[[link removed]]

DOES COLUMBIA STILL MERIT THE NAME OF A UNIVERSITY?  
[[link removed]]


 

Rashid Khalidi
March 25, 2025
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Columbia has long been run more as a business empire than as an
educational institution. Now it’s acting like Vichy on the Hudson.
It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about
silencing Palestine. _

‘After Friday’s capitulation, Columbia barely merits the name of
a university.’ , Photograph: Adam Gray/Reuters // The Guardian

 

It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about
silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students,
and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to. While
partisans of the Israeli-American mass slaughter in Gaza may have been
offended by their protests, large numbers of the students whose rights
of free speech have been infringed upon via draconian punishments were
themselves Jewish.

Many of those faculty members who are about to be deprived of academic
freedom and faculty governance, and perhaps fired, are themselves
Jewish, indeed some are Israelis. If it were ever really about
discrimination, the university would have taken action against the
ceaseless harassment of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and
faculty, and their allies and supporters, instead of endorsing and
enabling it.

This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that
a genocidal 17-month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian
people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October
2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza,
most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing
of the people of Palestine from their homeland. These lies, generated
by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and
our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump
administrations, by the New York Times and Fox News, and have now been
officially sanctioned by a once great university.

These lies are rooted in blatant racism. Frantz Fanon wrote that the
Manichaenism of the colonist sometimes “goes to its logical
conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns
him into an animal”. Indeed, Israeli minister of defense, Yoav
Gallant, in October 2023 called Palestinians “human
animals”. Benjamin Netanyahu
[[link removed]] said of them:
“I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting
to animals.” In this colonial war, through this lens, Palestinian
lives, like other brown and Black lives, are rendered a worthless,
faceless, dehumanized mass, while other lives are uplifted and
individually cherished and mourned.

We should hold on to these thoughts as long as we can, because in the
dystopian world we have entered, simple mention of race and racism
are, or will soon be, violations of the perverse current reading of
federal law. Once the quislings who run Columbia University have
implemented the diktats of their masters in Washington and on the
board of trustees, once these diktats have spread to other
universities under threat, teaching and even quoting Fanon will be
perilous indeed, as will be mere mention of race and racism, not to
speak of gender, disability and much else. We are approaching the
status of Chilean universities under Pinochet, where on the orders of
an authoritarian government, ideas and books were banned, students
were expelled and arrested, departments were taken over, and faculty
and staff fired.

We should not mourn what Columbia has become, for as great as it may
have been, none of this is entirely new. Before the current expulsions
and suspension, Columbia once in its history expelled a student for
non-violent protest: in 1936 for protesting against offering a
platform to Nazis. In 1953 its president signed a letter pronouncing
communists unfit to teach. Columbia trustees fired two faculty members
for opposing the first world war on pacifist grounds, while student
conscientious objectors were arrested and jailed.

Columbia has long been run more like the vast, wealthy business and
real estate empire that it is, than as an educational institution. It
is a place where trustees, donors and powerful professional schools
dictate its policy, not the rest of its faculty. In the spring of
2024, two-thirds of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted no
confidence in a president who bowed to outside pressure, threw her
faculty under the bus, and called in the NYPD for the first time since
1968. Her successor has outdone her, further garlanding Columbia’s
already rich repressive traditions with groveling obeisance to
government dictates that were promoted and eagerly seconded by
shameless collaborators within the university.

After Friday’s capitulation, Columbia barely merits the name of a
university, since its teaching and scholarship on the Middle East, and
soon much else, will soon be vetted by a “senior vice provost for
inclusive pedagogy”, in reality a senior vice provost for Israeli
propaganda. Partisans of Israel, infuriated that scholarship on
Palestine had found a place at Columbia, once named it “Bir Zeit on
the Hudson”. But if it any longer merits the name of a university,
it should be called Vichy on the Hudson.

_[RASHID KHALIDI is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab
studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War
on Palestine
[[link removed]].]_

* Education
[[link removed]]
* higher education
[[link removed]]
* education policy
[[link removed]]
* Trump Administration
[[link removed]]
* Trump 2.0
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* anti-Semitism
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
[[link removed]]
* Columbia University
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Palestinians
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Israel-Gaza War
[[link removed]]
* Oct. 7
[[link removed]]
* Hamas
[[link removed]]
* Hostages
[[link removed]]
* Academic Freedom
[[link removed]]
* Genocide
[[link removed]]
* Ceasefire
[[link removed]]
* Israeli-control
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]