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The people involved don’t see themselves as autocrats empowered to run the university however they see fit in order to ensure the maximization of grant-winning. The idea, “Jews have lots of political power, so we need to expel anyone who speaks out against Israel in order to stay in the good graces of the powers that be,” didn’t even occur to them in October 2023.
Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money? That’s just not how universities think. Even if there are incentive gradients that push in that direction, no university has a department of data fabrication.
You don't need a department of data fabrication to fabricate data, just as you don't need a "department of antisemitism" to be antisemitic. It happens naturally as a product of incentives and cultural trends. There's enough horrible studies, especially in woke "sciences" (though reality-based ones are in no way exempt also). I haven't tracked how Columbia specifically performs on this, but there's no reason why they in particular would be an outlier.
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Assumes facts not in evidence. I think you'll find they do exactly that.
Well sure, if you call it that it would give away the game.
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Except they do? Soft sciences all suffer massively from replication crisis, but faked data is a huge problem that goes unchallenged and covered up till it could not be hidden anymore. Francesca Ginos work on behavioral science was totally fabricated and earlier attempts to highlight it were quashed till 9 years later. Roland Fryers work on black outcomes was quashed because he went against the orthodoxy of white supremacy being responsible. Hard sciences also suffer from dubious research overenthusiastically seeing shadows in slides.
I think its fair to see the prestige of academic research as a dead end if they don't stand the test of the real world. The endowments and sinecures lavished are rewards for satisfying the emotional wants future billionaires whose nostalgia overweights the contributive effect of their university years to their success. The actual practical knowledge of university is either relevant only to the arcana of the universities internal minutae or only temporarily substantive as the world is so dynamic. Spending eight years locked in your lab to dissect nanoparticle impregnation becomes irrelevant when corning glass comes up with 5 different product iterations in the meantime.
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Given the general direction of the replication crisis in the the social sciences, retracted questionable applications of statistics, and the number of high-profile plagiarism accusations against university leadership in the humanities, are you sure they don't? I don't think anyone is doing it out loud, but it's at least happening in practice through some combination of only studying problems that could have the flattering solution, or just hiding the report when you don't like its results.
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