University Capture

Institutions are complying, sometimes with gusto: Part 3

Apr 18, 2025

The third and final installment of this look into how our institutions are being rolled into carrying water for the Trump redux, but even worse agenda lands us in the hallow grounds of our country’s prestigious universities.

I have never had the privilege of attending esteemed universities like Columbia University, Harvard University, or NYU. I am a lowly graduate of the CUNY industrial complex; after attending Queens College for my undergraduate years, I stayed in the CUNY network at Brooklyn College for my graduate degree.

The alma maters I attended do have their own rich history of student activism; the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner Library Clock Tower is a landmark on Queens College campus, dedicated to the slain civil rights activists in 1964 Mississippi. (Andrew Goodman was a Queens College student.)

Universities enjoy promoting what makes their campus unique when it comes to fighting for a better world. Columbia University, for instance, actively promotes their campus’s long history of civil disobedience as a reason for prospective students to apply.

It’s easy to acknowledge or even celebrate past acts of disobedience when enough time has passed.

Enough time that you can rewrite your past and turn it into a new perspective.

Enough time that you can explain to a modern audience how “you get it now.”

Enough time where your most generous donors are no longer demanding your opposition.

But there is no time like the present. And the present — where snap decisions marking the moments that we eventually call history take place. It’s in this place where universities have opted to mirror their past and mortgage our tenuous democracy with the Trump agenda’s future.

Let’s get into it:

Universities and their Cowering

I think that now, since we’re nearly 100 days in, yes — we are almost at that watermark day — of Trump Part 2, it’s likely most of you already know on some level that our colleges are giving into the targeting of the Trump administration. So our focus here won’t just be on the complicity of universities, but high-profile politicians and organizations that have fueled this attack on higher-education.

This will be a long one.

Here is the collection of the universities that have been directly targeted by Trump:

Harvard University

Brown University

Columbia University

Cornell University

Northwestern University

The University of Pennsylvania

Princeton University

One of the universities that has already been reaping from their own capitulation is Harvard University. The university is making news at this time for showing some backbone to the White House, where they became the first university to refuse to comply. Among the demands of the White House was for Harvard to share all its hiring data and subject itself to government audits until at least 2028, provide all admission data and shut down all programming related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The issue here being that the government is looking to control the functions that Harvard independently has authority over.

To their credit, this is a stance worth fighting and they are paying real consequences for it. The government has canceled more than $2.2 billion towards Harvard and now the IRS is looking to revoke their tax-exempt status, while providing no evidence for any law-breaking. They’ve also threatened to block Harvard from enrolling international students.

Much of these attacks have been under the guise of combatting antisemitism, which is where Harvard initially had complied with the White House. The university in late March dismissed their faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, under general claims of antisemitism. They have suspended programs and partnerships with other universities, such as Harvard Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative and the Birzeit University in the West Bank.

And of course, right at the beginning of the Trump administration, Harvard reached a settlement agreement regarding alleged antisemitism on campus, most notably adopting the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Many of these concessions can be understood as operating on the principal that giving into some of these demands might satiate their opponents. But they have learned quickly the old adage of “give someone an inch, and they'll take a mile.”

At least Harvard — for now — is showing some resistance. The same cannot be said for their counterpart in Columbia University. Their almost ritualistic undoing by the Trump team includes banning face masks on campus, removing faculty control of courses on Middle Eastern Studies, and allowing security officials to arrest people on campus.

Their decisions have been denounced and seen as a dangerous precedent for stifling academic freedom. It also reportedly hasn’t stopped Trump from possibly seeking legally binding control over Columbia.

How did we get here? How did these institutions get to this point and are there any cracks that can lead to some light?

“I don’t oppose many of the things that are being done. I just wish they would be done more deftly.”

This quote is in reference to Trump’s efforts to deport students who have either participated in pro-Palestinian activities or written critically about Israel. And no, it isn’t from an ex-Trump official or a “moderate Republican” columnist from the Wall Street Journal.

This quote is attributed to Deborah Lipstadt, a renowned Holocaust historian and President Biden’s former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.

Mind you, the White House has not even attempted to pretend that any student they have detained has committed any crime other than exercising their freedom of speech. And yet, there is an attempt to wistfully dream of a nicer, less cruel version of these actions.

It perfectly encapsulates the people responsible for midwifing these attack on free speech, due process, and residency status that we are all witnessing and threatened with.

In The Nation, Jeet Heer argues that liberals helped lay the groundwork for the current crackdown on dissent, which he terms “The New McCarthyism.” Heer focuses on how Biden’s almost universal condemnation of the protests on college campuses (which he called “hate-filled”), in tandem with the unrelenting support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, paved the foundation for Trump’s repression efforts.

Even now, we still have Democratic officials unable to unequivocally stand up for basic civil liberties without placing qualifiers. Leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries prefaced just how much they abhor what Mahmoud Khalil has said before meekly going on to state how his first amendment speech should be protected if no laws were broken. That if, which provides the Trump administration a latitude they have not earned nor which they deserve, has still not been presented by the White House for Khalil or any detained student to date. Schumer, for his part, has had little to nothing to say about the detained students since his previous comments.

And while stressing due process now is better than nothing, we cannot forget figures who cheered this on from the start. People like Jonathan Greenblatt, leader of the Anti-Defamation League, were outright euphoric when Khalil was first detained. Since then, Greenblatt has walked back his organization’s comments, striking a tone much more concerned suddenly with constitutional freedoms.

As Heer mentioned, if this is a new McCarthyite tactic to silent dissent, it must be opposed full-stop. And in doing so, we can’t ignore which argument fueled the fire and the people who kept fanning the flames.

So where is the light?

My derision of Harvard aside, it is a good sign that they have now decided to say “enough” and be willing to take on the Trump administration’s attacks. This could compel other universities to follow suit and lead a broader higher-education movement against the White House.

But where the Ivy Leagues have failed us, pockets of rebellion are happening locally. Two elementary schools in Los Angeles denied entrance to federal agents who sought to access five students who they alleged to be undocumented students. In another case, a small New York village gathered a thousand protesters to demand the release of a mother and her three children after ICE had detained them. Days after the outcry began, they were released.

Our existing institutions are failing us. There is no question of that. If Trump’s attempts to impose his strain of authoritarianism are to be defeated, it will be at the hands of the regular people, gathering and organizing together. And with that, there will come a need to take a second look at these institutions and how they’ve been complicit in bringing us to this point.

Since many of us never actually observed the college campus protests of last year, I recommend watching the documentary The Encampments, that offers a much more intimate look at those actions. Heavily featured in the film are Mahmoud Khalil, who is Palestinian and was the lead negotiator for the encampments and Grant Miner, who is Jewish was expelled from Columbia for participating in the protests.

University Capture

Institutions are complying, sometimes with gusto: Part 3

Let’s get into it:

Universities and their Cowering

How did we get here? How did these institutions get to this point and are there any cracks that can lead to some light?

So where is the light?

US Slop

World Slop

NYC Slop

Democratic Party Slop

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