Getting schooled

Mahmoud Khalil

Last Saturday, federal immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a US legal resident who led anti-Israel protests at Columbia University in New York last year.

It was a well-chosen opening move by a media-savvy administration, guaranteed to get saturation coverage on television and to go viral on social media. Khalil is a wildly unsympathetic character to many Americans – Hamas' attack on Israeli civilians precipitated the war in Gaza. Its abuse of hostages, its use of Palestinian civilians as shields for pitched urban battle, are war crimes that legitimately disgust. The Columbia protestors voiced support for Hezbollah and Hamas.

The US State Department designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1997, during the second Clinton administration. George W. Bush signed an executive order just after the 9/11 attacks that make it a crime to provide "material support" to a terrorist organization.

You might imagine that the Trump administration and DHS would argue that Khalil provided material support to Hamas by protesting in its favor. In fact, they don't. Khalil has been charged with no crime. The argument before the court is, essentially, that legal permanent residents – green card holders – in the US have no right to free speech. They can be arrested, their status can be revoked and they can be deported for activities that I could engage in freely under the First Amendment.

Columbia

It would be hard to find a university that did a worse job than Columbia at responding to student unrest over the war in Gaza. Its own report on events admits that Jewish students were harassed, verbally abused (including by faculty in classrooms) and subject to physical violence. Those failures led to the resignation of Columbia's president, Minouche Shafik, and the appointment of Katrina Amstrong as her interim replacement.

Armstrong has, to all appearances, taken the prior failures seriously and worked hard to establish policies and practices that protect all students. Damage done, however, is easy for the Trump administration to attack.

Last Friday, the day before Khalil's arrest, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced that the Trump administration was cancelling $400M in federal funding to Columbia. The cuts were, she said, due to Columbia's earlier failures to protect Jewish students during the pro-Palestinian protests, notwithstanding the leadership change at the school and Armstrong's work to repair the situation.

It's not clear yet exactly what grants and funding will be cut. Research programs? Scholarships and tuition assistance? Something else? Faculty and administrators will no doubt scramble for the next few months as they try to budget for the 2025/2026 academic year. And, undoubtedly, the University will contest the cuts in court.

Will it work?

It's hard to know whether Khalil will be deported. The question is whether Constitutional rights extend to all legal residents, or merely to citizens. I believe deeply that everyone here legally should enjoy those protections. I hope that the courts – and this case is likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court – agree with me. But my confidence in our judicial system has been weakened, so I will wait to see.

If the administration is allowed to deport Khalil, the essential question will be: Who's next? In that case, the administration will no doubt expand its attacks to a much broader population that Trump dislikes or fears. I expect citizens, not just residents, to be targeted. The rule of law will be badly compromised.

It's possible that funding for Columbia will be restored, though the process of fighting for it may make the question moot for the coming academic year. A four-month negotiation between the school and the government, or a year-long legal case, would put the funds practically beyond reach for classes beginning in the fall.

I argued last week that the tech-bro playbook of delay and deflection does just as damage in government as it has elsewhere in society. That conclusion extends to this case: Columbia may win at law but lose on the ground.

But these two actions aren't really about Khalil or Columbia.

Trump and MAGA know that the better-educated you are, the likelier you are to embrace liberal values and policies. They want to eradicate what they claim are left-wing indoctrination camps. The simplest way to do that is to control what students and faculty are allowed to say.

And that's already working.

I talked this week with a foreign-born faculty member working at a major research university in this country. This person is on a green card, the same program under which Khalil is here.

Last Friday, students and faculty and others in the community gathered in "Stand Up for Science" protests nationwide. The day was meant to demand that the federal government fund important scientific research in all kinds of fields, all around the country. My contact spoke in public as part of the campus' protest, arguing against Trump executive orders and policies.

Khalil's arrest was a shock. The faculty member had scheduled international travel, but has canceled those plans. The prospect of being confronted by INS on re-entry over speech and political views poses a new, and very real, risk. Speaking up is much more dangerous now.

The threat of retaliation for mere speech – arrest, deportation – has silenced a member of that university's community. That threat means the person won't be able to visit family or do work outside the country.

That is deeply offensive.

By the way, this chilling effect doesn't just apply to academics who live in the US. Increasingly, foreign researchers working in other countries are refusing to travel to the US, wary of confrontations at the border and unwilling to support an isolationist and hostile government. This will chill international cooperation on research and undermine US academic excellence, but that is a post for another day.

The direct threat to individuals is reinforced by the explicit funding threat that the Trump administration wields against "woke" universities. My alma mater, UC Berkeley, was on the list of schools targeted for investigation of anti-semitism when the sanctions against Columbia were announced. Our former Chancellor, Carol Christ, did an exemplary job of handling student unrest and protecting the school population, so that threat seems to me mere bluster, but it cannot be disregarded. Threats to funding and the morass of an investigation will pressure schools to pressure students and faculty to censor themselves even further.

That is clearly the Trump administration's intent. It is clearly working.

You might argue that the moment calls for conviction, and that folks should speak up despite danger. Real people have real lives, though, real jobs and real families that they need to protect. It's perfectly rational to be careful when you're threatened, implicitly or explicitly, by the full weight of the federal government. I started this blog because many of my CEO peers have been publicly silent about the policies of this administration. CEOs as a class are far richer and more powerful than college professors and students.

Freedom of speech and freedom of association are so fundamental that they are enumerated in the very First Amendment to the Constitution. They're the opening salvo in the Bill of Rights. This administration's abrogation of those rights isn't merely anti-conservative. It's anti-American.