your community. Even if it's as simply as helping clean up a graveyard with others, it can really help get one's head out of all-politics-all-the-time mindsets.
That's what the reported Russian threat was aimed against: "it will be five regions the next time we meet".
And it was a poor threat for the same reason. Good threats should never incentivize people to not comply.
The issue is not how many regions Russia wants to claim. The issue is that it no matter how many kms of regions Russia wants to demand the ukrainians turn over without fighting, it will still be in the Ukrainian interest to make Russia pay the resources they are willing to spend fighting km by km, rather than let Russia have both kms and the resources to conquer more.
A Russian offer that a concession of KMs will stop further aggression runs into the Russian credibility problem.
I agree that a major Ukrainian collapse is improbable, but it is not impossible. Russian operational competence is low, but most Ukrainian units are half-strength right now at best. If there's a lucky breakthrough, the 93rd might not be there to plug the gap in time. I am not talking about a total collapse, but a major realignment like the 2022 Harjkov counteroffensive.
Better a kharkiv further east within the regions that Russia insists it wants all of, than a kharkiv further west to be basis of claim a fifth region.
No ceasefire until Ukraine withdraws from the four mainland regions
What is the purchasing maxim? Never offer to pay what someone is willing to do for free? This is the inverse of that- demanding for free what others know you are willing to pay for.
Even if all parts of the Russian position eventually end up being accepted as written, this demand alone would be reason enough to keep fighting on. The 'rapid' advances of Russia in the eastern front last year were still slow enough in absolute amount of territory gained that it would have taken years of fighting at the same rates to finish conquering the claimed territories at the same rate, if they could sustain the same intensity over that period of time. Indications so far this year don't really support that, with the territorial advances in Ukraine in the earlier part of this year falling behind the rate of the last months of last year.
The upcoming Russian summer offensive does not change that. In fact, the bloodier it is expected to be, the less reason to accept the Russian ceasefire terms to give up land it has not conquered, especially if you expect this advance to make major gains against the Ukrainian defensive lines.
After all, if the land and defensive lines would be lost regardless, the relevant variable isn't the land being lost, but the resources both sides lose to do so. Russian forces and equipment and time spent taking the easternmost regions by force are resources that can't be used in a later offensive should the conditional ceasefire break down. In turn, the defensive positions in the east, even if they are insufficient, are better than the defensive lines further west, while the investments in the east provide no benefit if turned over without a fight. But defenses in the west will have more time to be developed if it takes months, or even 'just' weeks, to be developed.
Even if the entirety of the four regions is conquered in the coming offensive- and that requires a level of belief that the Ukrainians are about to have a systemic collapse cascade that ignores the last few years of the war to date- it would still be better to accept the Russian demands then, rather than now.
And if the Russians wouldn't be interested in accepting them then, that is a pretty strong indicator they aren't likely to be satisfied even if the terms were accepted now. Which increases the value of making the Russians pay more manpower / material / time in the present, rather than leaving it open in the future.
Dean
Flairless
29d ago
I think honestly you should have the ability to do a National injunction but it should be a situation where you have to get all the plaintiffs on one case, and it should be automatically taken up by SCOTUS.
Maybe, but only if the nation injunction takes effect if the SCOTUS agrees to take it up, and is negated if SCOTUS refuses the case. Otherwise, this could easily cause more harm than it avoids.
One of the critical institutional power factors of the Supreme Court is precisely that it gets to choose it's own cases. This is power over other branches of government, but also a power over the rest of the judiciary. The Supreme Court gets to dodge politically untenable legal issues that could threaten the independence of the court precisely because it reserves the right to ignore a court for now but overrule it later. The ability to disagree later-but-not-now is a positional influence which can allow the Supreme Court members to pick their battle and avoid unfavorable contexts.
Forcing the Supreme Court to take cases is a way of exercising process control/influence to influence the Supreme Court. A coalition that is already willing to abuse injunctions through willing partners in the mid-judiciary could easily use the lack of case autonomy to force the Supreme Court into politically untenable positions that provide the political cover to either force SC endorsement, or use the refusal as the political basis to dismantle institutional independence until the political pressure can dominate. Either way undercuts the Supreme Court's institutional autonomy and pressures it into political conformity with lower courts.
Which might be fine and preferable if you think the lower courts are on your side / substantially correct. But the issue of nationwide injunctions itself- where an overwhelming majority of injunctions in the last quarter century have been against one party, despite the Presidency having been evenly split between two parties- indicate a lack of consensus that would legitimize such a position.
It's also bizarre to suddenly give life advice in the middle of an argument with someone over the Internet. Clearly you told him to do that as part of the argument, not because you have a habit of giving random advice to strangers.
Direct question before anything else- are you confusing different posters and posts?
Are you confusing this sub-thread response to Pasha's perception of ethics courses to Pasha's top-level comment about cheating, where my only direct response was a non-sequitur that noted from the start I was merely going off of the same article that I'd been intended an effort-post on? This is a completely different thread-chain. That thread had no argument with Pasha, and Pasha did not even respond to my post on that. He did have a later reply over what 'modern' means in na different context that I did not respond to (because I felt it was fair and valid).
Or are you perhaps confusing the Dean quoted by Pasha here to be referring to me, the user who goes by Dean, and not the Dean of the AvocadoPanic's post that he was replying to, an academic title? I.E., the Dean of a school?
Like, I would be charmed if after all these years someone publicly guessed why I've had this username for nearly a decade. And if this is a general misunderstanding due to the nature of different subthreads, that would clarify a lot.
But if you are not confused about what response chain you are in, there are three problems with your claim of clarity.
First, I have not had an exchange with Pasha on the subject of ethics classes. I have not opined on the merits or demerits of Pasha's position on ethic classes. Pasha has not responded to my post on alternatives to ethic classes. The only exchanges on my recommendation have been with not-Pasha one, and not-Pasha two (that's you).
Second, there is no dispute/argument between Pasha's position that I quoted, and my response to it. I agree with Pasha's claim that he has "never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors." I certainly have no reason to doubt his account or perception.
Third, 'giving random advice to strangers' is what a substantial proportion of my posts on The Motte are. I am, if anything, notorious for unsolicited, loquacious, and sometimes unwanted advice on random subjects of debatable utility to the individual.
These are, admittedly, often advice on how to understand current events, history, or governmental affairs. But I have also been known to offer advice on things to listen to during workouts or car drives, family-friendly media recommendations, limits on the use of historical metaphors, and even writing advice that I don't follow enough myself.
Trying to cut down on loquaciousness is what ironically has led to this exchange. Giving examples of how studying ethics could be useful could itself be perceived as patronizing/implying that Pasha did not understand that utility argument.
Who says I do not like to read opinions on culture war topics by non-neutral observers?
Fortunately, the counter-argument is not fully generalizable. It can be countered by providing an introduction of a source, characterizing the source regardless of its level of bias.
And if the OP (sockpuppet) had bothered to introduce their argument, no one would be expected to conduct their own internet archeology to find it. I have a similarly dim view of people who link to long youtube videos for supporting context in lieu of their own arguments.
As a matter of practice- both in terms of advancing an argument and as as a framing device when introducing someone else for an argument- it is incumbent on the opener to provide some level of contextual justification for the audience as to why. This is particularly relevant if the opener is going to outsource their argument to someone else.
If OP's argument is going to be based on Unikowsky's views, then it will behoove the OP to justify why Unikowsky's views are significant.
My suspicion is that the the OP is making a broader culture war argument by selecting a take they agree with, but do not want to make themself, and so are attempting to smuggle in an insinuation of authoritative neutrality by presenting someone without characterization to make the argument by proxy, even if that person is more biased then the OP might care to admit and would undermine their opening position.
I base this suspicion in part by how the OP introduces Unikowsky to make an argument about deportation process, but then concludes with an appeal to HL Menken on the nature of resisting oppression. This is not Unikowski's position from the position of what is cited, but it is the conclusion that the OP cares to focus on using Unikowski as the buildup.
This suggests the OP is conducting a bait-and-switch argument, using Unikowksy's position as the opening bait (neutral observer on deportation process) for the concluding switch (deportation is a part of Trumpian oppression that must be resisted).
The way to test a bait-and-switch argument is to challenge the presenter to justify the bait.
Neither would I, but this in and of itself is not a reason to trust / care about the views of Unikowsky, absent further argument about why Unikowsky's framings should be believed or cared about.
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