Columbia’s Settlement

I am still recovering from sinus surgery. Thanks for your prayers and well wishes. I especially needed to hear the words, “be still,” repeatedly. I listened. And I haven’t done much over the last week. I did read about Columbia’s settlement with the Trump administration, and it got me thinking.

The University agreed to pay a $200 million fine over the next three years and an additional $21 million to settle an investigation launched by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Columbia did not admit to any wrongdoing in its handling of the claims about antisemitism. Although the interim president, Claire Shipman, said that the school “recognized, repeatedly, that Jewish students and faculty have experienced painful, unacceptable incidents, and that reform was and is needed.”

Now I am still digesting the particulars of the settlement. I am trying to figure out the role of the independent monitor and what it portends for universities and colleges generally. And, of course, Columbia has agreed to end its DEI programs or, as it was stated, to no longer “maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets or similar efforts.”

With all of this, I keep asking myself why these institutions are capitulating to the Trump administration’s accusations and demands. Just think about it. Five years ago, we saw and heard so many leaders of universities and in the corporate world declare their commitment to racial justice and, in a blink of an eye, we find ourselves smack in the middle of another Lost Cause.

I can only conclude that people were lying or were simply driven by sentimentality where admission of guilt was sufficient for absolution. People pushed too hard and some behaved like bulls in a china shop, I suppose, and Trump gave white folk an excuse to do what they wanted to do in the first place. Now the country is in a full-blown spiral.

And the fact that Columbia settled, even without admission of guilt, doesn’t bode well for American higher education.

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In the end, I reject the claims motivating Trump’s attack on universities and colleges. He believes antisemitism and DEI have overrun American education. That the student protests after the horrific events of October 7^th proved that places like Harvard and Columbia were rife with Jew-hating students radicalized by “wokeism.” Anyone who works at a university, and I have been a professor for thirty years, knows this is not true. Of course, there are disruptive elements among the student body, on the faculty, in the administration and on boards, but generally, these are vibrant spaces for the free exchange of ideas – where students get to risk themselves as they shake off old prejudices and find their own voices.

I keep thinking about those student protests, though. The encampments, the taking over buildings, the demands. And I wonder what those protests look like with the viewpoint from here. Gaza starves. Babies are dying from malnutrition. Netanyahu and the Likud Party are overrun with bloodlust. Peter Beinart reminded the country that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu last November for the war crime of starvation. Eight months ago. Before Israel cut off all food, water, and electricity to Gaza.

No matter what you think about the form of their protests, the students saw something, and they spoke out passionately. Isn’t this a desired outcome of an effective education – not to stand by silently or with indifference when confronted with evil and tragedy?

How might we situate those protests then with the reality of what we know is happening right in front of our eyes? What does it mean that conservative forces used the cudgel of antisemitism to crush students and to bludgeon universities into submission? And that some who know better allowed it to happen? And, what does it suggest that these institutions aren’t pushing back with all of their power against the lies that justify the assault?

I keep waiting, and I know it doesn’t make much sense, for someone to decry the idolatry of state worship: that the state of Israel ought not shift the center of gravity of what it means to be Jewish or what it means to identify with the liberatory power of the Jewish tradition. God matters, still. Traditions matter.

I keep wanting white America, and I know it is a fool’s dream, to stop capitulating to this nonsense – to stop giving in to the illusion that safety can be found in whiteness. I want the country to open its calloused heart to the suffering of others. But the historic question haunts, “Is God gone?”

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