As Goes Columbia, So Goes the Nation

Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian refugee and pro-Palestinian activist, received a Masters Degree from Columbia University last year. On March 8th, unidentified ICE agents came to his Columbia-owned apartment in Morningside Heights and dragged him away, leaving his pregnant wife behind. She’s a U.S. citizen; Khalil holds a green card. He is being held incommunicado in an ICE processing center in Louisiana awaiting deportation. After the Center for Constitutional Rights sued on his behalf, a federal judge temporarily blocked Khalil’s deportation, but his future in the U.S. is far from assured.

Before speaking more about his case, here’s a little personal history concerning how Columbia has dealt with protests in the past.

Two years after I got my B.A. from Columbia University, campus protests erupted there over the war in Vietnam, led by SDS, and the school’s plans to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park adjacent to Harlem, led by black students allied with Harlem community leaders. They were put down by calling in the NYPD to clear out occupied buildings.

Over seven hundred protestors were arrested. The Gym was built. The Vietnam War lasted for another decade. I went through an army physical exam and managed to escape the draft.

I supported the protests, but in a way I had been part of the problem. As a sophomore, I had a work-study job in a University office that raised funds for the prospective gym. And as a freshman, I had signed up for the Naval Reserve Officers Training program, another target for protests, even then. The turning point for me was the day that students laid down their bodies to block our platoon as we marched across College Walk. We had to step over the protestors, some of whom I knew. At the end of my second semester I resigned from NROTC and joined their ranks.

And so, last year, when Israel started laying waste to Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1200 people, students at Columbia and across the country responded with protests and counter-protests. Israel’s disproportionate response to level Gaza (killing dozens of Palestinians for every Israeli death), armed and abetted by the U.S., seemed like a mini-holocaust on top of ongoing oppression and displacement of Palestinians, and I said so at the time.

The day after she was raked over the coals by Congessional lawmakers for condoning antisemitic behavior on campus (see this blow-by-blow description in Columbia College’s student newspaper), Columbia’s newly-minted President, Minouche Shafik, lost no time summoning police to clear an encampment of Palestinian supporters from College Lawn, whom she called “a clear and present danger.” She then suspended all students who camped there and told them they were trespassing and to vacate the campus. In over her head, Shafik resigned several months later. A permanent replacement has yet to be named.

NPR put the situation in historical context with this table and other info in a segment broadcast last April:

Mahmoud Khalil was a well-known student activist who had both advocated for Palestinians and served as a negotiator between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli factions at Columbia. And while Secretary of State Rubio has accused Khalil on X of leading “activities aligned to Hamas,” the government has not provided evidence of him having contact with, taking direction from or providing material support to the group.

This is the first shoe to drop in the Trump Administration’s campaign to “destroy” elite “woke” universities under the guise of rooting out antisemitism. The Times reports that White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Columbia had refused to help the administration identify people “engaged in pro-Hamas activities,” adding “We expect all America’s colleges and universities to comply with this administration’s policy.”

Columbia’s founder Alexander Hamilton must be spinning in his grave at the abject grovelling the university has been reduced to after Trump cut $400M in grants to it the day before Khalil was snatched. Even this June 2024 ABC News interview with two Columbia Journalism Professors who co-taught a course on reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict now feels dated and almost moot. One, Ari Goldman, has since retired. The other, Gregory Khalil (no relation to Mahmoud), continues to teach there.

And while I have tried to moderate my words here, I want you to know my blood is boiling at how Columbia has so thoroughly capitulated to this assault on free speech. Not only has the university advised its community to refrain from publishing opinions on events in the Middle East, Mayor Eric Adams and NY Governor Kathy Hochul have washed their hands of Khalil’s detainment, even after Trump vowed that Khalil’s arrest was “the first of many to come:”

“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” he said on social media on Monday.

What it really is, is an an anti-woke, anti-DEI assault on perceived “radicals” Trump’s minions are in the process of rooting out. To the contrary, this may be the most radical assault on First Amendment rights this country has ever seen. If there is no judicial intervention, despite popular outrage many people, not just Columbia’s mouthpieces, will be too fearful to speak up.

Don’t allow yourself to become one of them.

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