Unions and students seek Columbia University board reforms after Trump deal

Students and Columbia University's chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) launched a campaign on Tuesday to reform the institution’s most powerful governing body, the board of trustees.

The decision comes after more than two years of what they say is disenfranchisement over the way Columbia's board of trustees has handled several issues, including permitting the police to target the student body multiple times while they were protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza and capitulating to the Trump administration’s demands over alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws.

While the encampments inspired other students at campuses across the country to protest, pro-Palestine students at Columbia paid a heavy price. Hundreds of students were arrested, dozens suspended, and several targeted for deportation. Activists say those actions have had a chilling effect on free speech on campus.

Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor and vice-president of Columbia's chapter of AAUP, told Middle East Eye that the idea to reform the board arose last summer, following the maelstrom and Columbia's agreement to a $220m settlement with the Trump administration for alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. 

AAUP had discussions with students, alumni, and community members, and a strategy to reform the board came up repeatedly.

Thaddeus said, “There are many things that we’re deeply, deeply unhappy about. One of them is the decision to call the police in response to the encampments, the occupation of Hamilton Hall and the demonstration in Butler Library in May of 2025.

“We're deeply unhappy with the decision to negotiate with the federal government rather than fighting their demands the way Harvard did. Columbia more or less acquiesced to those demands and made unprecedented concessions to the government on matters of hiring, curriculum, discipline and admissions. That was a deeply misguided decision," he added. 

Academics fear Columbia University's deal with Trump has wider ramifications

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The Trump administration successfully extracted $200m from Columbia to settle allegations that it violated Title VI by failing to address harassment of Jewish students, in exchange for restoring its federal grants.

Jean E Howard, George Delacorte Professor Emerita in the Humanities and member of the Columbia chapter of AAUP,  believes a campaign is necessary to have a board of trustees that is “more open in all its practices than our present board”.

“Elite institutions, and Columbia is such an institution, are unfortunately failing to stand up to the challenges of the Trump era,” she said.

“Charged to protect the core values of the institutions it serves, the Columbia Board has compromised those values, especially by curtailing the academic freedom of faculty members and curtailing peaceful student protest on issues where debate is essential,” she added. 

Another issue the AAUP brought up as a point of contention was the case of Dr Robert Hadden, a former gynaecologist and convicted sex offender whose conduct Thaddeus says was "covered up" by the university administration.

Hadden was found liable for sexually assaulting hundreds of women who were his patients at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital between the 1980s and 2012.

MEE reached out to Columbia University for comment, but had not heard back by the time of publication.

Leadership

The existing board of trustees is made up of 20 individuals who are responsible for overall governance of Columbia, selecting the president, overseeing all faculty and senior administrative appointments, monitoring the budget, and supervising the endowment.

The university president, according to the faculty handbook, is the chief executive officer of the university and exercises jurisdiction over all its affairs, subject to the trustees' control. 

While Thaddeus said it could be difficult to assess whether responsibility for recent failures lay with the executive leadership or the board, he said recent weak leadership had created a vacuum, allowing the board to exercise more control than it normally would.

Thaddeus recalled former president Lee Bollinger as an assertive leader, and consequently, the role of the trustees would be secondary. But this, he said, had changed in the last few years. 

“In the last two and a half years, we’ve had a series of presidents who were not so assertive. President Minouche Shafik was not a strong leader. And then we have had two temporary presidents. So it's clear that the board has stepped up and has been asserting its powers more.”

“The board has made it clear that they see themselves as having ultimate authority for all decisions at Columbia. If they assert those powers, then they also have to be held responsible when those powers are used in an irresponsible way.”

‘Mini autocracy’

Howard expressed concern that none of the board of trustees members are directly elected, and that the trustees do not make minutes of their meetings public.

She also expressed concern that the board was not representative of its stakeholders, saying it is “unusually insulated" from the body it serves because it is predominantly made up of those with "ties to the finance sector”. Howard said the board counts just one member who holds an academic position.

Thaddeus also says the board wasn’t representative of Columbia. “We need people who have more of a student-focused mindset,” he said. 

'All of this must change if Columbia is to recover its ethical and intellectual integrity'

- Jean E Howard, Columbia University

“In terms of the class structure of the board, it's very harmful that most of the members of the board represent the top one percent of our society in terms of income and wealth."

“If that's the kind of people who serve on the board, then the board and the university will end up serving the interests of an oligarchy.”

Thaddeus said it was important for the board and the university to serve society as a whole.

“Do we want to be a little mini autocracy, or do we want to be a little mini democracy?” he added. 

Thaddeus argues that the university needs to enact a democratic model of governance rather than handing "absolute power" to a board that implements a top-down approach.

As well as not representing its stakeholders, Howard said the board of trustees had been “contemptuous of the University Senate with which it is supposed to collaborate and whose powers it has unilaterally curtailed”.

“All of this must change if Columbia is to recover its ethical and intellectual integrity,” she added.

The Center for American Progress produced a report in December saying that college governance boards had started “to play an outsize role in the internal affairs of public universities”, and moving toward merit-based selection of board members would protect academic freedom more than politically appointed boards. 

“Decisions that were once guided by academic standards and institutional autonomy have become arenas for political influence and ideological control,” the report said.

“Faculty face professional uncertainty, students encounter a narrow and less inclusive learning experience, and the broader public sees public universities being reshaped in the image of political ideology rather than academic mission.”

Vision

The vision for the reforms would see a board currently composed of members nominated through an internal process replaced by democratically elected members who are more representative of the Columbia University body at large, rather than an amalgamation of corporate power. 

The initial aim of the campaign is to inform the student body and University Senate of the proposals and build momentum and support for change, Thaddeus explained.

He is realistic about the expectations of any potential reforms, saying it would take time.

“This is not going to succeed overnight. This is calling for fundamental change in the structures of power at the university. The establishment is going to resist. There's going to be pushback. We see this more as planting a seed that we expect to flower and bear fruit in the future.

“While we don’t expect success in a matter of weeks, we do feel that it's urgently necessary."