Columbia University reached an agreement with the federal government headed by Donald Trump, incurring a $200 million fine and implementing several significant changes. These include restrictions on its admissions and hiring processes, modified disciplinary procedures, merit-based admissions, and alterations to its curriculum and educational programs.
The Protest
There are no peaceful protests. The protests always embody the very cause they protest. Hence, it was no wonder that Hamas-supporting college students chanting “River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” and a call for global Intifada turned violent, seized campuses, and destroyed not only university property but public property too, all without knowing the meaning of the above two slogans, despite being herded by the virtuous and most intellectuals in academia.
A protest is organized to highlight an issue. It’s an expression of an idea in civil conduct, not of violence or vandalism. But the Left has never been graceful when treated indifferently, let alone when defeated. The reaction of the Left is not new to either Columbia University or the USA. The four-month-long protest and violence after Trump’s victory in his first term, and the four months of protest and vandalism in the wake of the accidental or deliberate chocking of George Floyd, demonstrated this.
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The last time Columbia University faced such disruptive protests was in the spring of 1968, that were contained with the help of the New York City Police Department. The protests erupted over links between Columbia’s affiliation with the Institute for Defence Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think tank affiliated with the United States Department of defence and its involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as concern over an allegedly segregated gymnasium to be constructed in Morningside Park (adjoining Harlem).
In that protest, too, students occupied Hamilton Hall and many other university buildings. The difference between the 1968 protests and those of 2023-25 is that while the former were driven entirely by American students, the latter were conceived and funded by a mix of Islamists and various leftist groups, generously supported by Qatari and Chinese donations.
An ordinary person would wonder about the reasons for not enforcing the law if the protests become violent, especially since Columbia University has its own Department of Public Safety. One doesn’t even have to get into a debate about who they are supporting if they are doing it peacefully. But nothing happened; an unseen ideological paralysis gripped everyone from top to bottom, and paid protestors occupied, encamped, disrupted, and vandalized the university.
The Biden administration’s inaction fuelled the fire. The protest lasted for a year, eventually culminating in a second entry by the NYPD onto the campus and a warning of punitive federal funding cuts from Trump’s office to curtail the violence, which is portrayed everywhere as a “threat” to freedom of expression and an “extortion.”
The Columbia University
Founded in 1754, Columbia is older than the United States that declared its independence in 1776. In every statement by the president of Columbia, acting or otherwise they started with, “Columbia is committed to academic freedom and to the opportunity for students and faculty to engage in political expression—within established rules and with respect for the safety of all.” And yet it took a supposedly rogue and unethical businessman to put some sense of duty and obligation towards their own students.
Since the protests began in 2023, Columbia University has seen leadership changes three times. Minouche Shafik, who served from 2023–2024, resigned following the 2024 pro-Palestinian campus occupation. Following her departure, there have been two acting presidents: Katrina Armstrong, who stepped down on March 28, 2025, and the current acting president, Claire Shipman, who assumed the office on the same date. All these women along with the trustee and swath of highly skilled and educated policymakers failed to deal with their won students and failed to read the situation and predicts it future outcomes.
Most statements issued by these presidents were filled with vague diplomatic catchphrases like “time to heal,” “we can do that together,” “fostering community engagement,” and “challenges of balancing free-speech rights.”
When the violence was at peak on campus much hesitatingly Shafik called in the NYPD, initiated negotiations with student protesters and refused to divest from Israel Cancelled the Commencement and Degree Conferral May 6, 2024, and instead conferred degrees via email. For her actions she was accused of Violating Academic Freedom by the Columbia Faculty of Arts and Sciences, criticizing Shafik’s decisions, including the arrests of students, campus lockdown, and potential plans to fire and investigate faculty members, which they deemed “clear violations” of academic freedom.
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After so much delay and vacillation it must have been hard for Ms. Shipman to reach a settlement with the Trump administration on July 2025 to resolve federal investigations into alleged civil rights violations, primarily centered on accusations of failing to address antisemitism on campus during protests related to the Israel-Hamas war.
The settlement involved a $200 million payment over three years and a series of policy changes to restore federal funding, which had been cut by $400 million in March 2025. Columbia also agreed to a $21 million settlement in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) investigation—the largest EEOC public settlement in almost 20 years. This was paid to Jewish employees who alleged a hostile work environment in the wake of the October 7 attacks, as per the historic EEOC resolution.
If one reads the Columbia University Resolution Agreement, one would wonder why is this not already implemented by the university. For example, Columbia agreed to provide the government, upon request, with information on disciplinary actions against student-visa holders resulting in expulsions or suspensions, potentially facilitating deportations.
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Columbia University, like many elite universities, had diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that considered factors such as race in admissions and hiring, though these were already constrained by the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-based admissions. Now Columbia committed to ending programs that promote “unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets, or similar efforts,” aligning with the Trump administration’s push for merit-based policies.
The root cause of all the left leaning bias The Middle East, South Asia, and Africa Studies department operated independently under faculty control, offering courses that some critics claimed were biased against Israel. The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies were distinct entities, not part of this department, but faced scrutiny during the protests. Columbia agreed to an immediate review of its Middle Eastern studies curriculum to ensure it is “comprehensive and balanced.” This includes reassigning control of the department from faculty to university administrators, a move critics called “academic receivership.
Hurt but in need of federal dole out, Columbia University emphasized that the settlement was not an admission of guilt, and it maintained that the agreement safeguarded its academic independence.
The La La Land of Leftist Politics
Post-World War II, humiliated by the Nazis, Western European academia, especially in France, took refuge in the intellectual sphere. The rise of postmodernist, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist theories—championed by figures like Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes—first sought to transform literary studies, emphasizing skepticism toward established narratives, authorship, or textual stability.
If you wonder why, you can understand by what Sartre said when he was stuck somewhere in France, besieged by Nazis. Sartre claimed that a man is freer in captivity than when he is truly free. In his War Diaries, he wrote that, “Never have we been as free as during the German occupation… Since the Nazi venom snuck even into our thoughts, every correct thought was a conquest…”
And then the largest education market, flush with money and endowment, the American universities, began adopting postmodern, left-leaning theories in their humanities curricula in the late 1960s. These theories were institutionalized in the 1970s and mainstreamed by the 1980s. By the 1990s, these theories—rooted in poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies—were central to literary and cultural studies, reflecting a broader progressive shift in academia.
This was still a better, more organic way to lean left as an intellectual who values free thought. That is why you see young populations, surrounded by eclectic elements, lean towards the Left, even more so now that we are globalized. Long ago, the academia once shook American and, to some extent, world politics during the Vietnam War.
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But things changed with the radicalization of these seemingly invisible left-leaning academia to the full-blown active interference in politics with the rise of right-wing leaders like Modi and Trump. Ideally, there should be no alarm with the Left or the Right, since they are part and parcel of the political ideological spectrum. But the long-standing Marxist ideologues attained a holier-than-thou attitude, being unchallenged for half a century. They should have reacted minimally or abstained from any reaction, as the conservative and right-leaning population everywhere was under the tutelage of the Left.
Things went downhill with a respite from Trump in a weak and completely inept Democratic presidency headed by Biden and followed by woke Gen-Z fortified by wokism with no idea of the history.
A picture surfaced recently of Columbia’s poster boy Edward Said throwing stone at Israel from Lebanon. Throwing stone is an Islamic ritual of “stoning of the devil” during the Hajj pilgrimage which has been appropriated by the radical left as sign of protest. It is ironic that the avant-garde intellectual who fight for superior ideas resorting to physical violence.
Whatever happened to debate.
