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TEACHING AT TRUMP’S VERSION OF COLUMBIA  
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Helen Benedict
November 11, 2025
LA Progressive
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_ The university at large has sold out our students. But there are
hundreds of faculty on this campus dedicated to the right of our
students to learn, debate, protest, research, and report without fear.
_

Columbia University, Photo by Scott Rudd

 

On September 17, 2025, one month before I was to teach my annual
social justice reporting class at Columbia University’s Graduate
School of Journalism, the campus lowered its flag to half-mast
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in honor of far-right pontificator Charlie Kirk.
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Nobody deserves to be murdered, as Kirk was, but to honor a man of his
White supremacist
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Christian nationalist
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and misogynist
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beliefs was to spit in the face not only of all the women on campus,
but of students and staff of color; the queer and trans students and
employees whose identities he characterized as “abominations
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the Muslims whose religion, he said, “is a sword being used to slit
the throat of America
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immigrants he insisted will “replace us” with their “anti-white
agenda”
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and the Jews he accused
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of controlling America’s institutions.

Columbia did not have to lower that flag. Trump ordered federal
institutions to do so, but the university is private, not part of the
government. No, lowering the flag was a choice.

That Columbia made such a choice is nothing short of astounding, given
that its past two years of capitulations
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to the Trump administration have rested upon the school’s promise to
protect its Jewish students and staff from antisemitism. As our
current acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote
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to the university community this past summer in classic Orwellian
double-speak:

_“While Columbia does not admit to wrongdoing… the institution’s
leaders have recognized, repeatedly, that Jewish students and faculty
have experienced painful, unacceptable incidents, and that reform was
and is needed.”_

So why honor a man who espoused Nazi
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conspiracy theories?

I bring this up because this flag business was only the latest example
of the groveling submission Columbia’s trustees have shown toward
this country’s proto-authoritarian
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government since the 2023 student protests against Israel’s genocide
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in Gaza gave Republicans the idea of using accusations of antisemitism
to attack liberal
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arts colleges.

Allow me to illustrate with a brief history of this groveling.

THE FIRST YEAR OF CAPITULATION: 2023

In 2023, not long after the horrific Hamas attack on Israeli citizens
and Israel’s insanely outsized retaliatory slaughter of tens of
thousands of Palestinians, Columbia called in the police against our
nonviolent student protesters, locked down the campus for the first
time in history, and suspended
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both its own and Barnard undergraduates, most of them teenage girls,
in punishment.

That same year, Columbia’s administration allowed Trumpian Christian
nationalists to define
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who was antisemitic and who wasn’t. It succumbed to and accepted the
right-wing false narrative
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that the campus was rife with Jew-haters. And it refused to stand up
for the Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and Jewish students who were being
harassed, threatened, and doxxed
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on and off campus for protesting Israel’s murderous policies.

THE SECOND YEAR OF CAPITULATION: 2024

In 2024, Columbia groveled even more. It kept the campus locked down
(as it does to this day). It put in place so many rules governing
protests that it effectively squashed
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ability of students to voice their opposition to Israel’s genocide,
or even to the government of President Donald Trump. And it refused to
offer any support to Palestinian students Mahmoud Khalil
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and Mohsen Mahdawi
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when they were arrested and detained by ICE in violation
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of their First Amendment
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rights, or when their visas were revoked
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Other universities have not been so cowardly. For example, when Bard
College student and Afghan refugee Ali Sajad Faqirzada, who had fled
the Taliban regime with his sister, was arrested
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and detained by ICE at his asylum hearing this October, Bard President
Leon Botstein offered him instant support. He contacted the
student’s family, mustered local officials to help the family, and
sent a letter to the government advocating for Faqirzada’s release.
He also issued a statement
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vowing to stand up for Faqirzada and informing other Bard students of
their rights. These were the kinds of morally sound actions we have
yet to see from any of our presidents or trustees at Columbia.

THE THIRD YEAR OF CAPITULATION: 2025

In 2025, after Trump and his minions snatched $400 million
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away from Columbia, crippling the ability of our scientists and
medical researchers to do their work, the university’s capitulations
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plummeted to even greater depths.

It suspended and even expelled
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antiwar students for having protested on behalf of slaughtered and
starving Palestinians by occupying the campus library.

It agreed to comply with Trump’s ban on DEI (diversity, equity, and
inclusion) by no longer using “race, color, sex, or national
origin” when hiring anyone or even when admitting students, thus
giving in to the Trumpian goal of creating a university largely filled
with White, heterosexual, Christian men.

It put the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department
under special provost supervision or receivership.
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It agreed to pay
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more than $200 million over the next three years in blood money to the
Trump administration to restore our funding. (Is it a surprise that my
colleagues and I had our salaries frozen this year? And what will
Trump do with our school’s money — build a villa in Gaza?)

Columbia also agreed to pay a further $21 million
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to — in the words of the White House PR machine — “resolve
alleged civil rights
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violations against Jewish employees that occurred following the Oct.
7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.” I am sure not a penny of that
money will go to Palestinian employees and students whose family
members were wounded or killed in Gaza, or who suffered from
Islamophobic harassment from other students and outsiders. Nor is it
likely that any of that money will be given to the many Jewish
students who were manhandled, arrested, and punished for protesting
genocide.

Columbia made other concessions as well, too numerous to list here.
But among the most egregious was its incorporation
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of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA
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definition of antisemitism, which conflates any criticism of the state
of Israel with hatred of Jews. This set off alarms among many of our
faculty members, Jewish and otherwise, who know that scholars have
long rejected
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the IHRA definition as restricting free speech and academic freedom,
and as nakedly anti-democratic.

Yet, in a summer letter
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to Columbia’s faculty and staff, President Shipman not only proudly
announced the school’s incorporation of IHRA, but made it clear that
any of us who don’t comply with that definition could be brought
before the University’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) and
censored or even fired.

Under that directive, Columbia ought to haul itself up before the OIE
for the act
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of lowering its flag for antisemite Charlie Kirk.

Adding insult to injury, Columbia’s Task Force on Anti-Semitism
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committee of professors who spearheaded the dubious claim that our
campus was riddled with anti-Jewish sentiment, offered not a peep of
objection to the campus lowering of that flag. When I asked one of the
Task Force’s architects why, he told me that the committee “does
not issue statements.” The hypocrisy of a university that forms a
task force against antisemitism and then honors a man like Kirk is, to
put it mildly, mindboggling.

Columbia’s faculty members have hardly remained silent in the face
of all these capitulations. Many of us, including a large cohort of
Jewish professors, have protested, rallied, held vigils, and met with
our rapid rotation of presidents, as well as with the school’s
trustees, to try to urge academic integrity for our campus and protect
our students’ right to debate, question, and protest.

One of the most recent of these faculty actions occurred on September
29th, when a group of professors, most of them Jewish, gathered at the
sundial in the center of campus to speak out against this adoption of
the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. I joined to watch and listen,
while the crowd around them grew.

The speakers explained why the IHRA makes it impossible for them to
teach classes on the history of Israel and Palestine, on Islam, or
even on Middle Eastern history in general, and leaves any of us who
teach anything someone might deem critical of Israel vulnerable to
being punished for discriminating against Jews — even if we are
Jewish.

One of the speakers, Professor Emeritus Marianne Hirsch
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the real-life dangers in IHRA’s conflation of criticism of Israel
with the hatred of all Jews:

_“This conflation has made the preferred definition of the Israeli
state, the Trump Administration and authoritarian forces throughout
the world who seek to silence those who stand in solidarity with
Palestine. The IHRA definition has been cited as the basis for
reporting international students, Trump’s travel ban, defunding
universities, arresting protesters and even targeting human rights
organizations.”_

Hirsch then added, “Please note that the incorporation of IHRA was
not part of Columbia’s deal with the Trump administration.”

In other words, its incorporation of IHRA was a pre-emptive
concession. Like lowering that flag for Kirk, it was a choice.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

To top off all these concessions, Columbia made a truly chilling move.
Last summer, it agreed to appoint an “independent monitor
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to play the Orwellian Big Brother
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role of watching to make sure that we faculty comply with all of the
above rules. The agreement
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states that this monitor, chosen jointly with the Trump
administration, will have access to “all agreement-related
individuals, facilities, disciplinary hearings, and the scene of any
occurrence that the monitor deems necessary,” as well as “all
documents and data related to the agreement.”

The reaction of the American Association of University Professors
(AAUP), the closest thing we have to a union, was swift and dramatic.
Calling the appointment of this monitor an unprecedented disaster
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AAUP issued the following statement:

_“Allowing the government to monitor and ultimately dictate
decisions about the hiring of faculty and admission of students is a
stunning breach of the independence of colleges and universities and
opens the door for the ideological control this administration so
eagerly craves. This is an extremely dangerous precedent that will
have tremendous consequences for the sector.”_

In a clear-eyed assessment
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of what Columbia’s concessions really mean, several authors at the
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia wrote this last August:

_“The settlement is an astonishing transfer of autonomy and
authority to… an administration whose disdain for the values of the
academy is demonstrated anew every day. It will have far-reaching
implications for free speech and academic freedom at Columbia.”_

The authors went on to say in academic jargon what many of us had been
saying all along: when you give a bully what he wants, he only demands
more. “Indeed,” they concluded, “the settlement itself gives the
administration an array of new tools to use in the service of its
coercive campaign.”

It makes me wonder what comes next. Flags with Trump’s face on them
all over campus? Forced pledges of allegiance to him? After all,
Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein did it. Why not Donald Trump?

“AFFLICT THE COMFORTABLE AND COMFORT THE AFFLICTED.”

For now, however, we faculty are stuck with Columbia as it is. In my
case, this means that I must teach social justice journalism not only
under the cloud of the Kirk aftermath, with professors and employees
being fired
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or chased
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out of the country for daring to criticize that purveyor of hate
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but with the IHRA sword of Damocles dangling over my head.

Social justice journalism is essentially about covering the ways in
which the powerless are oppressed by the powerful — that is, a
manifestation of Joseph Pulitzer’s mantra that journalism should
“afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” This means
that just about every topic my students will cover flies in the face
of all that the Trump government wants to suppress and might well come
up against Columbia’s new rules, too.

What if one of my students should want to cover the deportation
hearings
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for Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance? Or a speech
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the once-imprisoned Mahmoud Khalil? Will even a mention of a
Palestinian activist be deemed antisemitic now? Will quoting someone
who criticizes Kirk or Israeli Prime Minister
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Benjamin Netanyahu be grounds for expulsion? Can we report on Planned
Parenthood or transphobia
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the ICE persecution of Brown and Black immigrants, the ongoing climate
catastrophe, environmental racism
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violence against women, or Islamophobia? Can we talk about social
justice at all?

However, the aspect of teaching that worries me the most is how
Columbia’s capitulation will affect my students’ trust in one
another. I don’t want anyone to be afraid that someone will snitch
on them and get them punished, suspended, expelled, bullied online,
deported, or otherwise silenced. I want to foster a culture of
camaraderie and trust in my classroom, not suspicion and fear.

But students are afraid. Just a couple of weeks ago, I spoke on a
campus panel to a group of young women undergraduates of color,
several of whom are international students. They told us that (with
reason) they’re afraid to protest, post anything political, or speak
out at all. They’re afraid that their visas will be revoked, their
degrees and futures whisked away. They’re afraid of being kidnapped
from campus and disappeared by ICE.

This makes me worry that my students, too, will censor
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themselves out of fear, a dangerous scenario indeed. A journalist who
is afraid to publish the truth or question power can’t be a
journalist at all.

That said, there is nothing like sitting in a classroom full of
journalism students to give one hope. It’s uplifting to know that
there are still young people out there who want to be reporters, who
are dedicated to evidence-based facts, who have compassion for the
downtrodden and still see journalism as essential to upholding
democracy. Such students represent the generation that is going to
have to claw back capitulations and hold onto integrity in the face of
truly hard times.

So, yes, the university at large has sold out our students. But the
university is not all of us. There are hundreds of faculty on this
campus dedicated to the right of our students to learn, debate,
protest, research, and report without fear.

The task now is to keep up their courage — and our own fight.

_HELEN BENEDICT, a professor of journalism at Columbia University and
the author of the novel __The Good Deed_
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a 2025 finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, has been writing
about war and refugees for more than a decade. A recipient of the 2021
PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and the Ida B. Wells
Award for Bravery in Journalism, she has also written 13 other books
of fiction and nonfiction. Her new novel __THE SOLDIER'S HOUSE_
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will be published next Spring. _

* Columbia University
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* faculty
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* Resistance to Trump
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