Helen Benedict: 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 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 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 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 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 Israel’s 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.

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 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 who was antisemitic and who wasn’t. It succumbed to and accepted the right-wing false narrative 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 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 squashedthe 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 and Mohsen Mahdawi when they were arrested and detained by ICE in violation of their First Amendment rights, or when their visas were revoked.

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 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 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 away from Columbia, crippling the ability of our scientists and medical researchers to do their work, the university’s capitulations plummeted to even greater depths.

It suspended and even expelled 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.

It agreed to pay 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 to — in the words of the White House PR machine — “resolve alleged civil rights 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 of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) 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 the IHRA definition as restricting free speech and academic freedom, and as nakedly anti-democratic.

Yet, in a summer letter 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 of lowering its flag for antisemite Charlie Kirk.

Adding insult to injury, Columbia’s Task Force on Anti-Semitism, a 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.

Faculty Fight Back

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, a scholar of trauma and memory, pointed out the real-life dangers in IHRA’s conflation of criticism of Israel with the hatred of all Jews:

“This conflation has made [IHRA] 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” to play the Orwellian Big Brother role of watching to make sure that we faculty comply with all of the above rules. The agreement 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, 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.”

When You Give a Bully What He Wants

In a clear-eyed assessment 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 or chased out of the country for daring to criticize that purveyor of hate, 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 for Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance? Or a speech by our former student, 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 Benjamin Netanyahu be grounds for expulsion? Can we report on Planned Parenthood or transphobia, the ICE persecution of Brown and Black immigrants, the ongoing climate catastrophe, environmental racism, 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 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.

---

Copyright 2025 Helen Benedict. First published in TomDispatch. Included in Vox Populi with permission.

Helen Benedict, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of the novel The Good Deed, 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 will be published next Spring and she is a 2025 finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.