Hundreds of Jewish professors, scholars and students have signed a letter condemning the Trump administration for canceling $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University and threatening other universities.
Columbia is reportedly nearing an agreement with the Trump administration, which pushed an aggressive slate of demands on the university that critics said were a grave threat to academic freedom.
The administration has justified the demands, and the funding cuts, by alleging Columbia has “failed to protect American students and faculty” from antisemitic harassment, in addition to other unspecified legal violations.
But the signatories to the “Open letter in response to federal funding cuts at Columbia” argued otherwise — that the cuts did nothing to protect Jews, and in fact, could be used to target them.
“History teaches us that the loss of individual rights and freedoms for any group often begins with silencing scientists and scholars, people who devote their lives to the pursuit of knowledge — a pursuit that is core to Jewish culture,” stated the letter, which has so far been signed by over 350 people. “Moreover, destroying universities in the name of Jews risks making Jews in particular less safe by setting them up to be scapegoats.”
Among other things, the Trump administration has demanded that Columbia place its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years,” institute a ban on wearing masks on campus if they’re used to “conceal identity or intimidate others,” and adopt a definition of antisemitism that the administration stated would include “anti-‘zionist’ discrimination against Jews in areas unrelated to Israel or [the] Middle East.” The administration has also demanded Columbia institute new “time, place and manner rules,” which govern protests, and that it “empower internal law enforcement” to arrest “agitators.”
University leadership has already expelled or suspended several students who participated in briefly taking over a campus building last year. Among those expelled was Grant Minter, the Jewish president of the union representing thousands of graduate and undergraduate student workers.
Columbia did not respond to HuffPost’s questions about a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday that the university was “getting close to yielding to President Trump’s demands.”
Millie Wert, a Columbia spokesperson, pointed HuffPost to a statement from interim university President Katrina Armstrong, who said, among other things, “we will never compromise our values of pedagogical independence, our commitment to academic freedom, or our obligation to follow the law.” Armstrong also pledged to continue “to engage in constructive dialogue with our federal regulators.”
The open letter’s signatories say they have differing views on Israel, the Trump administration and American politics. “What unites us,” they wrote, “is that we refuse to let our Jewish identities be used as a pretext for destroying institutions that have long made America great.”
“Together, we say: Not on our behalf,” the letter said. “Harming U.S. Universities does not protect Jewish people. Cutting funding for research does not protect Jewish people. Punishing researchers and scholars does not protect Jewish people.” The letter concludes by urging the Trump administration not to “dismantle” the decades-old partnership between academia and the federal government — “especially not on the pretense of protecting Jewish people.”
Amitai Shenhav, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several co-authors of the letter.
“The goal of protecting the Jewish people should not be used as a reason for preemptively taking away funding that’s been promised to these universities for education and research,” he told HuffPost over the phone Wednesday.
“The potential downstream effects are looking increasingly grim,” he said, noting “entire labs” have had to scale back their work and could shut down.
“I think you’re going to see more people choosing not to pursue this career, and the knock-on effects of this will be catastrophic for the community of scholars, researchers and clinicians. It’s just tragic,” he said.
The Trump administration has also arrested, and is trying to deport, Palestinian student organizer Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident who is married to a U.S. citizen. The administration does not allege that Khalil committed any crime; rather, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Khalil’s pro-Palestinian activism is a potential threat to America’s foreign policy interests — an argument based on a rarely used, decades-old provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Khalil, who is currently in immigration detention in Louisiana and expecting his first child to be born any day, referred to himself as a “political prisoner” in a letter Tuesday, writing of the immigration detention facility: “Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here.”
Tensions have grown even higher since Israel broke a ceasefire agreement Tuesday, killing hundreds of Palestinians in a barrage of airstrikes, according to Palestinian authorities, and re-invading Gaza.
Columbia is far from the only university to face threats from the current administration. The Department of Education recently wrote to 60 universities, warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they do not fulfill legal obligations to “protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” The Trump administration has also paused $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania — punishment for allowing a transgender swimmer to compete on the women’s team.
Many see the administration’s real goal as degrading academic freedom and the university system and cracking down on Trump’s political enemies.
During a 2021 speech at a conservative gathering, Vice President JD Vance — then a private citizen — urged the crowd, “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to, honestly and aggressively, attack the universities in this country.”
Now, with Columbia in the government’s crosshairs and dozens of other universities potentially next in line, some in academia are calling for a fight.
In The Atlantic Wednesday, Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber warned, “Nobody should suppose that this will stop at Columbia or with the specific academic programs targeted by the government’s letter.”
“Precisely because great research universities are centers of independent, creative thought, they generate arguments and ideas that challenge political power across fields as varied as international relations, biology, economics, and history,” he wrote. “If government officials think that stifling such criticism is politically acceptable and legally permissible, some people in authority will inevitably yield to the temptation to do so.”
The Princeton president urged university leaders to “speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”
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