In the weeks before he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Manhattan, Mahmoud Khalil wrote to Columbia University officials asking how they would “protect [international] students’ rights to free speech...and stop the suppression and now potential criminalization of that speech.” Khalil, a permanent resident and green-card holder, was one of the leaders of student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, Khalil earned a master’s degree in December from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. At the time of his arrest, he was still living in university housing with his pregnant wife. The Department of Homeland Security alleges that his “presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” DHS has also claimed, without producing any evidence, that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” But an administration official admitted to The Free Press that the “allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.” Khalil is, then, a political prisoner, and the violation of his First Amendment rights is a threat to those of every U.S. resident, no matter their politics or citizenship status.
Khalil’s unlawful arrest is the most high-profile episode in the Trump administration’s escalating attack on higher education and Columbia in particular, which has become the testing ground for an authoritarian crackdown. Days after Khalil’s detention, the Trump administration issued a letter dictating terms under which the university might recover $400 million of funding that had been suspended due to an alleged failure “to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.” It’s true that campus protests have sometimes been accompanied by inflated, counterproductive rhetoric and disturbing incidents of outright antisemitism. Still, the right and other supporters of Israel have regularly and purposefully conflated legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism in an effort to delegitimize dissent and distract attention from indefensible U.S. support for a barbaric war. Antisemitism—which is rife in the Trump administration itself—is now being used as a pretext for an assault on universities, which the administration sees, along with journalism, the courts, and the federal bureaucracy, as an obstacle to its authoritarian agenda.
Columbia’s initial response has not been encouraging. Interim president Katrina Armstrong pledged cooperation “with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns” and designated the fight against antisemitism the university’s “number one priority.” Although she also mentioned Columbia’s “enduring and essential commitment to freedom of expression” and the need for “courage to meet this moment with determination” and “integrity,” Armstrong has not pushed back against the Trump administration’s attempts to silence and intimidate students critical of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, Columbia has expelled and suspended students who participated in last year’s protests. Armstrong’s response echoed that of other Ivy League presidents who refused to stand up for their students’ rights in congressional hearings last year and instead let exaggerations and mischaracterizations go unanswered and suppressed protests in ways that only inflamed matters.
This response is conditioned by neoliberal shifts in higher education. Since the 1980s, university administrations have increased dramatically in size, raised tuition while increasing their reliance on influential donors, embraced corporate buzzwords and business-management practices, wrested power away from faculty, and started treating students more like consumers. These transformations have helped erode public trust and undermined higher education’s proper role in American society. In the process, worthy commitments to racial and gender diversity and equality have also become distorted. Administrators have embraced and even stoked students’ political sensitivities in ways that conflict with the pursuit of truth through respectful, pluralistic debate. The elevation of “safety” over intellectual diversity and debate warped the protests and counterprotests over the war in Gaza and handed a valuable rhetorical weapon to the right. Of course, these trends by no means justify Trump’s cynical crackdown, but they are now making it harder for universities to combat the rising tide of illiberalism.
The Trump administration is threatening dozens of other universities with cuts, including to vital medical research, and his Education Department has launched a slew of specious investigations into diversity programs and alleged antisemitism. Many university presidents have, like Armstrong, responded with the tools of human resources and public relations. But this is not a PR crisis; it’s a political one. Some leaders have recognized that, including former Columbia president Lee Bollinger, who urged universities to “articulate” and “defend” their role in preserving “the bedrock of American values.” This is good advice, but to convincingly defend their role to a skeptical public, universities must also openly reckon with the forces that drew them away from those values.
Other university presidents have belatedly adopted positions of “neutrality,” hoping that by keeping out of the fray they might be spared Trump’s wrath. While administrators should be wary of official statements on divisive issues over which there are legitimate disagreements on campus, they are now adopting institutional neutrality not as a principled stand but as a dodge: they are, as Wesleyan’s president Michael Roth put it, “making cowardice into a policy.” The Trump administration’s lies and repression are not matters of opinion about which one can be neutral; they constitute an attack on the very principles that make the free expression of opinion possible.
