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Once upon a time, while taking my daily afternoon walk through my neighborhood, I could stroll across the huge Columbia University campus from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue, which was always a grassy pleasure. Sadly, that pleasure is now long gone. The campus was closed down in the spring of 2024, amid student protests there over Gaza that sparked a striking set of protests at campuses nationwide and ended at Columbia with the riot police being called in to arrest some of the demonstrators and occupy the campus themselves.
Today, while the police barricades of that moment are long gone, you still can only enter the schools carefully guarded gates and doorways with the right university ID. Out of curiosity, the other day this visibly harmless 81-year-old gave it a well, I guess I better not say a shot but a try and was promptly, if politely, told by the person guarding the gate and checking student IDs to forget about it.
In Donald Trumps America, it seems, security lies in being prepared for the worst, never the best, and protest over whats happening in Gaza, which remains an ongoing nightmare of the first order, is evidently still considered the worst by university administrators in this country. (Mind you, only the other week, during what still passes for a truce, Israel managed to kill a reported 46 Gazan children in strikes across that 25-mile strip of land.)
And in that context, since I certainly cant take you onto the Columbia campus, let TomDispatch regular and Columbia Professor Helen Benedict do so and fill you in on how that school has, among other things, in its own strange fashion capitulated to the world of Donald Trump. Tom
Capitulation at Columbia
Fear and Loathing Under the New Rules
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 in honor of far-right pontificator Charlie Kirk.
Nobody deserves to be murdered, as Kirk was, but to honor a man of his White supremacist, Christian nationalist, and misogynist 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; the Muslims whose religion, he said, is a sword being used to slit the throat of America; the immigrants he insisted will replace us with their anti-white agenda; and the Jews he accused of controlling Americas 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 to the Trump administration have rested upon the schools promise to protect its Jewish students and staff from antisemitism. As our current acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote to the university community this past summer in classic Orwellian double-speak:
While Columbia does not admit to wrongdoing the institutions 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 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 government since the 2023 student protests against Israels genocide in Gaza gave Republicans the idea of using accusations of antisemitism to attack liberal arts colleges.
Allow me to illustrate with a brief history of this groveling.
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