Columbia’s Capitulation
In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen
–“In Your Light, We Shall See the Light,” Columbia University’s motto

Of all the pathetic abdications of moral responsibility and expressions of cowardice I managed to see during the quarter century I spent in academia, few approximate Columbia University’s abject surrender to the Trump Administration the other day. I won’t bother belaboring the details, which you can read almost anywhere. As former Columbia law professor Katherine Franke aptly put it, this is a case in which the victim of a ransom note has not just capitulated to the demands of the ransomers but given them what they hadn’t asked for, in return for less than nothing. But if you stand back from the welter of detail, there are a few lessons here worth learning, and worth articulating.

Lesson 1: The delusions of ‘strategic planning’
Anyone who’s spent time in academia is familiar with the “Strategic Planning” process. The Strategic Plan is the Master Plan of the University, supposedly guided by its Mission Statement, which gives meaning and purpose to everything that’s done on campus. Progress toward its goals must rigorously be measured. And so, every department and program on campus, with the notable exception of intercollegiate athletics, is obliged to record and submit whatever bullshit statistics they have in the way of documenting progress toward the Strategic Plan. Faculty usually complain that the exercise is fundamentally meaningless, and are then upbraided by the “realistic” administrators and executives who supposedly know better.

You can now see how much “better” they knew. The one thing that Columbia’s strategic planners never planned for is the utterly predictable situation they’re now in. What if we face a recurrence of the Red Scare of the 1950s? What if a hostile government cuts off the University’s funding and makes an attempt to put one of its departments into supervision or receivership?

We’ll evidently be told that none of this was predictable, but let’s call that what it is: a lie, or else an expression of culpable ignorance. Anyone could have predicted the outcome here. How could Columbia, with its $14.8 billion endowment, with its lawyerly kings and horses, with top-notch scholars at its beck and call, and alumni in hifallutin places, have missed it? I’ll leave that as a question. What’s not a question is that strategic planners who couldn’t see this coming do not deserve to be employed. In a just world, these overpaid, over-hyped, preening incompetents would be thrown unceremoniously out of their plush offices directly into the streets of Morningside Heights. 

The situation resembles that of hospitals and acute care facilities before COVID that professed total surprise at the arrival of a virus producing a pandemic. Never mind that epidemiologists had been warning of the possibility for years, if not decades. The six-figure CEOs were “surprised” as the bodies piled up at their facilities. Who coulda thunk? Who in health care could have imagined that viruses exist, that they can proliferate at pandemic strength, and that once they do, they can undo an unprepared health care system? Not the overpaid hospital or acute facility CEOs.

Maybe the larger lesson here is that even non-profit organizations can be myopically focused on revenue stream, and once they are, lose sight of everything else that matters.  According to Hayek, central planning doesn’t work. Maybe not, but neither does non-centralized “planning” that fixates myopically on Excel spreadsheets full of fake values populating irrelevant variables in service to the bottom line.

Lesson 2: The noose of government largesse
For years, libertarians have warned of the dangers of government funding of scholarship on the premise that he who pays the piper calls the tune. For years, such libertarians were derided as tight-fisted meanies who wanted to wreck academia with their skin-flinty, limited government approach to austerity (or worse). I’m not a libertarian myself, but we’ve now seen that libertarian position vindicated in spades. Who has wrecked academia? The tight-fisted libertarians? Or the spend-thrifty liberals who never saw government largesse they were unwilling to lap up?

Had left-leaning academics seen the writing on the wall and built their own version of, say, Hillsdale College, they wouldn’t be in this situation.* But they didn’t. Now, government funding has become a noose around academia’s neck, and the question is how to escape strangulation. What bright ideas do these spendthrifts now have for escape? Another government program?

Alma Mater, Columbia University (photo credit: Nowhereman86, Wikipedia)

Lesson 3: The reality of Zionist thought control
For decades we’ve been told that the idea of “Zionist control” of anything is an anti-Semitic “trope” that no one is allowed to discuss on pain of expulsion from respectable society. The phrase “Zionist control” calls to mind The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anything that does that is anti-Semitic. Anything anti-Semitic leads to Nazism and the death camps. Therefore there is no such thing as Zionist control of anything. Zionists control nothing. They have no control over any feature of American politics or life. Zionism is a totally benign expression of the benign nationalism of powerless, penniless people totally lacking in influence.

Let me just state the blatantly, blindingly obvious: Virtually every aspect of the government’s attempt to take over Columbia is an expression of sympathy with Zionism and with Israel in its current incarnation. Virtually all of it is motivated by a desire to immunize Israel and Zionism from criticism, and virtually all of it targets the critics of Israel and Zionism–students, faculty, staff, visitors, everyone.

Neither Columbia nor the government itself has made any attempt at all to come to grips with the thousands (probably tens of thousands) of pages out there that document the brutality of Israel’s occupation before October 7, and its genocidal behavior afterwards. The premise of the government’s attack on Columbia is that all loyal Americans are obliged to support Israel regardless–including its descents into apartheid, martial law, murder, sexual assault, robbery, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. If you don’t, you’re an anti-Semitic, Hamas-supporting Nazi, your rights are up for grabs, and attempts should be made to shut you down, deport you, imprison you, and ultimately, get rid of you. Apparently, we’re all just supposed to accept this without resistance of any kind. But none dare call it “control.” 

I don’t care who this offends: what happened at Columbia–both the government’s demands and the capitulation to them–is a policy of control motivated by a belief in Jewish supremacy which is, as far as I’m concerned, what Zionism is and has always been. Put simply: Zionism now controls American political discourse to the point where anti-Zionism is now openly, explicitly proscribed by government and corporate decree.

The time has come to cut through the pro-Israeli blackmail and defamation and state the obvious for as long as it takes to make it obvious. This is what control looks like and is. If all that the word “control” does for you is to bring to mind “tropes” of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it’s because your mind is systematically out of touch with reality. Nobody needs The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or some outré conspiracy theory to state the obvious, happening directly in front of our faces. What we’re seeing at Columbia and elsewhere is a specifically Zionist form of McCarthyism. There’s no way to fight the adversary without naming it. And fight it is what some of us intend to do. 

Sorry to disappoint, but: the Palestine movement isn’t going anywhere. The anti-war movement isn’t going anywhere. The campus movement isn’t going anywhere. You can threaten us, gaslight us, arrest us, fire us, imprison us, deport us. Wherever we are, wherever we go, resistance will arise and find its way to you. Trump is right about one thing: this is just the beginning. The corollary is that we’re a long way from the end. 

*There are, of course, notable, laudable exceptions to this rule, like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and Deep Springs College. My point is that there ought to be more.