It was a vague 44 -word demand towards the end of the ultimatum of Trump’s administration at Columbia University this month that orders a dramatic review of imports and disciplinary rules. But it could prove to have consequences for colleges and universities at national level.
With $ 400 million in canceled government grants and line contracts, federal officials ordered Columbia’s administration to place the Middle Eastern Studies Department of the University under academic forced management for at least five years.
Usually, a forced management is treated internally. Universities can take the rare step of imposing the measure when a section goes down to chaos. It is regarded as a final position solution in extensive periods of internal conflict and dysfunction.
This time it is different. The call for management management comes from outside the university – and directly from the White House. And it arrives at a time, when dozens of other colleges and universities face federal research and are afraid of a fate similar to Columbia.
“It’s a small department at a university,” said Sheldon Pollock, a retired former president of the Middle East Study in Columbia. “But it will resonate across the country.”
The interdisciplinary program at the center of government demand-the part of the Middle East, South Asia and Africa-has been in battle for decades for the scholarship and employment of the members of the school that describe themselves as anti-Sionist.
Several historical and veteran professors have said that the federal government’s move to intervene in an academic department at a private university would be unparalleled in the modern history of US Higher Education.
Laurie A. Brand, Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California, who described the department as one of the most respected in the field, compared the transition to the central government of the Turkish Government of Higher Education during its “harsh authoritarian” 2010.
“I certainly do not remember a case in the United States,” said Dr. Brand, chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee at the Middle East Studies Association, an organization of scholars focusing on the region.
The swirling questions about the future of the department have emerged as the latest crisis for Columbia, where pre-Palestinian demonstrations against the war in Gaza triggered a national protest movement and moving debate on freedom of speech and anti-Semitism. The federal government accused the university last week of failing to protect students and teachers “from anti -Semitic violence and harassment”, calling for changes that include the school that formalizes the definition of anti -Semitism.
The government said it had expanded its deadline by the end of Friday for Columbia to respond to its ultimatum, which would include the offer of a timetable for the placement of the Middle East Studies Department under forced management.
College administrators across the nation are closely monitoring if Columbia acts with appreciation or disobedience.
Since higher education institutions face federal control, many see the dispute over the department as a high-stage test case for other Middle Eastern curricula-and other efforts that could perform conservative orthodoxy, such as centers for its centers.
Dr. Pollock described the “invasion” of the government as “jaw-pontic” and “a historical and amazing event”.
Such a move would mark “the beginning of the end of the American University, as we know it since 1915”, the year that the American University Teachers’ Association first codified the guidelines and practices for academic freedom.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Education, one of the three federal organizations named in the letter to Columbia, did not answer questions about the management reasoning.
In a letter to the university on Wednesday, Columbia’s provisional president, Katrina A. Armstrong, seemed to recognize the growing concern about how the school could respond.
“They can ask legal questions about our practices and progress and we will answer them,” writes Dr. Armstrong. “But we will never endanger our values for pedagogical independence, our commitment to academic freedom or our obligation to follow the law.”
President Trump has previously hosted Middle Eastern curricula for possible bias, including his first term. The Department of Education, according to its former head, Betsy Devos, ordered the University of Duke and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill to repeat the Middle Eastern curriculum, accusing them of providing students with a biased curriculum.
It was an example of the indefinite conflict over the Middle East studies, which has a historically inspired debate, in part because discipline can highlight the academic scholarship that is launching Israel into negative light. In some institutions, students, teachers, graduates and donors have been separated from the distinction between anti-Sionism and anti-Semitism in such work-and if both must be regarded as separate issues.
The Campus of Manhattan of Columbia-and the part of about 50 members of the Middle East, South Asia and African studies-was a hot spot for these differences.
The section was a central focus of a 2004 documentary called “Columbia Unbecoming”, which interviewed students who had taken lessons in the Department and describe that they are treated by the members of the School for their pre-Israeli views. Its central dissertation, which has been strongly debated, depicted a systematic silence of Jewish students in campus culture.
During the last 17 months of the battle in Gaza, the section has undergone a renewed wave, including a high -profile hearing for anti -Semitism last spring.
Some Republicans in Congress have questioned some members of the School, including Joseph Massad, a professor of Palestinian Christian descent, who teaches modern Arabic politics and spiritual history. Many students and graduates were outraged into an article he wrote after Hamas’ attack, which included descriptors such as “offensive resistance” and “terrible”.
Michelle Steel, a former Republican spokesman from California, said during the hearing that the article showed that the department was “extremely hostile to both Israel and Jewish students” for more than two decades and asked if the school would “consider it”.
Nemat Shafik, President of Columbia at that time, avoided an immediate answer. “The academic departments in Columbia are – there is not really a concept of management,” replied Dr. Shafik, who resigned in August.
Some Jewish organizations in recent months have called Columbia’s leadership to revise the department. Kenneth L. Marcus, founder of the Brandeis Center in Washington, DC, said that many Jewish students had “just warned to avoid the program completely over the past two decades”.
It may be questionable if academic forced management is the answer, Mr Marcus said. He also called it a landmark for federal officials to recognize “that the campus problem cannot be resolved without a school solution”.
Columbia’s president, Gil Hochberg, did not respond to commentary requests.
It remains unclear what academic forced management can entail. Several supporters of academic freedom have raised concerns in interviews that the government could seek to influence the choice of a new chair of the department, which could have a wide room to reshape the content of the courses or seek the dismissal of the members.
Others were worried that the move could set a previous one for Trump’s administration to threaten federal funding at other universities over the scholarship it finds. One teacher wondered if the history departments could set fire to lessons that federal officials believed they depicted slavery and separation very negatively.
Radhika Sainath, Palestinian Palestinian Lawyer Legal, who represents Palestinian students in a political rights case against Columbia, said that the Middle East departments were often targeted for punishment or weakness because they were inquiry.
Mrs Sainath has called on the demand for the management of “directly from an authoritarian Playbook where the university attack is the first step” and “any institution that represents the contrast with Trump’s agenda” could be next.
It would not be Columbia’s first experiment with academic forced management. About two decades ago, school administrators put on the Middle East Department under an annual forced management and appointed an intermediate chair in part because of the struggles to find a new leader, Dr. Pollock, former president.
And in the midst of internal disputes about cultural shifts in the study of literature, Columbia’s leaders appointed a scholar from a Pennsylvania University to lead the English department in the early 2000s. A weekly newspaper in New York.
David Damrosch, a professor of Harvard’s comparative literature, who was a member of the English part of Columbia, said the move helped to repair the departments. But he added that a forced management “can be the most dangerous thing that the administration has asked everything”.
For Dr. Damrosch, who has studied academic culture in colleges, the current turmoil is indefinitely reminiscent of an episode of 1940 at school now known as Iowa State University.
The school’s finance department – in a document on the economic policy on the production of warfare – had proposed the replacement of margarine butter, Dr. Damrosch said. The dairy industry and its supporters in the state’s legislative “went ballistic”, he said, pressing the school’s president to place the department forced.
The move sparked an immediate reaction and mass departure of the faculty members.
It can also play a small role in the reform of the landscape of higher education: at least six teachers left in Chicago, where they helped build one of the most famous financial departments in the world.
