Columbia University Historians Warn of Trump’s Threat to Academic Freedom

Members of Columbia University’s History Department have sent a letter to the university president and Board of Trustees, urging resistance against the Trump administration’s attempts to influence university policy. Their letter follows reports that Columbia is nearing a deal to acquiesce to the Trump administration’s demands — which include a major crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters on campus — in exchange for the restoration of $400 million in federal funding.

“As faculty members of the Department of History at Columbia University, we recognize in the recent actions of the Trump Administration a desire to assert political control over the university,” the historians wrote. While not an official statement from the department, the letter was signed by 41 of its approximately 50 members.

On March 7, the Trump administration revoked $400 million in federal research funding from Columbia, alleging that the university had violated Title VI by failing to address the “persistent harassment of Jewish students.” On March 15, the administration sent what Columbia professor Sheldon Pollock described as a “ransom note” to the university, outlining a series of conditions that Columbia must meet in order for the funding to be restored. Pollock, writing in The Guardian, called it “the most dangerous letter in the history of higher education in America,” arguing that the Trump administration seeks to “destroy the independence of American higher education.”

Despite the risks, The Wall Street Journal reports that Columbia is nearing an agreement to comply with the administration’s demands, which include banning masks on campus, implementing a plan to punish student protesters, and placing the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership,” stripping faculty of control. The administration has also called for the university to expand the authority of campus police to “arrest and remove students” — a demand that comes just days after a Palestinian student protester was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from his Columbia-owned apartment after pleading with the university for protection.

Columbia’s historians emphasized in the letter that while academic freedom at the university has been endangered before — citing incidents such as faculty dismissals during World War I, expulsion of a student protester against Nazism in the 1930s, and repression of anti-apartheid demonstrations in the late 20th century — this situation is fundamentally different. “Authoritarian regimes always seek to gain control over independent academic institutions. That is what we see unfolding now,” they warned.

Recently, Michael Ignatieff, former president of Central European University (CEU), drew parallels between Columbia’s predicament and his own experience resisting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s attempts to expel CEU from Budapest. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, he recounted being called by a university president whose institution faces severe federal funding cuts, endangering its medical school and research labs. While he did not name the university in his article, his description strongly suggests Columbia.

“The question the embattled university president asked, in effect, was how a university fights an authoritarian regime,” Ignatieff wrote. His advice: build alliances. “Make the case to the public that these attacks are senseless assaults on institutions that promote what America is famous for: life-saving science and world-class innovation.”

However, some critics argue that Columbia’s recent actions — such as authorizing police to conduct a brutal raid of pro-Palestine encampments, surveilling student protesters and punishing them through a secretive disciplinary committee, revoking student’s degrees for participating in protests, and failing to protect its students from politically-motivated deportation — have alienated potential allies.

“With each act of oppression, the bar for respect of human liberties and the freedom of academic spaces wanes,” CUNY professors Heba Gowayed and Jessica Halliday Hardie wrote in an article for Truthout earlier this month. “We must all insist, vocally and without fear, that colleges and universities recommit themselves to the principles of academic freedom and free expression before it is truly too late.”

Columbia’s historians echo this warning. They argue in their letter that compliance with the administration’s demands will not only endanger academic freedom, but historic scholarship itself.

“We call on scholars, students, administrators, and staff here at Columbia and around the world to reject such efforts to dominate colleges and universities,” the letter says. “Such interventions jeopardize our ability to think honestly about the past, the present, and the future, and to do so with our students, who deserve every opportunity to learn and to think for themselves.”

The Wall Street Journal has noted that compliance with the government’s demands does not guarantee the reinstatement of federal funds. A letter from the Trump administration last week described meeting its nine demands as merely a “precondition for formal negotiations” and outlined further “immediate and long-term structural reforms” it expects from Columbia.

“Should this control be realized, here or elsewhere, it would make any real historical scholarship, teaching, and intellectual community impossible,” the historians say in the letter.

Columbia is not the only university currently facing federal pressure. The Education Department is investigating 60 colleges and universities for “antisemitism” — which has been redefined to target people who are protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza — and sent notices to more than 50 institutions regarding their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Additionally, on Wednesday, the administration announced that it was suspending approximately $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over a transgender swimmer who last competed for the school in 2022.