This free speech group at Columbia is taking on Trump when the university won’t – and winning | Columbia University

When he first learned that federal agents had arrested Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his university complex, Jameel Jaffer knew he was in for a fight.

Jaffer is the director of a Columbia-affiliated institute dedicated to defending the First Amendment, and Khalil, a green card holder, was a regular at pro-Palestinian encampments on campus. A few months earlier, Jaffer’s organization hosted a symposium on the free speech rights of noncitizens. The institute had been created to defend the very constitutional principles that the Trump administration was now openly flouting — and that Colombia seemed too afraid to defend.

“We felt this connection to the case, because we’re in Columbia,” Jaffer said. “And we viewed this arrest as a serious violation of First Amendment rights.”

Last week, Jaffer’s team of constitutional scholars and attorneys from the Knight First Amendment Institute, along with the Sher Tremonte law firm, won a historic victory against the Trump administration when a federal judge in Boston ruled that the detention and attempted expulsion of Khalil and other pro-Palestinian students was unconstitutional and intentionally designed to cripple freedom of expression. The Trump administration announced it would appeal, with White House spokeswoman Liz Huston calling the verdict “an outrageous decision that undermines the safety and security of our nation.”

The decision raised the profile of the Knight Institute, catapulting it to the front lines of the battle against Trump over core American values. Yet the victory also highlighted the growing divide between the institute and the university that hosts it.

The case – described by Reagan appointee Judge William G Young as “perhaps the most important ever within this district court’s jurisdiction” – was the first in a series of challenges aimed at bringing Trump’s unprecedented attack on universities to trial. It is also the highest-profile first amendment against an administration that has launched a scorched-earth attack on speech that does not adhere to its ideological agenda.

During the two-week trial in July, citizen and non-citizen scholars testified about the climate of terror and self-censorship introduced by the arrests, while immigration officials revealed details of their reliance on the files of the right-wing, pro-Israel Canary Mission to choose their targets.

Veena Dubal, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, which brought the case with some of its chapters and the Middle East Studies Association, called it “the central civil rights case of the Trump administration this time around.”

“The university and the institute are in different camps”

While the court’s victory was hailed by lawyers and academics across the country, Jaffer heard nothing from Columbia after the ruling — a reflection of the tensions in the positions advocated by the institute and university.

Even before Trump came to power, Columbia symbolized the shrinking space for pro-Palestinian discourse on U.S. campuses after calling police to evacuate its student encampment, suspending dozens of students for their activism, and significantly restricting on-campus protests. Following Khalil’s arrest and Trump’s threats over university funding, the university adopted even harsher measures and decided to take over an academic department under the control of professors.

This summer, the university reached a deal with the Trump administration to pay millions to settle allegations of anti-Semitism and submit to significant restrictions on its independence, a move widely condemned as a “capitulation” to the president’s intimidation tactics. A Columbia spokesperson declined to comment on the Knight Institute, but the university has repeatedly rejected the claim that it has “capitulated” to Trump.

Columbia’s submissive approach was in direct contradiction to the defiant approach of the Knight Institute.

“This is a moment where the university and the institute are on different views on some of these critical issues,” Joel Simon, former Knight Institute fellow and founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at Cuny’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Simon denounced how “independent institutions that have the firepower to truly challenge Trump are being left behind,” also referring to media organizations and large law firms that have struck deals with the administration. But he praised university leaders for allowing Knight to operate according to its mission, even at a time when the university was not doing so. “Tolerance” towards the autonomy of the institute is in the interest of Colombia which seeks to rebuild its image, he added.

Aryeh Neier, former director of the American Civil Liberties Union, agrees. “In a way, the fact that an institute associated with this institution takes such a strong and direct stance on freedom of expression issues has saved Colombia’s reputation,” he said.

The Knight Institute launched in 2016 and is housed on the Columbia campus. It received significant funding from the university under an agreement that each contributes $5 million in operating funds and $25 million in endowment funds for its launch. Closely associated with Columbia’s law and journalism schools, the institute is largely the brainchild of former President Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar.

“My hope for the institute in the long term is that when the government is going in the wrong direction and basic rights are at stake and no one else is willing to come forward and say enough is enough, it will be the Knight Institute that has come forward,” Bollinger said in a video presentation of the institute.

Jaffer envisioned Knight as an academic and legal center dedicated to resolving future First Amendment issues — from social media to AI — and the institute litigated landmark cases involving surveillance technology and public officials’ use of social media.

He did not think he would contribute to the defense of fundamental values ​​long considered untouchable.

“It turns out that even the seemingly most well-established principles of the First Amendment are now up for grabs,” he said.

“Columbia should not have accepted this”

Shortly after October 7, 2023, Columbia and the Knight Institute found themselves on opposing sides, with Knight regularly criticizing the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian protests, both privately and in increasingly callous public statements.

In a November 2023 letter to then-President Minouche Shafik, Jaffer condemned the decision to suspend two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which the university said had violated policies related to hosting events on campus.

The criticism, Jaffer emphasized, was made “with deep respect for Colombia’s long history as an incubator and protector of free thought and freedom of expression, and with a particular sense of the Knight Institute’s responsibility to this tradition.”

In April 2024, Jaffer again condemned the university’s decision to call the NYPD to campus to clear a peaceful, pro-Palestinian encampment – ​​leading to the arrest of more than 100 students. “The decisions and policies of the university have become disconnected from the values ​​that are central to the life and mission of the university – including free speech, academic freedom and equality,” he wrote this time.

During closing arguments in the trial, Knight Institute lead attorney Ramya Krishnan accused the government of “engaging in a campaign of threats aimed at intimidating and silencing non-citizens.” His remarks – and the case itself – stood in stark contrast to Columbia’s tepid response to the arrests of Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, another Palestinian Columbia student detained by the administration because of his advocacy activities.

Khalil, in particular, had pleaded with university administrators for protection, and in an op-ed written since his detention, he wrote that “the logic used by the federal government to target me and my peers is a direct extension of Colombia’s repression playbook regarding Palestine.”

Columbia settled its dispute with the Trump administration just days after the case went to court.

Shortly after the deal was announced, the Knight Institute issued a scathing rebuke, concluding that the settlement sanctions “a stunning transfer of autonomy and authority to the government.”

“Columbia leadership should not have agreed to this,” the statement said.

Knight is not alone: ​​Organizations such as the ACLU, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), and other civil liberties groups have challenged the Trump administration on free speech issues, as have unions and Harvard University. Nor does it focus exclusively on campus issues: In other challenges to the Trump administration, the institute has filed lawsuits on behalf of farmers and environmental advocates challenging the Department of Agriculture’s purge of climate-related data sets, and challenged the suppression of the special prosecutor’s report on Trump’s cover-up of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

But his defense of student discourse in a university, now synonymous with compromise, places him in a particularly difficult position.

Jaffer expressed sympathy for the lack of “good options” for Colombia’s leaders, although he described their decision to settle as a “grave mistake.” But he stressed that even though the institute is on opposite sides of its host when it comes to dealing with the president, the university has allowed it to operate without pressure.

“Especially right now, I don’t take that freedom for granted,” he said, declining to discuss details of private conversations he had with university leaders.

“If Columbia tried to restrict our work, I wouldn’t be at Columbia anymore.”