Chartbook 365 Defend Columbia. But from what? A globalized University caught in the crosshairs of polycrisis.

On a rainy lunchtime on Amsterdam Avenue, in front of the gates of Columbia University, hundreds of professors demonstrated this week, holding placards calling for the defense of our University against an unprecedented attack.

The situation is both shocking and viewed from the outside somewhat mysterious.

A right wing government supposedly committed to Making America Great Again is slashing science funding and imposing oversight on a highly productive research University in reaction to allegations of anti-semitism pursued through a civil rights bureaucracy, whilst that same administration lashes out against Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) measures. On its face, it is incongruous.

How to make sense of it?

One reading is that this is part of an authoritarian wave. Analogies are drawn to Orban and Erdogan. Much of the current resistance clusters around this framing.

One can see why this is attractive. On the one hand it positions Columbia and American Universities as a whole as part of a global movement. On the other hand it also exoticizes Trump as an “autocrat” and foregrounds the American tradition of the 1st Amendment guaranteeing free speech.

A representative list of questions recently circulated amongst a great group of colleagues at Columbia included the following: “academic freedom; the meaning of freedom; the challenge of democracy etc, the rule of law as a topic within the challenge of democracy; a scientist on the relation between politics and scientific research, history of academic freedom, the relationship between antidiscrimination law and the First Amendment, the drivers and dynamics of the authoritarian turn in other countries, the rights of non-citizens, the nature of university governance.”

Now these are good fights. We might wish that these were the fights that we were having. But do these questions really address our current situation?

Most obviously, and most tellingly, what to make of their silence about the specific issue that brought us to this point: the thoroughgoing repression of the student-led pro-Palestine and anti-war movement, and the allegations of antisemitism weaponized by Trump's administration in its attacks on higher education.

The silences produced by the generic framing of Trump as authoritarian, or Trump v. the constitution are not merely happenstance. Many of those defending universities are uncomfortable naming the crackdowns on pro-Palestinian, Israel-critical speech that have helped shape the Trump administration's most aggressive attacks on academia to date. Matters are not helped by the fact that the University administration makes a show of actually embracing the charges as a reasonable description of the situation on campus and a matter of the utmost urgency. Rather than addressing this concession head on, the resistance sidesteps it by aligning Trump with Erdogan or Orban, or treating him as a threat to the 1st Amendment. The result is an incomplete and incoherent account of how we have ended up where we are at.

So how can we reframe the current crisis on Columbia campus beyond the paradigm of free science v. authoritarianism, or a narrow construction of America’s constitutional history? What kind of framing do we need to actually address the situation we face, in its specific intensity?

I suggest three dimensions, which, taken together, place global Universities and Columbia in particular in the crosshairs of geopolitics, the cultural contradictions of American life & the contested position of big science. More speculatively, one might see all three of these vectors as originating in a general crisis of the vision of the global University that originated in the “end of history” moment of the 1990s.

Viewed through this lens, the attacks on Columbia and other US universities appear as moments in the nationally specific unravelling of a globalization paradigm, a process which is at one and the same time particular and specific and interconnected and reverberating. It is best viewed neither in terms of America’s national constitution, nor as a case study in comparative authoritarianism, but as an instance of uneven and combined development at a global scale.

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#1

Rather than debating the quality of the evidence being presented for a wave of anti semitism, or the elision of anti semitic and anti Israeli utterances and actions, or the relative prevalence of anti semitism as opposed to, say, anti Black racism, anti Asian discrimination, or, as is far too rarely named, specifically anti-Palestinian racism. Why don’t we proceed historically and ask why this charge is coming up in the way that it is, right now? To my mind the answer must start with the situation in the Middle East itself and its ramifications in the US and in NYC in particular.

What is disturbing the fraught, hypocritical but relatively peaceful liberal status quo on campuses across the US, is the collapse of the 1990s effort to depoliticize and neutralize the forcefield of the Middle East, a project that we once knew as the “two state solution".

The “return of history” though long advertised has caught many organizations off guard. It is tempting to say that it has exposed a lack of thinking and a lack of good processes in places like Columbia. It might be more correct to say that it has exposed what were always the underlying structures of power. In this sense Columbia University is like other global actors, who have also seen their assumptions about globalization shifting beneath their feet. This did not happen all at once. It has been long in the making. But it now seems irrevocable. Readers of this newsletter might think, for instance, of Western energy companies who found themselves with stranded assets in Putin’s Russia, or HSBC bank uncomfortably straddling Hong Kong, London and mainland China.

But first, what has the two state solution go to do with globalization? And why does it matter for Columbia?

The two state solution was a classic product of 1990s belief on the part of certain influential constituencies that history could be calmed and that economics, commerce and exchange would do the work. For Shimon Peres’s vision of “new middle east”, the pacification of European politics by way of European integration was the template.

This pacified vision of the future of Israel-Palestine mattered for American politics and for Columbia in particular, because located as the University is in NYC, we are in the midst of a global city, which is also a major center of Jewish and Arab migration and an important node in the network that solidifies the US-Israeli alliance as a cornerstone of strategy on both sides. To think of this as some shameful hidden network that must be uncovered with daring acts of truth telling - the classic gambit of antisemitic conspiracy theorists - is to invert the realities. It is loud and proud. It is no less open and outspoken than similar networks that support NATO and the Atlantic alliance, or the deep connections that run between Wall Street and the City of London, or the networks that ramify out from UN headquarters in New York City. Columbia University is plugged into all these networks and many more.

Of course, it would be to fall into a stereotypical trap to imagine that political attitudes and views of the Middle East align straight forwardly with nationality, religion or ethnicity. But, equally obviously, the stakes for many on Columbia campus are high. Hillel International estimates, according to its own definitions, that there are roughly 5000 Jewish students at Columbia. Whatever their personal political views, whether they support Israel or not, the claims made on their behalf by Israeli and American politicians mean that those students find themselves enrolled in the conflict, whether they like it or not, and on terms they did not choose. The same goes for the much smaller constituency of Arab and Muslim students. And since the purpose of education is to expand horizons and widen imaginative affinities and since our students are brilliant and Columbia is good at what it does, a large part of the student body as a whole is stirred by events around the world and nowhere more so than by the Middle East. The crowd in and around the encampments was very diverse indeed.

This active engagement with world affairs should be celebrated. Furthermore, for those who are citizens or taxpayers in the US it is no more than a basic civic duty. After all, as American taxpayers, we are footing a large part of the bill for Israel’s assault on Gaza. Furthermore, the US is providing diplomatic and political cover for the Netanyahu government.

The United States is anything but neutral in this conflict. Taking a position in the conflict is not illegitimately butting in, or singling out a particular question or minority in a discriminatory way. The Israeli-US alliance makes the affairs of the Middle East into a matter of public interest, as do the wide ranging investments of the Columbia endowment. Since we cannot pretend to neutrality, the responsible thing is not to avert our eyes, but to take a position, even if that means debate and contention.

Of course, it is true that there is a high degree of selectivity here. Not all conflicts matter on campus to the same degree. The same level of interest and engagement and vociferous argument is not generated by every global conflict.

The Middle East conflict at Columbia is in a class of its own. It has been made that way by decades of work on the part of individuals and organizations friendly to the cause of Israel and individuals and organizations who promote the Palestinian cause. The world is not flat. We make investments and build language “games” which constitute meaning amongst other things through conflict. The Israel-Palestine conflict has more meaning at Columbia than other conflicts that one might cite as also worthy of attention.

This explains why, for instance, the Ukraine war or crises in Central America, feature so little in campus politics. Given the significance of those crisis and given their relevance to the US, one could construct the case for intense engagement with both, but the connections have not been forged in the same way as they have been to Israel-Palestine. To recognize this is not to invite “what aboutism” or tendentious demands that we apply equal standards to all conflicts. If you want to understand why we are not equally engaged with all conflicts, the relevant standard is not some formalistic judicial norm of “equal treatment”, but history and struggle.

Columbia’s engagement with the Middle East is sui generis because of what the champions of the two sides have, with significantly unequal power, invested in that connection.

What the two state solution did was to create the possibility of an uneasy and uncomfortable modus vivendi between those students, faculty and donors, Jewish or otherwise, who were passionately committed to the cause of Israel and a group, Jewish or not, who were deeply critical of Israel and attached instead to the cause of Palestine. Crucially, it allowed the rest of campus, like the wider polity, to bracket the conflict as one to which there was a reasonable solution, which the US and other parties had helped to broker.

In fact, of course, this was always a convenient fiction, more convenient for some than for others. There were factions who were profoundly dissatisfied on both sides. And they had their reasons. On the ground, the second intifada was followed by the Hamas seizure of power in Gaza and the blockade, as Israel enacted daily, regularly deadly brutalities, mass detentions and buoyed aggressive settler expansion. To characterize the situation of the 2010s, Tareq Baconi coined the term “violent equilibrium”, which is apt so long as one ignores the hugely unequal death toll and the vast imbalance of force.

By the time of the first Trump administration in 2017, not much was left of the
”economic peace” as far as Palestine was concerned. Gaza was being held in a state of siege with a declining economy, at least according to official figures. The West Bank economy was growing modestly, but as a dependent annex of Israel. The Abraham accords which on their face expanded the vision of an “economic peace”, did so only between the newly rich Israel and the immensely wealthy Gulf state. It deliberately sidelined the misery of the Palestinians. It was framed regionally by the chaos in Palestine, the implosion of Syria and Egypt’s ongoing financial difficulties. There was not comprehensive prosperity in the Middle East, but an axis of wealth that ran, at least in the imagination of the Abraham Accord strategists, from Israel to the Gulf.

Israel’s security position was stronger than ever in relative terms. Iran was the only challenger that remained and it was under massive US sanctions. For Palestinians and those who identify with their cause, the situation was increasingly unbearable. But what remains unspoken in all the hammering insistence on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, is that the choices facing those who defend that vision are increasingly unpalatable too.

Israel’s power and wealth could not hide a deeper ontological insecurity. What was the future of democracy in Israel given the divisions within the Jewish population in Israel and the rapidly growing and disenfranchised Palestinian population? The allergic reaction to phrases such as “apartheid” and “genocide”, is not as aggressive as it is simply because those labels are contentious or hurtful. The problem is rather that in shorthand form they capture real dilemmas facing the project of a Jewish state of Israel. The repression of the use of these terms cannot hide the fact that in the absence of a two state solution, the measures required to defend the vision of a Jewish state, certainly as envisioned by the likes of Netanyahu, are so drastic as to provoke revulsion around the world. Forbidding the words may help your cause, but it is unlikely to win the argument in the long-run. Columbia is unusually politicized. But the opinion polling evidence shows a far more general shift in attitudes amongst young Americans away from US support for Israel.

All of these questions did not begin on October 7. They were mounting year by year since the late 2000s. Legal action began in 2019. But when Hamas decided on October 7 to disrupt the status quo with its spectacularly violent assault and the Israeli state reacted with extraordinary force, the last illusion of the two state solution evaporated.

What happened on our campus was a distant and faint echo of that violent explosion. The two-state fiction and the modus vivendi that it helped to maintain evaporated. It was more than the University administration and many others could cope with.

When the sharpness of the conflict became clear, outside forces were quickly brought to bear. This emphatically did not start with Trump. The Biden administration were unsympathetic to say the least. Congress was hostile. Counterfactually, it is more than likely that Columbia would have faced serious Title VI action whether Trump was elected or not and it is clear that the University leadership was happy to comply. Mahmoud Khalil’s case has rightly attracted global attention. But there is a long history of US action specifically against Palestinian students and scholars

In the Middle East there is no prospect of a just settlement. Violence by the IDF and settlers continues as does resistance from the Palestinian side. There are many ways we might deal with this in a far away place like New York and Columbia campus. Under the prevailing dispensation, however, as events since 2023 have shown, calm will likely be preserved by one-sided policing and censoring of dissent.

The least that can be said for the letter from the Trump administration is that it is frank. It does not hide its intentions or its methods. It is a point by point to-do-list in the uprooting and silencing of oppositional voices. As such it is an unusually overt exercise of coercive and disciplinary power. The University leadership’s main response is to insist that it is shares the Trump administration’s concerns and is urgently trying to address them.

This is a legal tactic. In legal argument around Title VI claims, once it is conceded that anti semitism is a real problem, the University’s main line of defense will be to argue that it did not callously disregard the issue. But the eagerness with which the administration has responded to the Trump prescriptions also reflects a real politics. It reflects the political coalitions both within the University and around it.

#2

MAGA adds a particularly disinhibited quality and tonality to the assault on American Universities. Its bullying tone is new. The aggression and the willingness to deploy different modes of leverage. It would be silly, certainly as far as society at large is concerned to speak of two-sided polarization in the US. The main dynamic of escalation is clearly on the right.

But if we are to do justice to the micro climate of American campuses we must add another element. The intellectual and cultural Left really did establish a position in many Universities and Colleges and in communities closely associated with those campuses.

It is important to say this because it helps to explain the violent reactions in national political culture and the real unease on campus on the part of the small number of actual conservatives and the much larger group of liberal centrists.

In this sense the unhinging of Universities like Columbia from political mainstream in the US did not start with Trump and is not reducible to the story of Trump. Campus political culture has its own dynamic and it has an actual left-wing. Administrators were willing to allow faculty to promote a political view of scholarship. It attracted students and gave identity to the institution. Furthermore they were not, in any case, intellectually equipped to answer the challenge. But under pressure, it is no surprise to find that those administrations and their legal advisors and trustees are in no way in solidarity with protestors, or with radical faculty or students.

How best to characterize the campus left I am still undecided about. A first stab might sociological and to say that it pursues an arcane and niche strategy of cultural power within the professional managerial class. An explanation in terms of the logic of highly exclusive symbolic capital might also be a way to theorize the location of critical academia.

In any case, the gulf between the sciences, medicine, engineering and the humanities and social sciences yawns wide. Only a small minority of academics are interested or imaginative enough to see structural similarities between the games being played, or to recognize moments of convergent interest. Otherwise, the University is tied together by budgets and buildings, far more than by any common purpose. University administrators preside uneasily over the show, deferring, in the vast majority of cases, to each field and subfields codes, crossing their fingers and hoping to go on accumulating resources, increasing the University’s reach and network, whilst avoiding scandal as far as possible.

The result is a balkanized entity in which different units and groups pursue cross-cutting projects, be it a project like increasing diversity (DEI) or driving an issue of current interest e.g. climate.

Though there are some truly radical voices, though there is a prevailing attitude of skepticism towards authority and though there are very few registered Republicans in most parts of the campus, to view the University as a monolithic power structure, is a figment of right-wing imagination. The extraordinary way in which institutions and legal codes originally created to promote civil rights and foster the DEI project are now at the core of the Trump era crackdown, is symptomatic of the possibilities of ironic and perverse inversion that are rife in modern Universities.

Far from being hegemonic in any comprehensive sense, the campus left was always closer to the mark when it insisted that its position was marginal and embattled. In its more realistic moments it has claimed to have numerous powerful enemies. A huge amount of time has been devoted by the left to demonstrating that liberals are not to be trusted. All three points are correct.

But that also means that no one on the left should be surprised by recent events, by the caving of large law firms, Senator Schumer throwing Columbia to the wolves, the coverage by the NYT, or the silence of all but a small minority of Democrats in the face of the MAGA onslaught.

In 2024, when then President Shafik approved the NYPD clearance of the first Gaza encampment at Columbia, as the NYT reported:

… Dr. Shafik did not head back to New York to be on hand when the police arrived, … . She decided to keep a longstanding plan to attend a private dinner in Washington for the Bezos Earth Fund, according to a university spokeswoman. Dr. Shafik ended up fielding so many calls that she never had time to eat, she said.

Having to duck out of an audience with one of the richest men in the world would have been awkward.

#3

Side stepping Gaza and the actual hostilities and oppositions around the left-wing politics of campus, the solid pillar of the centrist defense of universities, other than constitutionalism, centers on science.

Raising the banner of science against the ignorant vandals in the Trump administration is good politics. It particularly appeals to liberal and centrist audiences. But it does not relieve of us of the need to explain why science could be taken hostage in the way it has been.

What we have to reckon with is the unsettlement of the institutional, political and cultural location of US big science. This has reached a new pitch under Trump and his crew. But it does not begin or end with them.

Reading Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance - a centrist-progressive text if there ever was one - I was surprised to find a chapter-length critique devoted to the NIH (National Institute of Health), the medical research funding body that has been targeted by the Trump administration and is being used as leverage against Columbia.

According to Klein and Thompson the prevalent view amongst policy wonks is that the medical research funding system is broken, bureaucratic, conservative and counterproductive. It needs nothing less than radical culture change. If we take their book as a manifesto for a Harris administration that never was, and imagine that the administration had followed through on their advice, one could well imagine a NIH controversy even under Democratic auspices. (Though, as one colleague remarked to me it would have been “zoning changes rather than Blitzkrieg).

Science is not outside the current crisis in the United States, but fully embroiled in it. Whereas conservative Americans once had a higher level of confidence in the scientific community than Democrats, attitudes are now sharply polarized in the opposite direction.

Source: FT

This is alarming. But it should come as no surprise. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck predicted as much back in his classic Risk Society, published back in 1986. As science becomes more and more influential at every level in the modern world, it cannot escape entanglement with society and politics. It loses its innocence. A further corollary is that those who “innocently” invoke science as an ultimate instance of authority, are themselves either wittingly or unwittingly engaged in a power game. This is not to say that science is bunk. That would be ridiculous and dangerous. It is to remind us to be cautious in the way that we use it and invoke it.

In 2025 we are, after all, commemorating the fifth anniversary of the COVID disaster. Have we forgotten, how on issues like face-masking and social distancing, the exponents of the simple mantra that policy should “follow the science” tied themselves in embarrassing knots?

Klein and Thompson marvel at the fact that no one in US politics today claims the triumph of the vaccines. But is it really surprising? The vaccines were a triumph of Trumpian industrial policy that did not fit the Bidenomics narrative. And though Trump himself might want to claim them, a large part of his constituency, failed by public education and America’s broken media system, preferred to take their risks with COVID rather than take the shots. Medical research has been caught up in the general skepticism towards white-collar expertise and hostility towards the Professional Managerial Class. The result is clear to see in the mortality statistics.

Meanwhile, on the techno-libertarian wing of MAGA, arguably the most charismatic side of Trump 2.0, Elon Musk embodies a vision of innovation that consists in shaking up and disrupting the status quo of the science-industrial complex. With his private SpaceX vehicle lauding it over NASA, there is no safe hiding place in the NIH.

In the face of all this, to invoke science as a solid pillar against MAGA attack is once again to clutch at a liberal straw without recognizing what makes it so weak.

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So here are the three elements of a framing of the crisis:

#1 the unravelling of globalization and in particular the hope of the two state solution that explodes a critical fault line on our campus and throws the weight of power massively on to the side of the Israeli government’s efforts to uphold the project of the Jewish state by violent means;

#2 the MAGA assault exposes the compromise that liberal administrators thought they could create on campus, creating enclaves of left-wing thought and incipient mobilization, which are now being sacrificed pell mell to the new conservative mood;

#3 the multi-faceted crisis of “big science” as a source of consensual authority in the US.

It is hard not to see the convergence of all three as an epochal phenomenon. The relation between all three has long been tense. In all three domains one could see a compromise “fix” being put in place in the 1990s. Indeed, it could from the point of view of a globalized university seem like an apotheosis – a turn to globalization as synchronous with the cosmopolitan, liberal values of the university.

Now, all three have broken open at the same time.

Viewed in these terms, the Columbia crisis is no surprise. It was waiting to happen. Which prompts the question, is there anything else waiting to unravel? Is there another dimension of the 1990s globalization model coming undone. And as soon as you frame the question this way, the answer is obvious: Chinese-US relations.

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If we start with geopolitics, then alongside Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East, the third big arena in which the globalization bargain has come undone, is China.

The impact is being felt by large organizations, businesses, foundations and Universities around the world. If American manufacturing experienced the China shock in the early 2000s, the same was true for US education, but in reverse. Colleges across the United States are huge exporters of educational services and newly affluent Chinese upper middle class and upper class, are our most avid customers.

Source: WSJ

In 2024 Chinese students made up a quarter of all foreign students enrolled in US institutions. At Columbia their importance is far larger. In 2024 Columbia enrolled almost 6500 graduate and undergraduate students identified as Chinese for immigration purposes. By the same standard roughly 600 researchers and scholars were counted as Chinese. As far as students are concerned that is roughly half the students with non-American passports who make up c. 40 percent of the student body. So that is a Chinese share of roughly 20 percent. As far as American students are concerned, 13 percent identify as “Asian”, a category which is very diverse, but in which Chinese Americans make up the largest share.

In terms of fee income it would be surprising if Chinese students did not account for half a billion dollars or more, comparable to the grant cut imposed in the first round of Trump sanctions.

Columbia is, in short, deeply invested in the Chimerica vision of globalization.

This clearly has a political dimension. Under President Bollinger, a Confucius Institute opened on campus in 2013. It remained quite obscure and seems to have shut up shop during the pandemic. In 2019 President Bollinger brushed off a request from the FBI to permit monitoring of Chinese students on campus. But apart from these minor skirmishes, it is remarkable how little awareness there is of this giant East Asian lurch in Columbia’s global location. Whether it recognizes it or not, Columbia has become a major Chinese university. On the last count, it is the leading private University in the United States in terms of Chinese recruitment.

Though most Westerners are oblivious to this, amongst China’s educated middle class, Columbia University even has a Mandarin nickname 哥大 gēdà, short for 哥伦比亚大学 gēlúnbǐyà dàxué. Rather flatteringly, it rhymes with the familiar short form of PKU, beida.

The obvious question, is can this be sustained? Or is this another deglobalization shock waiting to happen?

Even as Columbia continues to maintain deep connections to China, support for hostile measures towards China has huge bipartisan support in Washington. It is, in this sense, the mirror image of support for Israel. If there are two foreign policy agendas that tie US politics together, it is the mantra “for Israel, against China”.

And, as in the case of the Middle East, this has direct implications for higher education. A MAGA motion is currently before the House that proposes to end all students visas for Chinese wanting to study in the United States. It is unlikely to make progress in Congress. But as Yangyang Cheng, research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, noted the bill “should be seen as part of a broader effort to restrict academic freedom and hurt higher education in this country, to control what can be taught, which research projects can be pursued, and who have access to the classrooms and laboratories.” It has manifest echoes of the brutal legacy of Chinese Exclusion and yet I have come across no mention of it in recent campus conversations or protests.

Would such steps be a form of discrimination? Clearly, yes. Would they also be damaging to the motor of science and research at a University like Columbia? Yes. They would be devastating. Almost half the Chinese-national students at Columbia are in the engineering school. If the current attack uses science funding against the University, anti-Chinese measures would hit the huge talent pipeline of students that propels so much of engineering and sciences in the US.

Again you might be incredulous. Could this really happen? We already know the answer. The guidelines given by the Trump administration for the termination of NIH grants already create an alignment between research involving collaboration with Chinese Universities and the DEI/”woke” target list.

Source: Nature

What we do not yet know, is the extent or the precise direction that anti-Chinese measures will take. Clearly, they would be fundamentally different from those of the Middle East. The crisis of globalization we are going through is not uniform. It may be interconnected and combined but it is uneven.

What we can say for sure is that this would be a break that we are not ready for. Not the campus, not the students, not the University, or the wider political field.

(A special note of thanks to QW, DC and NL)

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