How Trump’s Anti-Semitism Crackdown Has Already Changed Education by Seth Mandel
The Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student active in the anti-Zionist tentifada movement, is getting most of the attention regarding the president’s fight against campus anti-Semitism. That’s understandable—put a human face on something and it becomes a lone streetlight around which every media moth will flutter.
But that attention should not crowd out coverage of the fact that university administrative culture is already changing in significant ways thanks to the White House’s focus on combating campus anti-Semitism. Khalil’s case will develop more this week as court hearings begin, so at the moment nobody really knows where it’ll lead. Such uncertainty no longer applies to the colleges themselves.
Last week, the administration cancelled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia and announced it was undertaking a review of billions more in grants. Finally, we had the answer to a lingering question: Would there be any tangible consequences for the schools that allowed their campuses to descend into prolonged bouts of anti-Semitic hysteria?
Universities clearly took President Biden’s passivity as a reason to bet against being held to account for their flagrant violations of Jewish students’ civil rights. If they were right, that meant that the only students they had to placate were the anti-Zionists: There was no reason to protect Jewish rights or Jewish safety on campus because the Jews would never cause anywhere near the same amount of trouble for them. In contrast, there were a thousand scrawny segregationists in keffiyehs with nothing to do but wait for orders from their Hamasnik organizers.
But now the playing field has changed entirely. A source at Columbia told the journalist Steve McGuire that the Trump Education Department’s threats weren’t empty: “Grant cancellation notices flowing in now. Labs shutting down. Layoffs imminent. Faculty apoplectic at Katrina Armstrong for letting it get to this point. She has to fix this fast.”
Armstrong is the university’s president. She took over after Minouche Shafik, who presided over one of the most disastrous years in Columbia’s history, quit just weeks before the academic year began.
Shafik’s experience is instructive. She had been president of the London School of Economics, deputy governor of the Bank of England, vice president of the World Bank, and managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Yet in her first and only year at Columbia, the pro-Hamas encampments posed a challenge she simply couldn’t meet. One such encampment was set up while Shafik had left campus to testify before Congress, a pointed humiliation that underscored the anarchic anti-Zionist mania that had made a mockery of Shafik’s—and the university’s—sense of authority.
Shafik never took anything resembling serious action against the students, and she left a Morningside Heights-sized mess for Armstrong to clean up. Trump’s victory in the presidential election changed the debate, but Jew-baiters still gathered in numbers and assaulted people, broke various property laws, and generally continued trampling on the idea that anyone in the Columbia or Barnard administrations was in charge. Armstrong, sensing that the federal government’s patience had run out, began doling out actual punishments for some of the more psychotic behavior of the Hamasniks, which at one point required the school to post security at Israel-related classes.
The punishments inspired more Hamasnik temper tantrums. Armstrong’s threats of disciplinary action were ignored. It was as if the Romanovs were standing at the windows of their Yekaterinburg prison house shouting orders at passersby.
And so the idea that faculty are “apoplectic” at Armstrong for “letting it get to this point,” is rich with irony. The only way to have prevented this loss of funding was to have instituted order on campus and shut down the junior PFLP camps. But when college administrators at Columbia and elsewhere called in law enforcement to do just that, faculty rebelled and essentially joined the opposition.
And this is an important point: The faculty at Columbia put the university in a situation in which there was no way for it to retain its funding unless the federal government decided to look the other way. The faculty are a not-insignificant reason Columbia is in this position in the first place. They arguably made it inevitable.
And not just at Columbia, either. Yesterday the Trump administration notified 60 other schools that they risked the same fate. The New York Times reports that it is quite a diverse group: “The list of five dozen schools included colleges from both Republican- and Democratic-voting states, elite Ivy League schools such as Brown and Yale, state schools including Arizona State University and the University of Tennessee, and smaller institutions, like Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., which has about 2,000 students.”
The secretary of education is Linda McMahon, and she has moved fast. As the Times notes, four days after her confirmation hearing she had the department announce its prioritization of campus anti-Semitism. McMahon, like the rest of the Trump team, hit the ground running.
Indeed, the speed with which the new administration has taken action on numerous fronts has frequently caught the White House’s targets and the Democratic opposition completely off-guard.
And the higher-education landscape was already changing by the time Trump took office. As of today, 148 schools representing 2.6 million students have adopted policies of “institutional neutrality,” according to the Heterodox Academy. Rather than putting out institutional statements on every passing piece of news, schools officials have balked at such activism ever since the American intifada began. Officials were caught between not wanting to align their schools with Hamas and their fear of student anger at any acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist.
Fear, cowardice, whatever you want to call it, the universities have succumbed to it rather than stand up for their Jewish students. All those 148 schools adopted neutrality before Trump brought the hammer down on Columbia. Institutional neutrality, therefore, is only going to grow.
Meanwhile, Trump’s executive orders limiting DEI—so-called diversity, equity and inclusion programs that have ended up turning U.S. institutions into playgrounds of racial and ethnic power struggles and a major catalyst of anti-Semitism on campus—have already seen some schools close certain administrative offices. The University of Virginia dissolved its DEI office just days ago.
Focusing on the institutions has, and will continue to have, profound effects on university responses to anti-Semitism. That doesn’t mean the White House is wrong to punish students where appropriate, especially if the universities won’t do so. But so far, Trump’s White House is well on its way to getting schools to discipline their own—or lose the gravy train of taxpayer money. Either eventuality would mark a significant departure from the prevailing, and unacceptable, status quo.
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