Under threat of losing millions of dollars in federal funding, Columbia University has caved to demands from the Trump administration, leaving students and faculty fearing the loss of academic freedom. Adding to those fears, ICE has made multiple arrests of international students at several schools, as well as recent graduates, like Mahmoud Khalil.
This week, Alex Wagner speaks with students and professors at Columbia to discuss the dangerous precedent being set, not just for college campuses as centers of debate and dissent, but for all free speech.
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Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
(Crowd Chanting)
Alex Wagner: It’s been almost a year since the first encampment was established on the campus of Columbia University, the Ivy League school in the Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights.
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Reporter: A stunning scene at Columbia University in New York today, police in riot gear moving in to clear an encampment of students protesting the war in Gaza. Dozens arrested.
Reporter: Lester, right now, press isn’t being allowed on campus. So what you’re seeing here are protests that have spilled over to the public streets, protests that, as you can see, appear to be far from over.
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Alex Wagner: Columbia’s encampments were part of a nationwide student movement to protest Israel’s war in Gaza, and they dominated college campuses for months. But Columbia’s protests, in particular, received international attention. Critics claim the protests were promoting antisemitism, and that claim is something the Trump administration has seized on.
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Donald Trump: I will inform every educational institution in our land that if they permit violence, harassment, or threats against Jewish students, the schools will be held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.
Reporter: This morning, the President wrote all federal funding will stop for any college school or university that allows a legal protest. He says agitators will be imprisoned or deported, and American students will be permanently expelled or arrested.
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Alex Wagner: Very quickly, the White House made good on that promise.
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Reporter: Tonight, a Palestinian activist who helped lead the protest at Columbia University is in ICE custody.
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Alex Wagner: Earlier this month, on Saturday, March 8th, federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate who helped organize the encampment protests last year.
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Reporter: The U.S. government has not charged the Columbia graduate student with a crime. But administration officials have accused him of supporting Hamas and they want to deport him despite his status as a lawful permanent resident, arguing his presence in the U.S. would have adverse foreign policy consequences.
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Alex Wagner: Khalil is a green card holder and his wife who was eight months pregnant at the time is a U.S. citizen.
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Noor Abdalla: Hey, okay, he’s not resisting. He’s giving me his phone. Okay?? I understand. He’s not resisting.
Unidentified Male: He’s only a witness. Don’t worry about him. You’re going to have to come with us.
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Alex Wagner: ICE agents showed up at their door, an apartment owned by Columbia University, and took Khalil away.
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Noor Abdalla: Yeah. They just, like, handcuffed him and took him. I don’t know what to do.
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Alex Wagner: For a short time, Khalil’s whereabouts were completely unknown. He’s now in a detention center in Louisiana, and that’s where he has a pending deportation hearing next month. As Khalil’s case has been unfolding on the national stage, the Trump administration has set its sights on Columbia University, the institution,
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Reporter: The Trump administration is canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University due to what they say is the school’s continued inaction and the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.
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Alex Wagner: In the wake of this, Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, put out a statement, “There is no question that the cancellation of these funds will immediately impact research and other critical functions of the university. These impacts will touch nearly every corner of the school.” But Armstrong also pledged to work with the federal government to restore the money.
About a week later, the Trump administration followed up with a letter demanding the university make several significant changes, among them banning the use of masks during protests, enhancing the campus police force and allowing officers to make arrests, and putting Columbia’s departments of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies under academic receivership. Essentially, this means allowing the federal government to oversee the academic department of a private university, a move virtually unheard of in the United States.
And then, last week, at the very end of Columbia’s spring break —
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Reporter: We have some breaking news coming in right now. Just in the last few minutes, we are learning that Columbia University will give into demands from the Trump administration in order to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. It appears that in some way, shape or form, Columbia has agreed to pretty much all of the president’s demands, including banning mask-wearing, a new definition of antisemitism, and reforms to the admissions process and as well putting the Middle Eastern studies department under so-called academic receivership.
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Alex Wagner: Columbia is an outlier here, but it may also be a predictor as far as the Trump administration and its plan for colleges and universities all over the country. Leo Terrell, who heads the administration’s task force on antisemitism, said as much on Fox News earlier this month.
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Leo Terrell: We are suing every one of these universities, guilty of antisemitism under Title VI. We’re taking away their money mark. We’re going to bankrupt these universities. We’re going to take away every single federal dollar.
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Alex Wagner: As students and professors return to the campuses of Columbia and Barnard this week, a new reality set in. On a rainy Monday afternoon, a group of staff and faculty gathered just off campus.
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Reporter: Columbia University professors fought the rain to rally, urging their employer to defend teaching.
Unidentified Female: And if we, the faculty, the teachers, do not stand up for these values, who can we be for our students?
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Alex Wagner: And the next question might be, if one of the most well-established and well-funded universities in the country can’t or won’t stand up to the Trump administration, what does that mean for everyone else?
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Alex Wagner: On this episode of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner,” we’re going to Morningside Heights to speak with Columbia and Barnard students and their professors about this dramatic moment in their school’s history.
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Adam Kinder: To say it’s a chilling effect would be an understatement. It’s a freezing effect.
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Alex Wagner: And what this turmoil might signify for the rest of the country.
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Nara Milanich: I teach about dictatorships, but I’ve never lived in one. You know, as you say, it doesn’t happen at once, but it does feel like we’ve taken a giant step in that direction.
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Alex Wagner: The reforms that Columbia announced, in response to Trump’s demands, do not ensure that its $400 million in federal funding will be restored. This week, on Monday, the Trump administration responded to Columbia’s reforms, describing them as a positive first step in the university, maintaining a financial relationship with the United States government. Note the use of the phrase “first step” in that statement.
Now, Columbia’s announcement agreeing to these changes came last Friday, at the end of the school’s spring recess. As students began classes this week, we headed uptown to meet a few of them, but not on campus because Columbia has been closed for nearly a year and a half to non-students and non-faculty. So we met up with Adam Kinder across the street from Columbia’s closed gates.
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Alex Wagner: First of all, just tell me what is it like on campus?
Adam Kinder: So to say that campus is charged right now would be kind of an understatement.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Adam Kinder: There’s a lot of division, a lot of chaos. The kind of atmosphere is defined by paranoia, I would say. Everybody is afraid of other students, whether or not they’re going to get doxed, whether or not, you know, ICE is going to show up at their dorm hall, and whether or not the administration is going to be able to stand up for them at the end of the day. It’s definitely a very divided atmosphere above anything else.
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Alex Wagner: Kinder is 20 years old. He’s a junior and the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Political Review.
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Adam Kinder: We’re not a newspaper, but we’re just basically a venue for any students. We’ve got a staff of 220 to share their opinions, to share their commentary. And yeah, that mission has absolutely been threatened by what’s going on.
Alex Wagner: Are people freaking out on staff?
Adam Kinder: Yeah, absolutely. Literally, 10 minutes ago, I got an email from one of our former writers, an alumnus, not a current writer —
Alex Wagner: Oh, wow.
Adam Kinder: — who wanted to have all of our articles taken offline because she’s threatened, because she’s an international worker now. And that’s not new, it’s something that people have been trying to do ever since doxing became a problem on campus, removing articles about Gaza. But, I mean, I’ve gotten at least five of these emails in the past week.
Alex Wagner: And is it about Gaza, or is it just about political dissent generally?
Adam Kinder: It’s definitely about political dissent generally. It’s not restricted to Gaza in the slightest. I mean, this person that just emailed me did so because the articles were about China and how China is going to move forward given the current international situation.
And in my view, that’s not particularly controversial, right? But the reality is that nobody knows what’s on the table. They just don’t want that information, their commentary out there, because they’re not sure what the ramifications of their speech are going to be.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Adam Kinder: But it’s also just speech, in general, that might be considered controversial by the current administration, especially related to China, Iran, any of these, you know, major geopolitical in particular flashpoints, right? And I can only imagine that soon, that’s going to move to domestic social issues, right? Transhealthcare, DEI, I mean.
Alex Wagner: This is presumably, you know, driven by the protest here at Columbia over Gaza.
Adam Kinder: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: But you’re suggesting that the lens, the aperture could widen to include anything from trans rights to DEI. Do you think the university would capitulate on those topics? I mean, do you think that there’s a red line for them?
Adam Kinder: I’m not sure. I think when you’re threatening taking all federal funding away from these universities, anything is on the table. Had Columbia shown some integrity and said, look, we made some mistakes in the past, but were not going to capitulate to authoritarianism or to the dictates of somebody who’s trying to regulate our student speech, I think people would’ve stood up to the task, especially, you know, wealthy donors with an interest in promoting —
Alex Wagner: Free speech?
Adam Kinder: — free speech. It’s the most basic thing. The crux of the problem here is not even, you know, that the university should be taking sides. It’s that you’ve got an entire student body of 30,000 students that are taking on tens of thousands of dollars of life-changing debt, and you can’t spare a penny for our political rights?
Alex Wagner: What does it mean for you as a student here, that this is the new reality?
Adam Kinder: As a student, I feel like I have learned a lot. I will say that this has been the formative experience of my life, seeing all of this unfold, understanding like the political, financial, social dynamics at play on issues like this and at places like this. But I also feel like I’ve aged like 30 years.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Adam Kinder: And I feel like that’s the case for most people on campus, because the stress is unreal. And the self-censorship, to say it’s a chilling effect would be an understatement. It’s a freezing effect.
Alex Wagner: I think there are a lot of people who know Trump’s done a bunch of controversial stuff, but their lives haven’t changed. And the idea that fascism is creeping seems really remote —
Adam Kinder: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: — and really abstract. But when you tell me here that students are not having conversations, are trying to pull their writing off the internet, are only able to have, you know, robust disagreement in side chats that are unmonitored, that to me, smacks very clearly a fascism.
Adam Kinder: It feels that way.
Alex Wagner: People outside the gates, I think, don’t understand what’s happening inside the gates. And like, it’s a different reality, it sounds like for you.
Adam Kinder: That’s absolutely the truth. And I’ll tell you one thing, I originally come from Baytown, Texas, which is about as Trump country can get.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Adam Kinder: My family are Trump supporters. I love them to death and I understand where they come from.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Adam Kinder: We have meaningful disagreements, passionate disagreements. And I know that for a lot of people in this country, it’s not going to be readily apparent what the effect of this self-censorship, these fascist impulses are going to be, right? And a part of that is that the desire is to see like a bull in a china shop, you know?
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Adam Kinder: People are frustrated with the system and the systemic drivers of, you know, the negative things going on in this country that predate Donald Trump, right?
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Adam Kinder: But the solution to that is not to target university students, to blackmail administrations so that they acquiesce to your political agenda. It’s to actually address the root causes of systemic inequality of any of the things driving people’s dissatisfaction with the country as it is right now, which is why I know that what’s happening is not just like antithetical to what they think Trump is about, but antithetical to what they know America is about.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Adam Kinder: And that’s why, you know, every time that I talk to them, I try to appeal to them on that basis, be like, look, I love this country. This is my home, and the number one thing that I was taught about my country growing up is that I don’t have to fear about what I have to say.
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Alex Wagner: Ishaan Barrett is a 21-year-old junior studying political science and urban studies.
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Alex Wagner: Do you feel like you can have the same conversations this week that you did three weeks ago?
Ishaan Barrett: No, definitely not. I mean, I told my mom today that I was going to be speaking with you and she was like, hey, well, make sure you get a list of talking points so that you don’t say anything you might regret. And that there isn’t a way for, somehow, people to link together your criticisms of the university and patch together that, somehow, criticism against Trump, even though I’ve been writing and criticizing these issues now for almost a year and a half.
Alex Wagner: I think the creeping authoritarianism is a concept that seems very abstract to most of this country.
Ishaan Barrett: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: But within the gates of Columbia, it feels like you guys are experiencing it in a pretty real way. The feeling of being under scrutiny, the feeling of being vulnerable is undeniable. And the fact that it’s changing conversations and the way you behave and the way you learn is just not something we’ve had in America in my lifetime.
Ishaan Barrett: Yeah. I think you are right to say that what we do, how we speak, how we work has changed. Yes. But that’s because we are balancing a new and heightened sense of scrutiny. So we are changing how we act. We are knowing our rights. We are paying attention to ICE, and we’re doing more work to try and consider what this $400 million like bombshell of, you know, federal funding means to the university.
But that doesn’t mean we’re changing what we do in the classroom. It’s just how we evaluate the importance of that work against $400 million. That rests on the administration, and they have made a choice and they’re worried that, you know, if they didn’t do anything, if they didn’t treat that letter as legitimate, they would face more cuts. That’s a reasonable assumption to make.
But if you make that assumption, you just can’t have it both ways. You can’t be a great enterprising university and bend the knee to fascism. It’s just not something you can do.
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Alex Wagner: We also spoke with Eliana Goldin, a senior in her final semester at Columbia. Goldin co-chairs a pro-Israel group at Columbia-Barnard Hillel, and she hosts “The Uproar,” a podcast focused on campus antisemitism.
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Alex Wagner: Let me just first get your reaction to what the university decided and announced on Friday last week, about the Trump administration and its demands that the university effectively changed its policies. What’d you think of it?
Eliana Goldin: It doesn’t feel good to have Trump making demands of the university and then the university capitulating to Trump. Like, no one wants that. But the thing is, Jewish students have been asking for these changes for months —
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Eliana Goldin: — and they didn’t listen until Trump came into office.
Alex Wagner: It seems like the feeling among some students that we’ve spoken to is that this is no longer just about Gaza. This is about what we can say and what we can’t say, whether we can disagree with the policies of this administration in a public way. Do you worry about that?
Eliana Goldin: I feel like there are multiple different framings, and you’re focusing specifically on the Trump framing.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Eliana Goldin: Trump getting involved obviously did contribute to that sort of framing, but you can’t take antisemitism out of the conversation and say, oh, it’s all about Trump. Because the reality is that it had nothing to do with Trump in the beginning, and it was all about antisemitism.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Eliana Goldin: And then Trump essentially co-opted this to become part of his own tirade against universities.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Eliana Goldin: Right? I get that that’s the point you’re getting towards. And right, Trump obviously has something out against higher education. But that doesn’t change the fact that the things you were asking for are actually like grossly needed in order to stop antisemitism on campus.
Alex Wagner: Sure. I understand that embedded in this are some maybe changes that you and, you know, people who are aligned with the cause of Israel, believe were necessary and overdue, right? Okay, we seem to making progress on this issue that you care very deeply about. But do you worry about the spillover effect into all that, as you say, on liberalism and academic elites?
Eliana Goldin: Yeah. I would say the spillover is definitely a concern. That’s totally valid. And that tends to be for any sort of extremist movement, whether it’s from the left or the right. Like, fear it getting out of hand.
Federal funding is the reason that Trump is allowed to have a foot in this, right? Like, technically, the money belongs to taxpayer. So we can take that money out if taxpayers don’t want to be paying for it.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Mahmoud Khalil: And “we” meaning the United States did elect him, so he does have the power to do that.
Alex Wagner: Do you think that the people who elected him wanted to see him target places like Columbia and Harvard and UPenn?
Eliana Goldin: Yeah, for sure. I mean I’m from the south and something we talk about a lot is how there’s no political, there’s no philosophical, there’s no ideological diversity at all on college campuses, and they’ve essentially become woke hot spots. And that’s something I do think half of America wanted to see combated.
I think the removal of DEI, for example, was really important to Republicans. This is like really important to a lot of people who feel like their voices are being withheld from institutions like Columbia. He’s not shutting down Columbia, he’s shutting down taxpayer money that’s going to Columbia.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Eliana Goldin: And again, my taxpayer money shouldn’t be supporting anti-Semitic material either.
Alex Wagner: Do you ever worry that Trump is using the charge of antisemitism as a cloak for an acting more —
Eliana Goldin: Of course, he is. And for the record, if they were Black students, let’s say, who were being discriminated against, and President Katrina refused to do anything about it until the President came in and said, you need to stop it or I’ll pull federal funding, that’s something I would totally put my feed behind. And I would also still be worried about the chilling effects of having the president get involved in education. I think all these things can be true at once.
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Alex Wagner: We’re going to take a quick break. But when we come back, some of the teachers who have found themselves in the middle of a battle that none of them thought would happen here.
(Announcements)
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Alex Wagner: Columbia University may have acquiesced to the demands of the Trump administration, but not all of its employees have. This past Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP, filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration. The first filed alongside the American Federation of Teachers, seeks to block any large scale arrests, detentions and deportations of non-citizen students and faculty members who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and other protected First Amendment activities.
The second goes after the Trump administration for unlawfully cutting off $400 million in federal funding. And it alleges that Trump’s threats and coercion at Columbia are part of a clear authoritarian playbook meant to crush academic freedom and critical research in American higher education.
On the executive committee for the AAUP at Barnard College is Nara Milanich, a professor of Latin American history. Professor Milanich is an expert on authoritarian dictatorships, and she joined me at Riverside Park, just a few blocks from campus and a few hours after the lawsuits were first announced.
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Alex Wagner: How do you think about the job that you have at Barnard? You know, teaching young minds, fostering, I would assume, an environment of debate and discussion and open-mindedness —
Nara Milanich: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: — exchange of ideas.
Nara Milanich: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: What’s that like right now?
Nara Milanich: Yeah. I mean, some people think that we should, you know, be on strike and we should not be teaching our classes, and that we can’t act like business as usual. And clearly, it’s not business as usual. You cannot have students being abducted from dorms and pretend like nothing is happening. At the same time, I feel very committed to continuing to have my class because I feel like that is exactly what the nefarious forces, they want us not to do.
Alex Wagner: Does it feel to you like we’re on the precipice of fascism? I mean, does it feel like we’re on the edge of it?
Nara Milanich: I know we’ve been using the F word as it were —
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Nara Milanich: — for almost 10 years now. As you say, it doesn’t at once, but it does feel like we’ve taken a giant step in that direction. You know, I teach about dictatorships, but I’ve never lived in one. And one of the things that I didn’t appreciate before is the fact that living in an authoritarian regime doesn’t necessarily affect everyone in the same way.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Nara Milanich: Right now, it’s immigrant communities, and federal workers, and people at Columbia, and soon to be people at other universities who are being impacted. And slowly, that’s going to grow. Those folks are going to grow. But, you know, I went to my Zumba class the other week and we were all just —
Alex Wagner: Still doing Zumba?
Nara Milanich: — still doing Zumba. And I suspect that, you know, they could dissolve Congress and probably Zumba will keep happening. That’s not a criticism, really. I mean, it is, I think, the way life works. So this feels like it will be concentrated in certain arenas of our lives and it will impact certain people and perhaps less so others.
I remember years ago when I first taught Latin American history and I was still a graduate student, and I was teaching about the dictatorships, and this earnest young man raised his hand and said, I just don’t understand, after I’d explained about these military dictatorships and the repression, and the violence and the fear. And he said, but why didn’t people stand up? How could they let this happen? He could not understand how a society can exist and persist under a dictatorship where lots of people are unhappy. And I think about him all the time now because —
Alex Wagner: Here we are.
Mahmoud Khalil: — here we are.
Alex Wagner: I was talking to a student who is part of the pro-Israel movement and she was like, we’re a marginalized group. I didn’t want Trump to have to step in here, but I’m not going to besmirch the changes that are maybe upfront because we are in need of help. I didn’t want to get it for Trump, but we got it and I would want this for any other marginalized group.
Nara Milanich: Yeah. I mean, first, I want to say that I hear, and I think it’s important to hear and acknowledge people’s feelings.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Nara Milanich: But I also want to say that dictators make for dangerous bedfellows. And we can think of lots of instances in history where some group thought that they were going to benefit from a dictatorship coming to power and getting rid of who they perceived to be their enemy, only to be eaten themselves, right?
This idea that you can somehow hit your fate to authoritarians and autocrats, and then you can hop off the train when you need to get off. There is no hopping off the train. So, you know, you break it, you buy it, you hook yourself to this train. This is the train that you have chosen, and you will live with the kind of historical consequences of your choice.
Alex Wagner: You’re going to the destination all the way.
Nara Milanich: You’re going to the destination all the way. You have to live with the consequences of that.
Alex Wagner: There was a lawsuit filed this morning by the AFT and the AAUP, both teacher-led group, professor-led groups —
Nara Milanich: Yes.
Alex Wagner: — suing the Trump administration over their attempts to withhold this $400 million in federal funding from Columbia. Are you surprised that it’s the teaching staff that is leading this charge?
Nara Milanich: What’s happening here is that it’s really about the trustees that are calling the shots at this moment. It’s not actually the administration of the college. They come from different worlds. They come with different values, and it turns out they’re calling the shots here.
So one of the interpretations of what has gone on at Columbia in the past week that I’ve heard, that I absolutely agree with is that this is not a story about capitulation. It’s a story about collusion. These are trustees who share at least some of the values of the Trump administration and see in this ransom note that was given to Columbia, an opportunity to impose changes that in a million years would have never happened, even six months ago. So they, too, have made common cause, with pretty nefarious elements, who they probably don’t entirely agree with.
You know, the Trump administration has said they want to destroy Columbia. I don’t believe the trustees want to destroy Columbia, but they certainly want to change it. And they think that there is an opportunity here to change, you know, profound, fundamental things about the university.
Alex Wagner: But what does that mean, I mean, from an academic standpoint, to have a vice provost? I mean, how do you think about that change?
Nara Milanich: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s hard for me to think of a prior precedent for such a remarkable development, which is essentially saying that the federal government will have control perhaps over curriculum, over hiring, over tenure decisions. These are the functions of the university and they should remain with the university.
We do not send the federal government into ice cream shops and let them choose the flavors, right? Nor should they be in our business, deciding what we teach or the words we can use on our syllabi.
And the thing that I find so worrisome about this development is that this is merely the first step, right? Once you have a precedent for the government stepping in and taking control over academic matters, presumably it can happen over and over again. And so we can already see how, you know, in social media, they’re ginning up critiques of the gender studies department.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Nara Milanich: Right? The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, we can imagine they’ll be next. Right? We know where this is going to go. And this is really what we’ve been saying for a year now, that this story was never about antisemitism. It was never about Gaza. It was never about Palestine and Israel. It was always about a right-wing strategy. This is a strategy to assert right-wing power within the university.
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Alex Wagner: Not all faculty members were surprised at Columbia’s decision to cooperate with Trump’s demands. Professor Bruce Robbins is a Columbia Humanities professor, who sparked controversy last year after he utilized Columbia’s encampments as a teaching opportunity.
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Alex Wagner: On Friday, when the university announced its position, what was your reaction?
Bruce Robbins: Well, I thought it was going to make the decision that it made. I was indignant, and I know that I share the indignation with lots and lots of other people. But, no, not surprised. And then the surprises came with things like when we found out that Mahmoud Khalil had asked for protection the day before he got abducted from the president, and the president never mentioned his name —
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Bruce Robbins: — and of course, didn’t offer him any protection. So for a lot of us, it’s protection of the students. And then, of course, with Friday, it’s more like protection of the mission of the university. We are here for independent thinking, and you can’t give into the government surveillance of what you’re doing. We’ll look at your syllabi. We’ll look at who you hire. We’ll look at everything. We’ll look in the kind of teaching you do, the kind of people you hire. It’s not the way the university has ever worked.
Under McCarthy, there was a moment when it was a bit like that, when people felt the government was looking over their shoulders and they had better pay attention. And if you had something maybe a little bit, you know, controversial to say, better to keep your head down and keep your mouth shut.
Alex Wagner: Do you think that there are a significant number of professors that want to keep their heads down, keep their mouth shut, just go about their business, teach your class and get out of the way?
Bruce Robbins: I think there are, and I don’t blame them, especially the people who, unlike me, are not senior, and tenured, and protected. If I were a young person right now, given the kinds of pressure that are being brought to bear and the kind of public attention, I don’t know whether I would feel like I could speak my mind. People have their lives to protect. They have families. I understand it.
Alex Wagner: He mentioned the government coming to look at syllabi, looking at what’s taught. I mean, is your expectation that that is what is coming down the pike for you, professors at Columbia?
Bruce Robbins: Well, it is exactly my expectation. I mean, I think that that’s what they’d like, that they feel that universities like this, you know, have been nurturing enemies of their way of looking at the world, which is to say independent thinking of any kind. And they’re taking the opportunity of this strange moment of crisis to clamp down and say, you know, you thought you were free. Well, you’re a lot less free than you thought you were.
Alex Wagner: They’ve cloaked this in antisemitism.
Bruce Robbins: Yes, ma’am.
Alex Wagner: But everyone I’ve talked to believes that this extends and will extend well beyond that, to any topic that the Trump administration deems controversial.
Bruce Robbins: I and most of my colleagues think that they’re using antisemitism as a wedge issue, that they have never cared about the actual antisemitism that’s out there. As a Jewish professor, as a Jew, I would have to say, you know, I don’t think there has been any more antisemitism on the Columbia campus than there is in general anywhere. I think probably there’s a lot less antisemitism on the Columbia campus than there is in most places.
Alex Wagner: What does it look like among faculty? What’s the group chat like right now?
Bruce Robbins: Well, the people that I’m chatting with are very angry and maybe a little bit disappointed. We’re disappointed in ourselves because we’re not very good at organizing ourselves to get anything done. You know, we’re good at complaining. We’re good at our individual projects, projects which are sometimes projects of complaint. But getting together with other people and saying, okay, we’re going to do something. We’re going to get together with other people who want to do something.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Bruce Robbins: We’re not very good at that.
Alex Wagner: What’s your level of optimism? There’s a better ending for this?
Bruce Robbins: I wish I could say that I had more of it. Right now, you’re not catching me at a very optimistic moment.
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Alex Wagner: Columbia University, the institution has taken a fairly clear position in this fight, namely acceptance of the terms that Trump has laid out. As of this recording, the most significant challenge to Columbia’s position is the lawsuit filed this week on behalf of the AAUP and the AFT, alleging that Trump’s actions to cut federal funding are unlawful, and that the broader goal of all of this is to crush academic freedom.
Mia McIver is the executive director of the AAUP, and she happened to be in town the day we visited Morningside Heights.
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Alex Wagner: How strong are the legal merits of your case?
Mia McIver: The lawsuit is based both in the unlawful canceling of the grants.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Mia McIver: Right? There are statutes and policies and procedures in place. You know, the Trump administration’s actions are appropriating congressional authority. So this represents, you know, another escalation in that consolidation of executive power in really despotic and tyrannical office.
Alex Wagner: That’s part of it that isn’t discussed —
Mia McIver: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: — ‘cause I think people have just acquiesced to the idea that, oh, well, it’s federal money, so he can do with it what he pleases. But what you’re saying is actually there’s a procedure he’s not following. This is Congress’ job, not the White House’s.
Mia McIver: Right.
Alex Wagner: You can’t do this.
Mia McIver: What’s really important is that with federal grants, there are protections in place so that there is no partisan interference or coercion.
Alex Wagner: Does it say that explicitly?
Mia McIver: Yes. That’s in the federal statutes. Yes. The Office of the President cannot use this intimidation to make the recipients of the grants conform to their partisan wishes. And that’s what’s so disturbing about the Trump administration’s actions is it’s not just the $400 million at Columbia, it’s billions more nationwide, and it’s the threat of even billions more that could be canceled.
And that is money that ultimately benefits ordinary everyday Americans. That is money that funds cancer research.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Mia McIver: It funds diabetes research. It funds Alzheimer’s research. It funds stroke research. Those federal grants fund the development of cures and therapies that millions of Americans could benefit from when we get sick.
Alex Wagner: This doesn’t begin and end at Columbia and Barnard, right?
Mia McIver: Definitely not.
Alex Wagner: There are state schools that get this money.
Mia McIver: That’s right.
Alex Wagner: This is a national issue. Do you think that academia at large understands that?
Mia McIver: I do think that. I do think academia at large understands that. I think that it’s clear to the people that I talk to that the Trump administration is trying to make an example out of Columbia. They’re trying to intimidate silence, suppress and repress voices throughout colleges and universities. They’re trying to create a domino effect, right?
The Trump administration is betting that the concessions at Columbia will now make it easier for other colleges and universities to make similar concessions. And the Trump administration is targeting 60 other, you know, universities around the country.
Alex Wagner: Well, good luck. See you in court.
Mia McIver: See you in the streets.
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Alex Wagner: Organizations like the AAUP have gotten involved in this issue not just to protect Columbia’s professors, but also the people they teach, the students. Trump vowed that former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest was the first arrest of many to come, and he has delivered on that promise.
So far there have been attempts to arrest at least two other Columbia students, Yunseo Chung and Ranjani Srinivasan. At Georgetown, Badar Khan Suri, a researcher, was arrested on accusation of spreading Hamas propaganda and having close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, accusations his lawyers deny.
And on Tuesday night, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University, was taken off the street, in front of her home, by masked plain clothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security.
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Rumeysa Ozturk: I think they’re here to — I think they’re here to —
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Alex Wagner: By Wednesday afternoon, NBC News had learned that Ozturk had been taken to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, about a hundred miles from the detention facility where Mahmoud Khalil is being held in the same state.
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Alex Wagner: We’ll be back next Thursday with a new episode of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner.” To get this show and other MSNBC podcasts ad-free, be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. As a subscriber, you’ll also get exclusive bonus content. And if you like what you’ve been listening to so far on “Trumpland,” please don’t forget to rate and review this show.
“Trumpland with Alex Wagner” is produced by Max Jacobs, along with Julia D’Angelo and Kay Guerrero. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Our crew included Bill Hennessey on audio, and Katherine McNamara and Andrew Dunn on camera. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Katie Lau. Bryson Barnes is head of audio production. Matthew Alexander is our executive producer, and Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And I’m your host, Alex Wagner. We’ll see you next week.
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