Photo: Sophie Park/Bloomberg/Getty Images

By Ross Barkan, a political columnist for Intelligencer From INTELLIGENCER

The war between Donald Trump and elite American universities is a contest of wills that some of these schools, as of now, seem committed to losing. The Trump administration intuited correctly that these institutions were fundamentally weak. This is what a good bully does: sniffs out a vulnerability and exploits it.

Consider the $200 million settlement that Columbia, one of the richest, most powerful, and most revered universities in the world, just reached with the Trump administration. It will pay $200 million to the government to end specious federal antisemitism investigations and an additional $21 million to settle employment-discrimination claims. An independent monitor will report to the administration on the university’s compliance with the deal. Columbia’s leadership ultimately accepted the premise that antisemitism was enough of a threat on campus that surveillance from Trump was needed to right the ship — or perhaps to get the university’s federal research funding back since it perceived no other way to battle onward.

Columbia has already strained to satiate Trump by hiring three dozen campus police officers who have the power to arrest students and by appointing a senior vice-provost with authority over the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies. Columbia will also require students wearing face coverings during protests to present university identification when asked, even though, if they are immigrants, they could be threatened with deportation.

In the short run, this is the path of least resistance for Columbia, but it will do lasting damage. Academic freedom is severely threatened with a provost hanging over Middle Eastern studies and another monitor constantly reporting back to Trump on the “progress” of the settlement. Consider that, unlike other forms of racism or hatred that have percolated on college campuses over the decades, there is no good-faith explanation of what, in the 2020s, constitutes antisemitism there. Last year, pro-Palestine protests convulsed Columbia, and the students and professors who resented them came to believe that any call for Palestinian rights or verbal attacks on Israel — these protests were, in almost every instance, nonviolent — constitutes Jew hatred.

Columbia will always be a desirable school to attend, but the brand damage has been done. Harvard understands this; it too has begun negotiations with the Trump administration but is driving a much harder bargain and appears far more willing to battle the government in court. Harvard grasps that colleges right now need wartime leaders. Yet it still risks capitulation: A deal for a $500 million settlement was apparently close before Brown settled for just $50 million doled out over a decade. The Brown deal also does not impinge on academic freedom to the same degree, dodging a monitoring agreement altogether and getting the administration to promise, in writing, it would not “dictate Brown’s curriculum or the content of academic speech.” The choice to direct the cash to workforce programs instead of federal initiatives of Trump’s choosing was also appealing to Brown. Harvard is aiming for something similar.

But Harvard leadership is acutely aware of what Columbia gave up. Federal funding for research can be recouped over time, if not when Trump is president, then in the years after. Reputations, however, are not so easily repaired. Columbia can’t undo the past year, when it aggressively — almost giddily, it seemed — surrendered to Trump. Some of this was clearly the Columbia administration wanting to clamp down on campus protests. It didn’t want more occupations and more comparisons to 1968. Trump offered the school an out: Do what you wanted to do all along but act as if it’s merely the government forcing your hand.

The trouble for Columbia is that few people on either end of the political spectrum take it seriously now. For Republicans, Columbia will always be a den of big-city liberal sin, and MAGA acolytes won’t respect it because it proved it could be easily cowed. And for the left — those who cared most for Columbia, ultimately, before last year — the settlement with Trump is an embarrassment that cannot be forgotten. Columbia will always be rich enough, and the Ivy League sheen can’t be completely eradicated. But something obviously has been lost, and it won’t be regained anytime soon. To attend Columbia today is to be at a school that is now under the surveillance of a revanchist federal government. It’s a school that cannot tell the difference between standing up for an oppressed people and literal Jew hatred. For any other university deciding what to do with Trump, Columbia is the model to be avoided at all costs.

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