Life in Morningside Heights these past few weeks has been characterized by the slow thaw of warming weather. Typically, the turn to spring signals our preparation for finals. It is accompanied by a blossoming of life on campus, a rededication to pedagogy and community.

Despite all outward signs pointing toward the imminent return of this liberatory period, spring has not yet touched Columbia University. Inside these closed gates, we are stuck in the dead of winter. Where one should find students studying, one instead finds ICE agents, deputized by the state, raiding our dorms. In spaces once known for rigorous debate and intellectual expansion, fear of doxxing by right-wing fanatics emboldened by the state has become the new norm. All the while, the administrative leaders who purport to uphold the “mission” of our university appear to be nowhere in sight.

Long before the Trump administration threatened to withhold the school’s federal funding, Columbia University drew the nation’s attention for its students’ committed protests against the ongoing onslaught on Gaza and attacks on free speech. Indeed, it is precisely Columbia’s tradition of activism that drew students like us to these gates. The university itself lauds its record of left dissent from the 1968 occupation of Hamilton Hall to the 1985 calls to divest from apartheid in South Africa—claiming that this legacy set it apart from its stodgier, more tradition-bound Ivy League competitors. But in its complete capitulation to the blackmail threats of the Trump White House, Columbia has made a mockery of this dissenting tradition, abandoning its now-imperiled students, forsaking the faculty’s independence, and abasing itself before the repressive and authoritarian agenda of the Trump White House.

In short order, the university has trashed the vital protections of free speech and open inquiry on campus. Columbia administrators have not only decided that the peaceful actions of dissenting students, staff, and faculty are beyond the pale; they have rendered any brand of dissent a de facto thought crime. In endorsing the unfounded equation of anti-genocide protests with antisemitism, the university has thrown over any meaningful role of protecting dissent and principled protest in favor of the disingenuous agenda plied by wealthy donors and bad-faith state interests.

Buried deep in the laundry list of Columbia University’s giveaways to the Trump administration is a bullet point noting a “recent downturn in both Jewish and African American enrollment.” Containing no real plan to address this trend and lacking any analysis of its cause, the point instead serves as justification for their surrender. We are the students these efforts claim to protect, and know that their implementation will only make things worse.

The Trump administration’s illegal denial of $400 million in already allocated funding to Columbia University has nothing to do with alleged antisemitism. Indeed, the Trump White House and the broader MAGA movement openly cater to racist and antisemitic bigotry, making a mockery of the effort to to protect Jewish lives.

The Trump administration has gone on to withhold funds from both the University of Pennsylvania and the state of Maine for treating trans individuals with respect, demonstrating that the broader McCarthyite punishment of dissent is just beginning. The attack on America’s universities is but the opening salvo for a far broader and vengeful deployment of state resources against the democratic commitment to free speech Americans have long held dear.

Current Issue

May 2025 Issue

As graduate students of history, we are trained to look back. For the past few weeks, as the Trump administration has assaulted our colleagues and threatened our research, the only question we have been able to ask is, what will come next? We know what starts behind Columbia’s gates won’t end there. Our studies have taught us that the meek submission of the school’s Board of Trustees before the blackmail threats of an inquisitorial right-wing regime only emboldens the enemies of free speech. The creep of normality inches further still. When receiverships of entire academic departments are rationalized today, the arrest of dissidents is what gets explained away tomorrow. This situation cannot stand.

Since the start of the new academic year, Columbia’s administration has attempted to reassemble its fractured community in the wake of the uprising for Palestine last year. Its vague appeals to reconciliation and piecemeal attempts at open dialogue have done little to quell discontent among students and faculty. Implementing mask bans, authorizing campus public safety officers with the power of arrest, and adopting “institutional neutrality” will not breed any workable new consensus—they will work instead to steepen the climate of fear and distrust on campus.

The only way Columbia can regain the trust of its core constituency is by stating explicitly and clearly: We will not go down without a fight. In practical terms, this also entails a dramatic reversal of existing policy. The university’s leadership has deliberately ignored the substantive calls for real dialogue, justice, and principled conduct amassing among the student body.

It is crucial to step up pressure from the outside to reverse this disastrous dynamic. It does not matter where you stand on whatever issue that Trump officials have adopted as a pretext for dismantling the bulwarks of our civil society. If you believe in the transformative value of education, in the centrality of open dialogue to furthering democracy, the only choice is to wholeheartedly reject the university’s cowardice and to stand with those who will not let this pass.

What is at stake is something far greater than Columbia’s self-image. How many students and faculty can be coerced into silence by threats of economic coercion, mass firings, and expulsion from the country? How many peaceful protests can be curbed? Which marginal group of people will next be threatened with deportation or unlawful detention? How much will we, as individuals and a community, lose in the process? At what point is it too late?

The actions of the Trump administration have not made our campus a safer place. They have fostered an environment of distrust. They have transformed classrooms into forums of cowed conformity, where no one is safe to explore their curiosity for fear of brutal reprisal. They have ensured that our school will now act precipitously to punish and discipline dissent and open inquiry rather than modeling and promoting it.

This is not the function of a university. This is not the character of a democracy. There is no one coming to save us but us.