Columbia’s Settlement With Trump Is Pure Cowardice

The $ 221 million agreement from the University of Columbia with the Trump administration establishes an unhappy precedent in the annals of state interference with university establishments, and their besieged inheritances of independent thought. Faced with threatened reductions in federal funding operating at more than a billion dollars – in addition to $ 400 million in announced discounts – on the whim from the school of the school of the school and its alleged indulgence of anti -Semitism in student demonstrations against the Gaza War and in university programs, Claire Claire Shipman.

Shipman – A recent recruit from the Board of Directors of Columbia with the de facto mission to navigate the attack led by Trump against school -, of course, did not present the agreement as something like the shameful act of appeasement. A former national correspondent for ABC Hello AmericaIt is a reliable mouthpiece of contained content, and did not miss its brand this time. “This agreement resolves several surveys on federal agencies and protects the academic mission of Columbia, the research company and independence,” she wrote in an email on a campus level announcing the agreement. “The resolution will allow the University to move forward with clarity and concentration, which dates back our attention to the work of teaching, discovery and public service. This will also allow us to focus on the repair and reconstruction of our community. ”

There are all the reasons to believe, on the basis of the terms of the agreement, that the only thing that proceeds with concentration and clarity is Maga’s takeover of higher education. The agreement creates a mechanism for the current federal examination of Columbia’s admission files, which is set in motion whenever the new federal supervisors of the school take the smell of everything that resembles a positive action.

By establishing a third-party surveillance system for anti-Semitism on the campus, the agreement officially formalizes the precipitated capitulation of Shipman towards the Inquisition of Goon-Squad of the Trump administration erected under the pretext of fighting the spread of anti-Semitism in American universities. She had already asked Columbia to adopt the controversial definition of anti-Semitism of the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust Holocaust alliance, which functioning it functionally to criticism, and caused the anti-diploma league, which largely follows the same memory, to direct training sessions on anti-Semitism. And in a revealing concession and without principle on the eve of the agreement, Columbia also expelled and suspended more than 70 students demonstrators of the Gaza War. At a time when the head of the protest, Mahmoud Khalil, was dismissed from the brutal and unjustified effort from the Trump administration to expel it – and announced his own trial from his detention and his rendering – the ritual banishment of Nhituman from other anti -war activists, he will continue to launch together on flowering.

Whatever you can call this sinister litany of the appeasement of the state, it is anything but “the work of teaching, discovery and public service”. While Shipman purified her discussion points, the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon gave the whole game in an interview with Fox News on the Columbia agreement: “It is a monumental victory for the conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had teachers so far from the left.”

Other college presidents could claim an unnecessarily plausible before threats of White House extortion. This is not an option for Shipman, which has covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and anti-government demonstrations on Tiananmen square. AS Columbia Law Professor David Pozen Argues, The Agrement Deputizes A New Class of Super Administrators on Campus, Marshaled from a Cluster of Federal Agencies, to Oversee An Ominous New Institutional Innovation-“The First Time that antisemism and dei have been invoked as the basis Restructuring of a Private University, “As well as an unprecedented Pay-to-Play arrangement Mandating” A University to Fork Over Money in government as a condition of receiving government money.

And let’s not forget that the agreement amounts to the very first cut of funds appropriate by the congress by the congress to a university, in order to punish this university and to prevent it from adopting radical reforms, without any pretension to follow the procedures mandated by the Congress. Lawyers have debated the exact circumstances in which the executive power can freeze special subsidies and contracts to special schools. However, as far as I know, no lawyer outside the government even tried to defend the legality of the initial cut which put Columbia on his knees and, thereafter, at the “negotiated” table.

In short, the agreement gives a legal form to an extortion regime – the first of its kind! – which defies the relevant laws as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the first amendment.

Trump’s extortion shakedown also targets many other campuses, as well as law firms in the private sector, sanctuary cities and any other institution or company that the administration may have appointed an enemy of the day. Harvard continues the administration for his attempt to freeze $ 2.6 billion in federal subsidies, and Brown was notified that he could lose $ 510 million in federal funding. Other campuses also carry threats from the White House, notably Princeton, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the education and the workforce of the GOP of the Chamber continues to hold glorified spectacle trials, seeking to catch presidents and university administrators in the kind of exchanges of Gotcha McCarthyite who aroused the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and Penn.

All this is now the heritage of Claire Shipman. As president of the university, she is a hell of a day television personality.