Columbia’s president on Wednesday issued a statement that did not respond to the administration’s specific demands but said the university will continue to engage with federal regulators and “will never compromise our values of pedagogical independence, our commitment to academic freedom, or our obligation to follow the law.” It’s not clear who the receiver would be and whether they would need approval by the federal government. Traditionally, academic receivership is a tool used by university administrators to fix departments that become dysfunctional due to internal tensions. Receivers are often university administrators or chairs from another department or university who take organizational control away from the department’s faculty. As the Middle East Studies Association of North America wrote to Columbia’s president , allowing government to interfere in internal academic affairs would set an “extremely dangerous precedent.” “One can easily imagine the same threat of withholding government funding being deployed to compel a university to, for example, compel a biology department to teach ‘creationism’ on an equal basis with modern evolutionary theory, or to require that history courses portray slavery and segregation in a favorable light,” the association wrote. Conservatives cheering the move should imagine their reaction if a Democratic administration were to urge receivership of a biology department because its scholars believe there are only two genders, or of a university’s “free enterprise center” because its free market approach harms minority entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, Trump says he wants to eliminate the Department of Education and minimize federal government interference in K-12 education, leaving policies to the states . Yet he is simultaneously seeking unprecedented government oversight over the content of higher education. “This is the most terrifying threat to academic freedom I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime,” said Hank Reichman, retired history professor at California State University and former chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. To be clear, opposing governmental interference in university affairs doesn’t mean defending odious views expressed by professors, like those aired by some professors in Columbia’s Middle East studies department. Professor Joseph Massad, in an article on Electronic Intifada, called Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack against Israel “awesome” and praised “the resistance’s remarkable takeover” of Israeli military bases. He has accused Israel of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” Massad’s controversial stances were documented as early as a 2004 documentary about antisemitism at Columbia created by the nonprofit The David Project. Professor Hamid Dabashi described Israeli Jews in an Egyptian newspaper in 2004 as having “a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture,” according to a 2006 report by the US Commission on Civil Rights. Last year, he wrote in Middle East Eye that the “Zionist inquisition regime has ruled Columbia as it has ruled New York, and the US Congress,” tapping into the antisemitic trope of Jewish power over government. Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the right-leaning Foundation for Defense of Democracies, asserted that Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies department has “become utterly politicized and infected with an obsession with the Palestinian cause, anti-Israel invective, and often anti-American leftist indoctrination.” If Columbia wants to improve the reputation of this department, administrators should consider whether their hiring and tenure vetting processes are adequate and whether they have the right faculty in place to provide students with balanced views that accord to the academic standards of their discipline. Certainly, administrators are obligated to ensure no professor discriminates against students because of religion or nationality. Tablet Magazine editor Liel Leibovitz actually floated the idea of placing the department in academic receivership in 2024. As Leibovitz pointed out, Columbia previously used receivership in 2001 when it imported an acting chair from another department to manage an English department beset by internal disagreements. It might not be a bad thing for Columbia to recruit an outside scholar or administrator to revamp its Middle East studies department. But for government to coerce such change — or to play any role in receivership itself — sets a dangerous precedent that could threaten academic freedom far beyond Columbia’s gates.
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