Columbia professors protest policy changes after Trump administration’s demands
By Lisa Rozner
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NEW YORK (WCBS) — Columbia University professors gathered Monday to push back against sweeping policy changes after the Ivy League school agreed to several demands by the Trump administration in an effort to restore $400 million in federal funding.
At a separate rally, protesters argued the changes intended to combat antisemitism on the Columbia campus don’t go far enough.
Monday was the first day back from spring break on campus, and the American Association of University Professors held a vigil outside the gates. They said they dressed in black to mourn the loss of academic freedom, holding signs that read, “Hands off our students, faculty and research.”
“The administrators are going to be susceptible to political pressure in a way the faculty are not. Faculty have tenure, we can’t be sanctioned for the decisions that we make or for our academic speech,” said Michael Thaddeus, professor of mathematics at Columbia and vice president of the American Association of University Professors.
The Student Workers of Columbia, a union for teaching assistants and researchers, protested outside the campus’ main entrance. They want it to become a sanctuary campus.
“The business interests of the university are winning over student rights,” said Jed Holtz, with the Freedom Socialist Party. “They’re targeting immigrant student workers who are the most vulnerable.”
Columbia’s interim president announced last week the university would make several changes that were requested by the Trump administration, including hiring 36 new special officers with arresting power, modifying the disciplinary process and appointing a new senior vice provost who will review programs like the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Israel and Jewish studies.
“Scholars and students who are working in that area are going to be under a kind of special scrutiny that is not merited by anything that’s happened on this campus,” said Dhananjay Jagannathan, an assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia.
The university hopes the Trump administration will now restore the $400 million in federal funding that it pulled.
At their protest, professors from the Columbia American Association of University Professors argued academic freedom is at risk.
“Once the president and the provost have unilateral control of discipline, then much more political pressure is going to be exerted on them,” Thaddeus said.
Eliana Birman, a Barnard College student, is a fellow with the organization End Jew Hatred, which is calling for the Trump administration to withhold additional funding. She believes Columbia needs to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.
“It can lead to a lot of these protesters saying that what they’re doing really isn’t antisemitism,” Birman said.
In a statement, End Jew Hatred said in part, “[Columbia] is unwilling to specifically prohibit the most problematic types of disruptive protests, merely saying that ‘protests in academic buildings…are generally not acceptable.'”
The group also said Columbia’s language about agreeing to prohibiting masks is vague and limited, and that the school failed to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said over the weekend she believes Columbia is on the right track to unfreeze the funding, and that the federal government was “working on it.”
CBS News New York reached out to the Trump administration to find out when, but we have not yet heard back.
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