Obedience Didn’t Protect Columbia From Trump’s Attack on Higher Ed

Research funding is supposed to fuel discovery, tackle societal challenges, and push the boundaries of human knowledge. In President Donald Trump’s hands, it’s a ransom note.

Last week, the Trump administration gutted $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University in an effort to punish the school for allegedly failing to reign in campus antisemitism.

With these slashing cuts, Trump is setting a dangerous precedent for the independence of the academy from hostile political intervention. While this assault on higher education shows no signs of letting up, Harvard must recognize that an obedient posture won’t protect universities.

Combating antisemitism — on college campuses and elsewhere — is of course a worthwhile pursuit. But let’s not pretend that these haphazard cuts do much of anything to protect Jewish students or advance the academic mission of universities. It’s hard to see how students — or anyone else for that matter — will be helped by the $250 million worth of announced National Institutes of Health grant cuts, which could potentially devastate lifesaving medical research.

Instead, Columbia’s students and faculty — along with university leaders across the country— are left gripped with uncertainty about the future of their work. And that’s precisely the point.

Trump’s newest round of higher education funding cuts are less about combating antisemitism than strongarming universities across the country into submission and suppressing pro-Palestinian speech.

Don’t take our word for it. Vice President JD Vance has openly declared that “The Universities are the Enemy” while Trump has repeatedly condemned campus protesters. The cuts at Columbia are only the latest salvo in their assault.

The worst irony? Columbia tried to appease the Republican crusade. It cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests apparently with the naive hope that obedience would spare it from retribution. It didn’t.

That should be a warning to Harvard. Trump and his allies have made it clear that their punitive approach to Columbia is not the exception but the rule. Concessions won’t ensure our university’s safety — they’ll only enable more attacks.

So rather than scrambling to appease a federal administration that treats academic independence as a threat, Harvard must do what’s best for its students. When setting campus policy, it should heed the recommendations of its antisemitism and Islamophobia task forces — not the ideological inquisitors in Congress.

Columbia is the most recent victim of the right-wing attack on higher education. It won’t be the last.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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