As the White House’s aggressive offensive against higher education got underway, Columbia University in New York was one of the first schools to embrace a strategy rooted in appeasement. Indeed, in March, Columbia agreed to most of the White House’s demands in the hopes that Donald Trump would restore $400 million in federal funding that the president and his team had cut off.
It didn’t work. Not only were those hopes soon dashed — Columbia didn’t get its money back — but the Republican administration soon after proposed installing oversight personnel to help run the school in ways that would make the president happy.
In effect, the White House responded to Columbia’s appeasement by trying to take over parts of Columbia.
The developments were not lost on other universities — Harvard certainly took note before choosing to fight back against Trump’s heavy-handed tactics — but making matters worse is the fact that the administration wasn’t done with Columbia. NBC News reported:
The Trump administration said Wednesday that it has notified the accreditor for Columbia University that the school violated federal anti-discrimination laws, threatening the university’s accreditation status by saying it “no longer appears to meet the Commissions accreditation standards.”
According to the administration, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights determined that Columbia violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in response to pro-Palestinian protests.
If the school were to lose its accreditation, Columbia would effectively cease to be able to operate as an institution that can grant degrees.
To be clear, the president and his team do not have the legal authority to revoke Columbia’s accreditation, and in this instance it hasn’t actually tried. Rather, the Trump administration wants the university’s accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, to punish the school based on the administration’s alleged findings.
This, in and of itself, is a remarkable step: Columbia’s accreditor is an independent entity. For the administration to intervene like this is a rather radical development that departs from how the system is supposed to work.
But there’s also the larger set of circumstances to consider: Despite the plain fact that Columbia agreed to most of the White House’s demands months ago, they’re still an administration target. The message, to other schools and other institutions, couldn’t be any clearer: Trying to pacify Trump and his team will do little to slow their offensive. For its part, Columbia said in a statement that it is “aware of the concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights today” and that it has “addressed those concerns directly” with its accreditor. “Columbia is deeply committed to combating antisemitism on our campus. We take this issue seriously and are continuing to work with the federal government to address it,” it said.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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