Last week Columbia University continued to grovel in response to the Trump administration’s demands, which included banning face masks on campus, punishing student protestors with expulsion or multi-year suspensions, degrading remnants of faculty and student governance, imposing censorship and administrative control over the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies, and increasing police presence on campus.

Columbia not only agreed to every wildly undemocratic demand spelled out in what Professor Katherine Franke has called a $400 million “ransom note;” but also added a few of its own. However, as we may have predicted, this display of compliance and prostration has not restored any of Columbia’s federal funding. Rather it serves only to further embolden the current administration’s full-fledged attack on education, democracy, freedom of speech, and Palestine solidarity.

Franke was forced to leave her established and decorated career as a Columbia Law Professor several months ago over trumped up charges of antisemitism. Make no mistake: Columbia is not merely making the best of a bad situation; rather, it is sacrificing the safety, wellbeing, and constitutional freedoms of its students, staff, and faculty, while abandoning its entire educational and research mandate. Most terrifyingly, Columbia’s fawning is serving to teach the current [neo]fascist regime what further horrors it can get away with implementing on a mass scale.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)