GUEST POST: We Are Professors at Columbia. Here is How We Would Respond.

Five Columbia University political scientists offer their unofficial response to the Trump administration's demands on their university.

Photo by Chenyu Guan on Unsplash

Everything that has been posted on Drezner’s World over the past two and a half years has been the product of the hard-working staff here — until today.

In response to the Trump administration’s bevy of actions taken against Columbia University, it would be safe to say that scholars at Columbia — and everywhere else — are figuring out how to respond. Below is a response by five Columbia University political scientists to the demands made by the Trump administration late last week. Let me turn the floor over to them:

We are a group of political scientists at Columbia, who have no role in university-level administration. We understand that university administrators at Columbia and beyond are shouldering the enormous burden of calibrating their responses to the Trump administration’s open attack on the autonomy and financial viability of American higher education institutions. We do not claim to speak for the university or its leaders. We are writing in our own names to imagine how we would respond to the Trump administration’s letter of March 13. We emphasize that this does not constitute an official statement of the university.

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We write in response to your letter of March 13. Over the past year, a broad range of faculty, administrators, and students from all across our university community have invested enormous time and effort to address, in good faith, the concerns raised in your letter. We will continue to address legitimate concerns about Title VI in accordance with our principles and with federal law, and we expect the Department of Education and other relevant federal agencies to conduct Title VI investigations in accordance with the procedures set out in the relevant federal statutes. We refer you to the analysis of our Law School colleagues, who comprehensively examine the compatibility of your letter with Title VI itself.

No institution, composed of real people with different views, is perfect. The problems on our campus are real and complex, but in no way justify the targeted, menacing, and disproportionate sanctions and threats that the government has leveled against our university and against individual members of it. Your letter, moreover, ignores the concerted, ongoing effort our community is making to confront hate.

As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” Living with the conflict of these opinions is the price of liberty. And while it may not make the news, Columbia students and faculty representing a wide range of viewpoints respectfully engage with difficult issues and debates every day, in classrooms, dorm rooms, cafeterias, conferences, and seminars.

The government’s cancellation of federal grants disproportionately affects the university's medical school, which was not the site of campus protests. Harming medical research exposes these sanctions for what they are: pretexts for this administration’s self-defeating attack on American higher education.

Let us be clear-eyed about what you are willing to sacrifice in launching this attack, which will touch every university campus. Universities improve the lives of Americans far from their gates every day: in hospitals and clinics that treat patients, in laboratories that generate life-saving breakthroughs, in businesses that leverage the technologies that scientists pioneer to create prosperity and jobs, and in countless courtrooms, embassies, and meeting rooms where jurists, diplomats, and business leaders defend our country’s interests around the world. Universities are one of the engines of American greatness.

Likewise, those who stand to suffer the most from actual or threatened funding cuts to Columbia and other universities are among our society’s most vulnerable, including first-generation college students who depend on federal loans and grants, patients who depend on the cutting-edge care that university medical communities provide, clerical and custodial staff, and small businesses in broader university communities across the country. In short, gutting higher education through funding cuts will harm ordinary Americans completely unconnected with last year’s protests on college campuses.

Your letter informs us that compliance with its list of “immediate next steps” is a “precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.” In other words, we can only begin to discuss restoring funding to our vital research, service, and educational missions if we comply with your demands for changes to our internal structures and procedures.

Columbia has already implemented many reforms and that process is ongoing. We will continue to tackle these difficult questions in accordance with our principles and with the law.

But to take these actions under financial threat from the government, without due process, and with no guarantee that compliance will not produce a new set of demands, would establish government control inside a private university. No private university can fulfill its mission while subject to government micromanagement and minute oversight of its research activities, internal governance, personnel matters, and curricular decisions.

Originally established as King’s College, our institution was reborn in 1784 as Columbia College in the wake of the American Revolution. Since then, our nation’s bedrock system of civil liberties, hard-won in war and protected in our Constitution, has guided our mission. Columbia will remain the college of no king.

Allison J. Carnegie, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

Virginia Page Fortna, Harold Brown Professor of US National and Security Policy, Columbia University

Turkuler Isiksel, Associate Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

M. Victoria Murillo, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Columbia University

Elizabeth Nathan Saunders, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University