Jewish Academics Slam Trump Attack On Columbia | EUROtoday

Hundreds of Jewish professors, students and college students have signed a letter condemning the Trump administration for canceling $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University and threatening different universities.

Columbia is reportedly nearing an settlement with the Trump administration, which pushed an aggressive slate of calls for on the college that critics mentioned had been a grave menace to tutorial freedom.

The administration has justified the calls for, and the funding cuts, by alleging Columbia has “failed to protect American students and faculty” from antisemitic harassment, along with different unspecified authorized violations.

But the signatories to the “Open letter in response to federal funding cuts at Columbia” argued in any other case — that the cuts did nothing to guard Jews, and actually, might be used to focus on them.

“History teaches us that the loss of individual rights and freedoms for any group often begins with silencing scientists and scholars, people who devote their lives to the pursuit of knowledge — a pursuit that is core to Jewish culture,” acknowledged the letter, which has thus far been signed by over 350 folks. “Moreover, destroying universities in the name of Jews risks making Jews in particular less safe by setting them up to be scapegoats.”

Among different issues, the Trump administration has demanded that Columbia place its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies division below “academic receivership for a minimum of five years,” institute a ban on carrying masks on campus in the event that they’re used to “conceal identity or intimidate others,” and undertake a definition of antisemitism that the administration acknowledged would come with “anti-‘zionist’ discrimination against Jews in areas unrelated to Israel or [the] Middle East.” The administration has additionally demanded Columbia institute new “time, place and manner rules,” which govern protests, and that it “empower internal law enforcement” to arrest “agitators.”

University management has already expelled or suspended a number of college students who participated in briefly taking up a campus constructing final yr. Among these expelled was Grant Minter, the Jewish president of the union representing 1000’s of graduate and undergraduate pupil staff.

Columbia didn’t reply to HuffPost’s questions on a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday that the college was “getting close to yielding to President Trump’s demands.”

Millie Wert, a Columbia spokesperson, pointed HuffPost to an announcement from interim college President Katrina Armstrong, who mentioned, amongst different issues, “we will never compromise our values of pedagogical independence, our commitment to academic freedom, or our obligation to follow the law.” Armstrong additionally pledged to proceed “to engage in constructive dialogue with our federal regulators.”

The open letter’s signatories say they’ve differing views on Israel, the Trump administration and American politics. “What unites us,” they wrote, “is that we refuse to let our Jewish identities be used as a pretext for destroying institutions that have long made America great.”

“Together, we say: Not on our behalf,” the letter mentioned. “Harming U.S. Universities does not protect Jewish people. Cutting funding for research does not protect Jewish people. Punishing researchers and scholars does not protect Jewish people.” The letter concludes by urging the Trump administration to not “dismantle” the decades-old partnership between academia and the federal authorities — “especially not on the pretense of protecting Jewish people.”

Amitai Shenhav, an affiliate professor of psychology on the University of California, Berkeley, was one in every of a number of co-authors of the letter.

“The goal of protecting the Jewish people should not be used as a reason for preemptively taking away funding that’s been promised to these universities for education and research,” he advised HuffPost over the telephone Wednesday.

“The potential downstream effects are looking increasingly grim,” he mentioned, noting “entire labs” have needed to reduce their work and will shut down.

“I think you’re going to see more people choosing not to pursue this career, and the knock-on effects of this will be catastrophic for the community of scholars, researchers and clinicians. It’s just tragic,” he mentioned.

The Trump administration has additionally arrested, and is attempting to deport, Palestinian pupil organizer Mahmoud Khalil, a everlasting U.S. resident who’s married to a U.S. citizen. The administration doesn’t allege that Khalil dedicated any crime; moderately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Khalil’s pro-Palestinian activism is a possible menace to America’s overseas coverage pursuits — an argument based mostly on a hardly ever used, decades-old provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Khalil, who’s presently in immigration detention in Louisiana and anticipating his first little one to be born any day, referred to himself as a “political prisoner” in a letter Tuesday, writing of the immigration detention facility: “Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here.”

Tensions have grown even larger since Israel broke a ceasefire settlement Tuesday, killing a whole bunch of Palestinians in a barrage of airstrikes, based on Palestinian authorities, and re-invading Gaza.

Columbia is way from the one college to face threats from the present administration. The Department of Education lately wrote to 60 universities, warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they don’t fulfill authorized obligations to “protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” The Trump administration has additionally paused $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania — punishment for permitting a transgender swimmer to compete on the ladies’s workforce.

Many see the administration’s actual purpose as degrading tutorial freedom and the college system and cracking down on Trump’s political enemies.

During a 2021 speech at a conservative gathering, Vice President JD Vance — then a non-public citizen — urged the group, “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to, honestly and aggressively, attack the universities in this country.”

Now, with Columbia within the authorities’s crosshairs and dozens of different universities probably subsequent in line, some in academia are calling for a combat.

In The Atlantic Wednesday, Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber warned, “Nobody should suppose that this will stop at Columbia or with the specific academic programs targeted by the government’s letter.”

“Precisely because great research universities are centers of independent, creative thought, they generate arguments and ideas that challenge political power across fields as varied as international relations, biology, economics, and history,” he wrote. “If government officials think that stifling such criticism is politically acceptable and legally permissible, some people in authority will inevitably yield to the temptation to do so.”

The Princeton president urged college leaders to “speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”