Donald Trump is trying to cow higher education institutions into submission using the power of the purse. The administration has withheld $400m in federal funds from Columbia University and has vowed to remove even more if its demands are not met.
Columbia has an endowment of $14.8bn and an annual operating budget of $6.6bn. The cuts amount to roughly 6% of its annual budget – a non-trivial share. In order to keep it, Columbia was instructed to adopt a number of illiberal measures: it must put its Middle East, South Asia and Africa Studies department into academic receivership; change its admissions policies to reduce admits of people from those regions and admit more Jewish students; and grant campus police more power to surveil, detain and remove people from campus without following the usual due process. It must accept permanently heightened restrictions on campus protest and speech and comply with unlawful federal orders to arrest and expel green card holders who have committed no crime, such as Mahmoud Khalil.
