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This month, a vague 44-word request was ordered to mark the end of the Trump administration's ultimatum to Columbia University, ordering a dramatic overhaul of hospitalization and disciplinary rules. However, it could prove to bring results to universities and universities across the country.
The $400 million government grants and contract agreement has ordered the Columbia administration to place the University's Middle East Research Division as academic recipients for at least five years.
The recipient is usually processed internally. University administrators can take the rare step of imposing measures when departments fall into disarray. This is considered the last resort solution for long term in internal conflict and dysfunction.
This time it's different. The call for acceptance comes from outside the university and directly from the White House. And we arrive at a moment when many other universities face federal inquiries and fear a similar fate as Colombia.
Sheldon Pollock, retired former chairman of Colombia's Middle East Studies Division, said: “But that will resonate across the country.”
Interdisciplinary programs at the heart of government demands – research sectors in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa have been in a pitched battle for decades over scholarships and employment for faculty members who express themselves as anti-Zionists.
Several historians and veteran professors said the federal move to intervene in the academic departments of private universities is unparalleled in the modern history of higher education in the United States.
Raleigh A. Brand, professor of Emelita at the University of Southern California, described the department as one of the most respected on the ground, comparing it to the Turkish government's centralized management of higher education during the “hard authoritarian turn” of the 2010s.
“I certainly don't remember the incident in the United States,” said Dr. Brand, who chairs the academic committee of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, an organization of academics focused on the region.
Swirling questions about the future of the sector emerged as Colombia's latest crisis. There, Palestinian parent demonstrations against the war in Gaza sparked national protests and animated debates about freedom of speech and anti-Semitism. The federal government last week accused the university of failing to protect students and faculty members “from anti-Semitic violence and harassment,” calling for changes that include formalizing the definition of anti-Semiticism.
The government said Colombia has extended its deadline until the end of Friday to respond to its ultimatum.
University administrators across the country are closely watching whether Colombia will act with respect.
As higher education institutions face federal scrutiny, many view conflicts over the sector as high-stakes test cases for other Middle Eastern research programs.
Dr. Pollock described the government's “invasion” as “a surprising and surprising event.”
Such a move would mark the beginning of the end of American universities, as we know since 1915, the year the American Association of University Professors first codified guidelines and practices for academic freedom.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education, one of the three federal agencies named in the letter to Colombia, did not answer questions about the rationale for the recipient.
In a letter to the university on Wednesday, Colombia's interim president, Katrina A. Armstrong, appears to acknowledge growing concerns about how schools will respond.
“We can ask legitimate questions about our practices and progress, and we answer them,” writes Dr. Armstrong. “But we will never compromise on the value of educational independence, our commitment to academic freedom, or our obligation to comply with the law.”
President Trump has previously participated in the Middle East Studies program due to potential bias, including his first term. The education department accused former president Betsy DeVos of reworking a jointly run Middle Eastern research program at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, violating federal funding standards and providing a student-biased curriculum.
This was an example of a prosecuted conflict over research in the Middle East that had historically influenced the debate. This is because discipline can highlight academic scholarships that cast Israel in a negative view. In some institutions, students, professors, graduates and donors are divided into anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in such work.
The Manhattan campus in Columbia and the research sectors in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, with around 50 people, have become hotspots for these conflicts.
The department was the central focus of the 2004 documentary called “Colombia Ambe Coming,” which interviewed students who took classes in the department and described how they faced threats from faculty due to Israeli views. The intensely debated central paper depicted the systematic silencing of Jewish students in campus culture.
During the last 17 months of fighting in Gaza, the division has been exposed to a new wave of scrutiny, including a well-known anti-Semitism hearing last spring.
Many Congressional Republicans have problems with some faculty, including Joseph Massad, a Palestinian Christian professor who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history. Many students and alumni were furious at the article they wrote after the Hamas attack.
Michelle Steele, a former Republican leader in California, said during the hearing that the article has been “very hostile to both Israeli and Jewish students” for more than 20 years, asking whether the school would consider “putting the department into recipients.”
Nemat Shafik, then president of Colombia, avoided a direct answer. “That's true for Columbia faculties – there's actually no concept of recipients,” replied Dr. Shafiq, who resigned from her post in August.
Some Jewish organizations over the past few months have called for Colombian leadership to overhaul the department. Kenneth L. Marcus, founder of the Brandeis Center in Washington, DC, said many Jewish students have been “simply warned to avoid the program altogether.”
Whether academic receivers are the answer may be debate, Marcus said. Still, he called it a milestone for federal officials to recognize that “campus problems cannot be solved without teacher solutions.”
Gil Hochberg, chairman of the Columbia division, did not respond to requests for comment.
It remains unknown what an academic receiver entails. Several supporters of academic freedom raised concerns in interviews that the government may seek to influence the choice of new department chairs who may have broad leeway to restructure course content or pursue the termination of tenured faculty members.
Others were worried that the move could set a precedent over scholarships that could be deemed disadvantaged by threatening federal funds at other universities. One professor wondered whether the history department could fire because of a course that federal officials believed to portray slavery and separation.
Radhika Sinas, a senior staff attorney at Palestinian Legal, who represents Palestinian students in civil rights lawsuits against Colombia, said the Middle East Studies department is often targeted for punishment or refunds because it challenged the dominant narrative about Israel.
Sainath called it “right from the authoritarian playbook, the first step of the offensive colleges,” and “right from the authoritarian playbook,” where there could be “institutions opposed to Trump's agenda.”
It was not the first experiment at Columbia's academic receivership. About 20 years ago, school administrators placed the Middle East Research Division under one year's acceptance position and appointed some temporary chairs.
And amid the internal conflict over cultural change in literature studies, Columbia leaders appointed scholars from the University of Pennsylvania to lead the Bureau of English in the early 2000s. New York weekly newspapers described their interests in the familiar terms, “Crisis in Columbia.”
David Damroche, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard University who was then a member of Columbia's English department, said the move helped restore the department. However, he added that the hosts “may be the most dangerous thing the administration has demanded of everything.”
For Dr. Damroche, who studied academic culture at university, the current turmoil vaguely reminded me of an episode from the 1940s at a school now known as Iowa State University.
Dr. Damrosch said the school's economics department proposed replacing butter with margarine in its paper on economic policy on wartime food production. Supporters of the dairy industry and the state legislature have “became ballistic,” he said.
The move sparked immediate backlash from teachers and a massive departure.
It may also have played a small role in reshaping the situation in higher education. At least six professors fled to Chicago where they helped build one of the world's most famous economics departments.
