Columbia faculty sidestep Palestine as they protest against Trump's assault on academic freedom

It was a cold and wet day in New York City. The slow and persistent rain soaked to the bone.

At the entrance of Columbia University on 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, around 50-60 faculty members stood calmly in a coop of steel barricades on the sidewalk.

Monday afternoon's faculty-led picket was arranged to protest against the university's decision last week to implement US President Donald Trump's demands to overhaul and tighten rules for protests and disciplinary processes, as well as to assume control over an academic department as penance for failing to address what the administration has described as "antisemitism" on the institution's campus. 

Earlier this week, the Trump administration said Columbia's response to its demands was a “positive first step" in securing back the federal funding it had cancelled earlier this month.

In a separate development on Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and Faculty Members' Union in Manhattan, filed a suit against Trump for what they described as "an unlawful and unprecedented effort to overpower a university’s academic autonomy and control the thought, association, scholarship, and expression of its faculty and students".

"Acquiescing to the demands of the Trump administration is unacceptable, intolerable. It's an infringement of academic freedom," Michael Thaddeus, a professor of mathematics and one of the main organisers of the picket, told Middle East Eye.

"It strikes at the heart of our fundamental values, and we, as faculty, are going to stand up," Thaddeus added.

But observers noted that even as faculty had come out to protest against the administration's buckling to Trump, they appeared to have sidestepped the issue of Palestine - the raison d'etre for the current crisis at the university - to one primarily focused on defending "academic freedom" instead.

Amid the volley of placards outside Columbia on Monday afternoon, none mentioned Palestine, the ongoing "genocide" in Gaza, or the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student activist sitting in a holding facility two thousand kilometres away, facing deportation. 

Student organisers say the protest didn't merely miss the mark, it showed that faculty were still refusing to acknowledge how the university had reached this impasse in the first place.

Sidestepping Palestine

Columbia University has faced immense scrutiny since the pro-Palestine student encampments began last spring at the campus that helped catalyse a nationwide student movement over university investments in companies invested in Israel's military industrial complex. 

The protests at Columbia were vilified by the Biden administration and labelled "antisemitic", a narrative the Trump administration has continued and amplified further through deporting non-citizen students who took part in protests.

The university was condemned for failing to protect Jewish students, despite there being little to no proof the encampments, made up of many Jewish students themselves, had posed a threat to Jewish life on campus.

Testimony from several Jewish students who participated in the encampment at Columbia and others around the country attested to the inclusive nature of the protests as a key tenet of the student movement.

It was instead pro-Palestinian students who were targeted, maligned and doxxed, often with support from university administrators and law enforcement.

Students say the mischaracterisation of the student movement and the administrators' willingness to accept it and invite police onto campus paved the way for the Trump administration's detention of students and curtailing of academic freedom at the university.

At the protest on Monday, faculty carried signs that read "Defend research"; "Defend questioning"; "Defend expertise"; "Columbia fight back"; and "Hands off our teaching".

Student organisers within Columbia University Apartheid Divest (Cuad), a coalition of groups that organised the student protests for Palestine at the university, told MEE that "though they recognise the strategic appeal of centring 'democracy' in these trying times, it is our position that Palestine cannot be removed from these conversations.

"To do so fails those being attacked, abducted, and martyred by Zionist settlers and occupying military forces," a spokesperson for the Cuad Collective Defense Working Group told MEE.

"The Trump administration is not targeting nebulous 'academic freedoms' when they withhold $400 million in funding from our school, making sweeping demands about matters of private contracts at a private university - they are specifically responding to the university's inability to silence the calls of people of conscience for an end to genocide," the group added.

Likewise, a PhD candidate who joined the picket, owing to her teaching position at the university, said the messaging showed that the question of Palestine was still not a red line for faculty.

"As a graduate student, I personally have been disappointed in the lack of sharp political messaging from faculty," the student, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisals, told MEE.

The student added that even in protest, faculty seemed to be accepting the limits and exceptions of academic freedom at the university.

"It's upsetting to me that it's the more vulnerable people on this campus, the graduate students, the graduate workers, the undergraduate students, who are taking bigger risks with their messaging," the graduate student said.

One student organiser at Columbia, currently expelled for her activism over the past year, described the focus on academic freedom as "a cowardly manoeuvre to avoid taking a principled stance".

"If your idea of solidarity is to wave some signs, make broad calls for academic freedom, and then return to your classroom while we get dragged to jail, into court rooms, into disciplinary hearings, and into ICE deportation facilities, then you are just as performative as the congresspeople holding up placards on the [House] floor," the student organiser said.

Though the arrest of Khalil was brought up during the press conference, faculty appeared to admit that a decision had been made to focus on "academic freedom" instead of Palestine.

One Jewish faculty member at the picket, told MEE on condition of anonymity, that faculty had focused on academic freedom instead of Palestine or the charges of antisemitism to avoid creating a "distraction".

"Many people here are speaking to that (Palestine) and they are doing that in other venues, but right now, we're in the context of Columbia having capitulated to the demands of the administration, which was, I think, very clearly to everyone here, on the pretext of antisemitism," the faculty member said.

Thaddeus, one of the main organisers of the picket, said that the moment would likely see pro-Zionist faculty, aggrieved with the interference of the government into the affairs of the university, now work with others like himself, who were upset with the detention of Khalil for his pro-Palestine activism.

"So I think you're going to see some strange bedfellows, actually, which tends to happen in politics. You'll see some coalitions being built between people who hold very different views about Israel and Gaza."We're all united in rejecting this affront to academic freedom," Thaddeus said.
 

Organisers within Cuad say the strategy would backfire.

"To allow Palestine to fall out of our discourse, even to engage in liberal coalition-building, accomplishes the very aims the strong-arming and jawboning sure to befall other universities seeks: to demonise a people fighting for their own liberation, in any way possible and in all ways necessary," the group said.

A culture of fear

Columbia's faculty has faced criticism from several students as well as observers, who argue that the teachers haven't adequately protected their students nor have they spoken out sufficiently on the myriad challenges faced by the university community.

Faculty, however, have routinely spoken of the power imbalance between teaching staff and the university administration as they watched their outspoken colleagues face punitive actions as pro-Israel politicians and businessmen piled pressure on the university to show it was taking action against agitators.

Several prominent staff members, like Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history, and law professor Katherine Franke, have been the subject of targeted campaigns for months.

Franke said she was forced into early retirement owing to the level of harassment from colleagues, administrators, and pro-Israel students. 

The enabling of attacks on prominent, tenured faculty has allowed fear to percolate through to teaching staff on more precarious work contracts or visas, and now green cards. Even those with citizenship but with partners on green cards are afraid of the reprisals from the state.

"There's been an attempt to divide faculty from each other based on our nationality, on our immigration status, on the terms of our employment," Thaddeus, the mathematics professor, said.

In an interview with MEE last week, Columbia humanities professor Bruce Robbins said that though many staff were "very, very angry with the university," they were unsure how to tackle the issue.

He said that academics "were not great at organising themselves" and inferred that they would have to put aside their personal research or writing projects if they wanted to put an end to Trump's assault on the university. 

On Tuesday, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, slammed the university's capitulation to Trump, arguing that the university "barely merits the name of a university".

In an opinion article in The Guardian, Khalidi reiterated that the gagging of protesting students and now the gagging of faculty was all in the name of silencing Palestine.

"If it were ever really about discrimination, the university would have taken action against the ceaseless harassment of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and faculty, and their allies and supporters, instead of endorsing and enabling it," Khalidi added.

Around 45 minutes after it had begun, the faculty picket on Monday began to fold up.

Another protest began on the other side of the Morningside campus.

At the 116th Street and Broadway entrance, students lined up on the sidewalk waiting to pass through the de facto checkpoint at the entrance and watched as a group of no more than twenty students, their faces tightly wrapped in kefiyyehs, began agitating outside the college's famous gates.

The police, who have become something of an eyesore at Columbia entrances, looked on ominously.

But the students remained.

They beat drums, chanted for a "Free Palestine", and held up placards that continued from where they started last spring.

"Divest from Death", "Stop McCarthyite Witchhunts", and "Release Mahmoud Khalil", said the placards.

Student organisers said faculty had to come to terms with the fact that the attacks may have expanded but the issue remained fundamentally the same.

"The faculty who have adopted meaningful solidarity with their students have made sacrifices. They share spaces with us and we treat each other as colleagues and comrades," the expelled student organiser said.