Columbia’s Descent into Chaos Is by Its Own Hand—Actions to Right the Ship Must Be Swift and Tough

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the National Association of Scholars on March 31, 2025, and is crossposted here with permission.

I have been asked by several members of the National Association of Scholars, as well as by members of the NAS staff, whether we have an official position on the recent developments at Columbia University. This is a little unusual. Although it is not uncommon for NAS to criticize particular colleges and universities for policies or actions that we find doubtful, we have seldom set out a broad critique of a whole institution. The exception was our 2013 study, What Does Bowdoin Teach? But that was the result of two years of focused research.

We have done nothing comparable with Columbia University. Yet Columbia’s history is well known and we have had many occasions to pay attention to it as a leading institution in American higher education. In this light and given that Columbia is currently the epicenter of debate over national policy on higher education, it may not be amiss to offer the following outline for those who wish to know where NAS stands and who might seek guidance on the factors at play.

1. Columbia University is among the oldest and most respected American institutions of higher education. Founded in 1754 as The King’s College, it played a role in the American Revolution and educated many generations of American statesmen (e.g., Alexander Hamilton) and scholars (e.g., Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun). NAS does not seek the destruction of so venerable an institution. Rather, we seek its restoration as a great university.

2. But Columbia has been in decline for a long time. American communists gained a foothold at the university in the 1920s and never let go, the memoirs of men who attended in the 1920s make clear that even then both prominent faculty members and students were not only active in radical anti-American activities, but some were members of the Communist Party and were busy recruiting others to the cause. It probably isn’t wise to play this up in our public statements, but it is definitely important to know that the current wave of radicalism has very deep roots.

3. The decay of Columbia’s curriculum is just as old. Abraham Flexner—a major figure in twentieth-century higher education—bitterly criticized Columbia in his 1930 landmark, Universities: American, English, German, for teaching programs that “can do nothing for undergraduates that is worth their time and money.” Columbia did offer students “ample opportunity to study science, mathematics, language, literature, history, philosophy, economics … under competent and at times highly distinguished teachers.” But Colombia also engaged in a “process of adulteration and dilution.” Flexner says Columbia isn’t the only American university guilty of this, but he holds it up as the leading example.

4. In 1916, Columbia English professor John Erskine proposed a two-year sequence for juniors and seniors focused on “great books.” His program underwent many changes over the years, but it still survives as the required humanities course for all freshmen and sophomores. It has, of course, suffered from some of the “adulteration and dilution” that Flexner complained about. We had a Columbia graduate who worked for us for several years—he was outstanding—but he said much the same. Serious students had to work around the ideological incursions in the humanities core. But at least Columbia still has such a core. Rare these days.

5. Columbia, like many universities, had a rough passage in the 1960s, but more than most universities, it tipped into catastrophe. In 1968, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led a riot over several days that included the takeover of the university president’s office, the wounding of more than a dozen officers, and permanently disabling one officer who was leapt on from a first-story window by a rioter. Professional and personal papers were burned, and numerous faculty offices were vandalized. The leaders of this anarchy escaped any serious consequences. Mark Rudd, the Columbia student and SDS leader who was one of the public faces of the ’68 events, and who eloquently summarized the group’s politics with the catchphrase “Up against the wall, motherfucker!”, went on to become a member of the terrorist Weather Underground. This group orchestrated many bombings of police stations, government and military buildings, and banks. Three of its members accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse—right next to the home of actor Dustin Hoffman—in 1970. Rudd, emerging from his time in an organization responsible for many domestic bombings, served no prison time.

David Gilbert was another Columbia student of this period, also a central player in Columbia SDS and the Weather Underground. He did a long stint in prison for felony murder involving two police officers and a Brinks truck driver, all three murdered by a Weather Underground group seeking funds for their operations. Gilbert is the father of Chesa Boudin, the former radical DA of San Francisco. Chesa’s mother is Kathy Boudin, who participated with Gilbert in the Brinks operation that left three dead and several others wounded. She too was convicted of felony murder and did a long stint. Upon release in 2003, Boudin was hired as an adjunct professor of social work at Columbia University.

This lawlessness and violence are not an obscure part of Columbia University’s history but part of its present character. Every subsequent university administration and the Columbia faculty know full well that the students are capable of disregarding the safety of the community and educational ideals of the university as they promote whatever radical cause currently has purchase on them. Columbia has incubated some of the worst elements of American radicalism for a long time.

6. A decade after the 1968 riots, Columbia English professor Edward Said published his best-known work, Orientalism. Said was a specialist on the writings of Joseph Conrad, but Orientalism is a thorough-going attack on Western scholarship about the people and cultures of the East. He denounced this scholarship as illegitimate because it was and is informed by Western imperialism and romanticism. It was a form of “domination” that treats Arabs and others as an inferior form of humanity. Said’s book advanced the idea that scholarship is an exercise of power, rather than a pursuit of disinterested knowledge. Orientalism became a foundational book of academic postmodernism and a favorite of those who depict the Jewish presence in the Middle East as “settler colonialism” and yet another act of illegitimate Western domination. Said might well be considered the founding father of Columbia’s institutional anti-Semitism.

7. Taking all this into account, Columbia’s descent into a kind of institutional madness can probably be laid at the doorstep of its former president, Lee Bollinger, from 2002 to 2023. He is an attorney and former law professor, who, before Columbia, was president of the University of Michigan. His name adorns the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 2003, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, which gave us Sandra Day O’Connor’s elevation of “diversity” as the presiding justification for racial preferences in college admissions. (O’Connor gave official standing to the remarks that Justice Louis Powell made on this topic in 1978 in Bakke v. Regents.) So, Bollinger began his term as president of Columbia as the great hero of racial preferences and diversity. But he was primarily known as a champion of the First Amendment. The vast expansion of the First Amendment to justify all sorts of lawlessness and mischief is a Bollinger centerpiece and pretty plainly part of Columbia’s current chaos.

8. Bollinger, on multiple occasions, countenanced low-level violence by radical students. When they mobbed an invited speaker who defended civilian efforts to defend the border, for example, he let the miscreants off with a “suspended suspension” and wiped their record after six months. The Columbia community absorbed the idea that leftist activism was always welcome and the ensuing violence was just part of a good Columbia education.

9. The Middle East Studies Institute at Columbia goes back to 1954. I don’t have its history at hand, but I would presume that it started out with a legitimate mission. Over time, it was captured by the anti-Israel, pro-Palestine faction. Eventually, it became a center of radical anti-Semitism. In the 1920s, about 40 percent of Columbia’s enrollment was Jewish—at least according to some sources. But Columbia then imposed quotas on Jewish applicants. The history of anti-Semitism at Columbia is long and complicated but the benchmark for the current controversies was the showdown between Jewish students and professor Joseph Massad in the early 2000s. The Wikipedia account:

Notably, Massad delivered a lecture in 2002 titled “Zionism and Jewish Supremacy,” which was described in an op-ed by Daphna Berman in the Columbia Daily Spectator. In this op-ed, Berman directly compared the lecture to a swastika that had recently been discovered in a campus bathroom. Throughout this incident and subsequent events, Massad maintained that he was opposed to all forms of antisemitism. The dispute between Jewish students and Massad ultimately culminated in the production and release of Columbia Unbecoming, a film that consisted of taped interviews with students who claimed that their pro-Israel views had led to unfair treatment from Massad in his classes.

10. After World War II, Columbia rapidly transformed itself into a research university supported by massive federal grants. In 1945, it had an operating budget of $11 million. By 2007, that had grown to $2.8 billion, more than a quarter of which came from the federal government. Such funding fed important scientific research but also fueled institutional hubris. Jonathan Cole, who served as provost from 1989 to 2003, exemplified Columbia’s grandiosity in his 2009 book, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. His sweeping celebration of the university as a cornerstone of American prosperity is not limited to his home institution, but Columbia takes center stage. These days when defenders of the status quo at Columbia bemoan the jeopardy of the $400 million in research funding that the Trump administration sequestered, the story is much the same. Columbia’s research is too important for America and the world to be jeopardized by any considerations of deference to the policies of the elected national government.

11. I don’t think I need to rehearse the events on campus after October 7, 2023. But, by way of the shortest summary, radicalized pro-Hamas students encamped on university property and persistently harassed Jewish students and faculty. Columbia either took no action or such action that was so minimal that it did nothing to quell the lawlessness or the danger. This culminated in the takeover of Hamilton Hall, in which a janitor was kidnapped and the building was vandalized. Although the police were eventually called in, the University took no disciplinary action against the students until two weeks ago—a year after the events.

12. Columbia University appears to be targeted by outside groups of political radicals, some backed by Palestinian interests and some backed by Chinese interests that support the Palestinian radicals for reasons of their own. These outside interests coordinate with student radicals at Columbia and probably with faculty radicals as well.

13. The Trump administration’s interventions are driven largely by the rampant anti-Semitism, especially as a danger to students and an interruption of the University’s educational mission.

14. But Columbia University is also in the crosshairs for other educationally destructive policies. Most important in this category is the University’s commitment to DEI, which can best be understood as the legacy of Bollinger’s ardent involvement in group preference advocacy. The cut of $400 million in research funding was the Trump administration’s response to the DEI entailments of that research funding.

15. NAS’s position? The long-standing and deeply rooted fundamental academic principles at Columbia, and the replacement of those principles by ideological counterfeits, is a condition that cannot be corrected by gradual reform. Partly that is because the institution is now so enmeshed in its radical regime that it seems to all involved as the natural and rightful condition of things.

16. Reform can come only by shock therapy. The Trump administration’s interventions are necessary and good.

17. NAS recognizes the apprehensions of scholars who fear that a precedent has been set that may lead to other interventions that might not be warranted, or interventions by some later administration that cares more for enforcing radical doctrines than restoring academic integrity. These points are worth careful examination, but our position is that allowing them to dominate at this moment would be to abandon Columbia University—and perhaps the rest of American academe—to its fate as a colony of the radical left at the expense of America.

18. Moreover, the concessions that the Columbia University administration has so far made are not to be taken at face value. This fight will continue, whether in the courts or by the continued subterfuge of Columbia’s administrators and faculty members. Part of NAS’s role is to keep a close eye on this.

Image: “Columbia Encampment Day After NYPD Raid” by Pamela Drew on Flickr