'Heartbreaking': Columbia tears itself apart in a futile struggle to make nice with Maga

Confronted with a hostile government, the liberal bastion at first capitulated then seemed to backtrack.

- Andrew Gumbel

When the Trump administration first sought to eviscerate Columbia University's funding and independence - the opening salvo of what has quickly metastasised into a wider war against higher education in the United States - nobody at the august New York institution could say it came entirely as a surprise.

Months before Trump was elected to a second term in November, Republicans in Congress were accusing elite colleges, including Columbia, of tolerating rampant antisemitism among students protesting against Israel's war in Gaza, and they threatened a "fundamental reassessment of federal support" - everything from cancelling medical research dollars to lifting their tax-exempt status - if this did not change.

The incoming vice president, JD Vance, was on record, saying: "We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country". And, in December, Max Eden from the American Enterprise Institute recommended that the new administration "destroy Columbia University" - a "prize scalp", Eden said, "to scare universities straight".

Yet when the moment of reckoning came - a threat last month to cancel $400m in funding if Columbia did not accede to demands including putting its Middle Eastern, South Asia and African Studies department under new supervision - the university made no attempt to fight back. It didn't even complain about immigration enforcers, who had begun targeting international students - some but not all involved in the campus protests - by stripping them of their visas and hauling them into detention.

Instead, the university trumpeted its concessions mostly on campus security and cracking down on students' right to protest as things it was largely planning to do anyway. "These changes are real," the interim president, Katrina Armstrong, insisted on 25 March, "and they are right for Columbia."