ACTA President Michael Poliakoff’s Statement on Columbia University’s Settlement with the Trump Administration

Columbia has said it will undertake a major, overdue cultural change. Implementation will not be easy: There are few institutions as resistant to change as the contemporary college or university, especially those of the elite, well-funded variety. 

The need for dramatic change was apparent many months before the current administration came into office. The warning signs of corrupt values and a severe infestation of antisemitism were apparent for years: Witness the video of 2004, Columbia Unbecoming. Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president at the time, condemned the behavior of the faculty involved in the noisome episode of antisemitism, but it would take much more than that to remedy the disease that was spreading at Columbia, ready to burst forth in the well-organized anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations, encampments, and occupations—complete with attendant criminal behavior—that the nation witnessed last spring. 

And this has all taken place against the backdrop of a campus culture too focused on activism at the expense of inquiry, one in which too many students and faculty have been unable to express freely their views and the intolerant ideologies of a few have been allowed to silence and to rule overall.

It is regrettable that Columbia was not proactive and that the wholesome remedies it has now announced had to wait until the sanctions threatened by the Trump administration. Ending antisemitic harassment and ensuring the free exchange of ideas on campus are moral imperatives and should never have been left to begrudging compliance with an executive edict. Voices within Columbia and friends beyond it had already prescribed the reforms it needs.

But just as Columbia was a watchword for campus shame and disgrace, it has now announced a path forward that arguably can make it a symbol of reborn values and principles.

Cultural change, particularly in higher education, is very difficult. Columbia deserves to be judged now for how well it moves into what we should hope will be a much better future.

It is disturbing to see the federal government exert its power in a way that could cripple one of the nation’s storied institutions of higher education, and in a way that, arguably, is procedurally inadmissible. Columbia would likely have had grounds to challenge the cancelation of its federal funding. It has, however, taken a high road by acknowledging the changes it needs to make. It must not be forgotten in this episode that rule of law should be the very lifeblood of state and federal procedure, just as it is essential on campus. However much we applaud the federal government’s efforts to combat antisemitism, we do well to tether Leviathan tightly to established law and procedure.

Other institutions that have been put on notice by the administration have undoubtedly been waiting to see what will happen at Columbia. They still have an opportunity to make the changes their own institutions have long needed, thereby preserving their independence—a keystone of America’s excellence in higher education—and reforming themselves for the better.