Columbia, LLP

Dear Friends,

On Saturday, when I finally felt strong enough to look at the news, the top two stories on the Times homepage were about Trump shakedowns in two different industries. At the top of the page was the news that Columbia University, which the Trump administration had targeted for cuts to $400 million worth of federal funding, had bowed to Trump’s demands without so much as the suggestion of a legal fight. Among the steps the university agreed to were further restrictions on student protest, further powers to discipline (“i.e. defund, suspend, or derecognize”) student groups, and the appointment of a new Senior Vice Provost to govern the school’s Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department (starting with a review “to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced”). In addition, although the Times didn’t mention it, earlier this month Columbia expelled an unknown number of students involved in last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations, revoked the degrees of some others, and shamefully did nothing when Mahmoud Khalil wrote to the administration in fear for his life.

The other story concerned the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison—described by the Times headline as a “Major Democratic Law Firm”—which similarly folded in the face of (similarly legally dubious) threats to suspend the firm’s security clearances and ban its lawyers from federal buildings. The firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, met with Trump in the White House, and agreed that the firm would provide $40 million worth of pro bono work for the president’s choice of causes, including, naturally, fighting anti-Semitism.

Seeing these two stories side by side is instructive, not just because of the almost-identical tactics of mobster-style extortion, but in what it reveals about elite educational institutions like Columbia. I don’t think anyone is that surprised that a law firm that pulled in more than $2 billion last year would pursue anything other than advantage for its clients. A billion-dollar law firm is straightforwardly, obviously, a service for the wealthy and powerful. Those clients pay a fee and expect a service in return—from lawyers who know the system well enough to navigate it for their clients’ benefit. The wisdom of such a move aside—you could fill a very large book with the deals that Trump has backed out of—it is not surprising that the firm would see the appeasement of the world’s second most powerful man as good business. 

Universities, though, we hold them to a different standard, even elite ones, even in this disillusioned era. We expect them to have different values than the straightforward pursuit of advantage for their best-paying customers. We expect them to be primarily in the business of educating students and, in the case of a research institution like Columbia, creating knowledge and disseminating it through scholarship. Even as it has become clearer to many that elite institutions’ research programs are increasingly disconnected from their educational mission, and that that educational mission is too often a cover for privilege laundering, we still, many of us, hold these places in high regard, as places where learning seems to urgently matter. 

But it’s important to understand that Columbia probably has more in common with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison than it does with, say, the University of Iowa, or (to pick a private institution) Case Western. When an institution attains a certain level of wealth its primary job becomes to protect and increase that wealth, even moreso than to do the things that ostensibly won it that wealth in the first place. In news coverage of both cases, people from the legal and education industries were quoted, expressing dismay that such wealthy institutions would capitulate to Trump so easily. “They have all the resources they need to fight an unlawful order,” the Times quoted former prosecutor John Moscow as saying, along with a number of other lawyers who were baffled why Paul Weiss (as the firm is known) didn’t fight the administration’s sanctions in court. Similarly, law professor Samuel Bagenstos was quoted in the Chronicle saying “Columbia is not some small, under-resourced institution unable to fight back.” If Columbia, with its history and its endowment and its power, can’t stand up to Trump, what chance do other colleges have? This is a totally understandable feeling, and I don’t begrudge anyone their worry right now, but this has things exactly backwards, I think. One of the things we’re learning in this season of hell is not that money doesn’t protect you; it’s that money opens you up to blackmail. 

If all Columbia University wanted to do was to carry on being an amazing educational institution, educating its brilliant students with the most talented professors in the world, providing those professors with the resources to carry out world-changing research, even protecting its students’ rights to express themselves from the whims of a would-be fascist who wants to trample on those rights, it could do all of those things without one penny of federal funding. Columbia’s endowment is nearly 15 billion dollars. To replace the $400 million the Trump administration has “cut”¹ would take less money than the interest that endowment will generate this year. Even if the government followed through on Trump’s threat to cut all of Columbia’s $5 billion in federal funding, Columbia could absorb that loss if it wanted to, could work with donors to change the restrictions on gifts, and still be left with quite a nest egg to ensure its future flourishing. 

Conceivably, absurdly large endowments like Columbia’s exist to protect the institution against precisely the sort of external shocks coming right now. But what we’re learning is that such extreme wealth transforms an institution, convincing its leaders that its seat at the billionaires’ table is more important than its primary duties to its students, faculty, and staff. Many have lamented Columbia’s spinelessness in the face of Trump’s threats, its lack of courage to stand up for its values. But what if this deal is not Columbia compromising its values, but expressing them?

Clearly, my plan to write this newsletter every week was foolhardy. Clearly, I had not understood how difficult it would be to keep my head above water this semester. I’m teaching two new courses, on too many committees, driving my kids all over town every day. Plus, I had not reckoned with how much mental space the looting of the constitutional order by technofascist thugs would take up. You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, for writing less often than planned. See you soon.

1  It’s not even a sure thing they can make the cuts! The legal justification is, to say the least, shaky.