PNN – Mark Lynch, a distinguished professor of international relations and Middle East studies at George Washington University, reviewed the Trump administration’s recent letter to Columbia University, in which the university was asked to prevent the university from being cut off from government funding by facilitating its dealings with students who support Palestine and reviewing its programs and affairs related to some of its groups.
According to the report of Pakistan News Network, Lynch, who is the director of the Middle East Studies Department at the university and is also considered the originator of the phrase “Arab Spring,” in the article “Columbia University and the Next Front in the War on Higher Education,” published in his personal newsletter, Abu Aardvark’s MENA Academy, considers this action reminiscent of authoritarian governments and believes that if Trump is not resisted, these government interventions in universities will become the norm.
The following sections of this article will be discussed:
Yesterday, I began commenting on the developments of the past week in the area of Trump’s escalating all-out war on higher education and the field of Middle East studies, promising to write more regular posts to keep pace with this unfolding crisis. The battle escalated last night with the release of a truly shocking letter to Columbia University from the General Services Administration, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services, outlining the administration’s demands to begin negotiations to restore federal funding to the university.
The Trump administration has demanded that it respond to its broad set of demands within a week. Columbia’s capitulation to these demands essentially demonstrates the US government’s political dominance over one of the country’s leading private universities and paves the way for the same to be done nationally.
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Much of the government’s demands center around Columbia University’s punitive approach to students who participated in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza last spring. It’s not enough for them that the university, in a clear betrayal of its responsibility to its students and its academic mission, called police onto campus and has since turned the campus into a closed security zone. It’s not enough for the Trump administration that the university has announced that it is suspending, expelling, and even revoking the degrees of protesting students. It doesn’t matter to them that Columbia University allowed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest Mahmoud Khalil.
Columbia University — and most other universities — will likely go along with all of these demands. They have long made clear their willingness, indeed their eagerness, to punish and silence students and faculty in order to appease Israel advocacy groups, alumni, donors, the media, and the federal government. Perhaps they could please the government and their critics more by proposing a few public executions… Sorry, maybe it’s better not to share my ideas with anyone.
Two of the Trump administration’s less-noticed demands are actually more worrisome because of the implications they will have beyond Columbia University:
First, the government wants Colombia to “formalize, adopt, and publish a definition of anti-Semitism” – which would mean following President Trump’s Executive Order 13899, which is derived from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which equates some forms of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Harvard University recently shocked observers by adopting this definition of anti-Semitism as part of its effort to settle two federal lawsuits. It is almost certain that the Trump administration will push for universal acceptance of this definition as a condition for federal grants, and potentially even for accreditation and other basic requirements essential to institutional survival.
The second and equally troubling demand in the Trump administration’s letter is that the director of the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) [2] be appointed from outside the University for a Minimum of five years. I could talk here about the long and proud history of this group, a group that has long led one of the best Middle Eastern schools in the world and has always been the subject of ire from critics of Columbia and Middle Eastern studies – but that’s not really the point.