Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the author on X on March 22, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
Much in the news the past few days is the turnaround at Columbia University over the Trump administration’s pulling $400 million of federal grants and contracts unless Columbia takes decisive action to rein in the insanity of the past year, which effectively paralyzed Columbia as an educational institution.
The Trump administration is doing a victory lap. The Columbia administration is breathing a sigh of relief. Academics are wringing their hands. From the WSJ:
Schools nationwide are watching Columbia with alarm; many fear a demand for similar concessions. Their primary concern: without freedom to follow their intellectual curiosity, the discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy will decline or even grind to a halt.
The right is pleased to see an elite university get a long-overdue comeuppance. From Powerline’s Hinderaker:
The gnashing of teeth by left-wing academics is, as you would expect, nauseating.
The real problem, of course, is the intrusion of the federal government into areas where it has traditionally had little to no role.
Prior to 1950, the federal government did little to support academic research. Prior to the founding of the Department of Education, the feds had little role in education. These were simply not considered to be federal responsibilities. This was not “anti-science” or “anti-education.” It was to preserve the rightful independence of the academy from government control and interference.
The real lesson of the Columbia debacle is how susceptible the academy has become to political interference. This should surprise no one: whoever supplies the majority of funds gets to call the tune. When the major funder is a political entity—which government inevitably is—education and research will inevitably be politicized. Where the right was appalled at the Biden administration’s political ideology being imposed on the academy’s research and education missions, the left is appalled when the Trump administration does the same thing. The tables will be turned one day, and the right will be appalled again.
How do we get out of this Sisyphean quandary?
Which leads to the only logical lesson to be learned from Columbia’s “crumbling.” To preserve the academy’s mission, to promote the freedom to think radical thoughts, to preserve the intellectual independence of academics—all things I, as an academic myself, support—GET THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OUT OF ACADEMIA! If we want to be independent, BE INDEPENDENT!
The point was made by the WSJ:
Almost all schools—public and private—depend on the U.S. government for access to federal student loans and grants for low-income students. Research universities rely on the government for billions of dollars in contracts and grants.
Although Columbia stands among the country’s wealthiest universities, with an endowment of about $15 billion, it wouldn’t take long for it to cease to operate in any recognizable form without government money.
Here’s some tough love for my fellow academics. Grow up. You cannot raise a fist of defiance to the government with one hand, while having the other hand held out to demand federal money. It is the attitude of the petulant, entitled adolescent. It is rank hypocrisy, and the public is catching on.
Image of Columbia University by Scarlet Sappho on Flickr
No, it’s way more than just the Federal largess.
Bob Jones University didn’t drop its interracial dating ban when it lost the SCOTUS decision (and its tax exemption) in 1983. No, it did it after a visit by then candidate George W Bush in 2000 created an uproar.
The thing to remember is that even an ideal university with no attrition still must recruit 1/4 of its student body each and every year to replace those who graduate. The field of “yield management” came out of nowhere 20 years ago when IHEs started having trouble finding enough qualified students to fill their seats, and next year (recruitment for F-26) is going to get a lot worse.
It’s one thing for five Federal judges to say that they won’t hire anyone who attended Columbia — that’s maybe a dozen jobs — a dozen nice jobs, but there are some 600 other Federal judges also hiring so it’s not going to really matter.
But to wear the Federal Government’s Scarlet Letter is another story — having a transcript from a university that the Federal Government has declared to be discriminatory is another form of Scarlet Letter that your graduates will have to wear in job interviews, and that’s going to reduce your freshman yield when their parents think about this.
It goes without saying that an official Federal finding like this will hurt your recruitment of Jewish students, and Hillel says that Columbia is 22.8% Jewish — that’s almost 1/4th! You’re also going to lose a lot of your Christian students — people forget that there is more support for Israel amongst Protestant Christians than amongst American Jews — or that 3/4 of the Christian Bible is a translation of Jewish holy texts such as the Torah.
And then with this being Hamas-related, there are kids worried about being able to get a security clearance upon graduation and you will lose some of them as well.
The money is real, particularly if ED (or whomever) played hardball and included the student financial aid, as they did with Grove City College, but do not underestimate the impact of (and fear of) a Scarlet Letter.
And the other thing to remember here is that the big difference here is that Columbia didn’t immediately capitulate. Remember when the DKE fratboys at Yale chanted “No means Yes, Yes means Anal”? There was a Title IX complaint on that, and I have no doubt that the five year ban on DKE and other things Yale did was the negotiated settlement for this.
Unless someone gets a copy of the OCR letter and posts it, we don’t hear about this.
So I’m not worried about another Obama/Biden doing something outrageous because I know what they’ve already done, and they can’t possibly go further than they routinely did…