Columbia University is ready to work with the Trump administration to combat antisemitism on campus – and all it took was a $400 million cut in federal funding! The New York university is just one of many premier institutions suffering from anti-Israel/Jew activism, an issue the school administration has done very little to address. Columbia and many other Ivy League bastions of leftist thought have prohibited pro-Israel speakers while hosting pro-Palestinian and Pro-Muslim events and largely ignored or shrugged off reports of violent rhetoric, direct threats, and even actual violence against Jewish students.
Such antisemitism is hardly new on progressive campuses, but the conflicts have come to a head after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. President Trump, however, seems to have discovered the solution.
A Change of Heart at Columbia
A joint task force between the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the US General Services Administration warned Columbia University Interim President Katrina Armstrong earlier this month that it was reviewing the college’s federal funding and investigating possible civil rights violations. It got no response, and so the school was informed that $400 million worth of grants was being canceled. Suddenly, both the investigation and the underlying issue of antisemitism were noticed.
“Antisemitism, violence, discrimination, harassment, and other behaviors that violate our values or disrupt teaching, learning, or research are antithetical to our mission,” Armstrong wrote in an email on Friday, as reported by The Daily Caller. “We must continue to work to address any instances of these unacceptable behaviors on our campus. We must work every day to do better.”
What happened to that anti-Jew, pro-Muslim stance left-wing academics are famous for? Turns out, That was the old administration. Armstrong admitted that Columbia University’s disciplinary process “previously only existed on paper,” in what seemed to be an attempt to shift the blame to former Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who resigned August 14, 2024, after just one year on the job.
The pro-Muslim stance has always seemed a strange position to take for the radical left, as most Muslims' social values are quite conservative. Of course, it all makes sense when viewed through the lens of Muslim vs Jew. It isn’t that progressives follow the tenets of Islam, so much as they oppose the Judaeo-Christian values of the Western world that contradict nearly all their beliefs. But the leftist elites of these prestigious universities don’t hate Jews or love Muslims more than they love money, it seems. All it took was the threat of federal funding cuts to bring about a shift in their fundamental worldview. No matter what they may have said in the past, for some, nothing is sacred and everything is for sale.
Rights vs Entitlements – The Left Can’t Tell the Difference
Beneath even the antisemitism, however, lies another issue worth exploring. Columbia is a private university, not a state-run school. So why was it getting $400 million in taxpayer money to begin with? For that matter, why did it need it? The latest data available on the university’s statistics page shows that, in 2023, Columbia had a total of 35,872 students. The Department of Education reports that for the 2022-2023 academic year, students paid an average of $89,587 in tuition and fees for the privilege of attending the Ivy League private university that only accepts about 4% of applicants. If the institution can’t operate on the more than $3.2 billion a year it rakes in from enrollment, is it really worth propping up with tax dollars? And that’s ignoring large private donations, the university's endowment fund – valued at $14.8 billion as of June 2024 – or the tax dollars the university already gets in the form of federal student aid.
Still, there are those who argue that cutting any federal funding as punishment for not addressing antisemitism on campus is a free speech violation. Like so many other entitlements that absolutely aren’t constitutional rights, the progressives genuinely seem to believe that they are owed hundreds of millions in tax dollars for the good work they’re doing in these Ivy League bastions of leftist thought. The irony is that taking money from all American taxpayers, regardless of religious or political beliefs, and using it to fund an institution so adamantly pro-Muslim and anti-Jewish (or, for that matter, pro- or anti-any religion). This comes much closer to violating the First Amendment guarantee that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” than cutting that funding as a response to violent antisemitism being allowed on campus.
And religious/political violence there has been. “After October 7, many Jewish and Israeli students began to report multiple instances of harassment, verbal abuse and ostracism, and in some cases physical violence,” reads the executive summary on a report by the task force at Columbia. “Given the volume of these reports, the Task Force invited all students – not just Jewish and Israeli students – to tell us their stories. Over the course of the spring, nearly five hundred students offered testimonials, at over 20 listening sessions, which provided valuable insights into the campus climate during these troubled times.” Numerous examples were given of threats of violence and chants celebrating violence against Israel and Jews in general. In one instance, a Jewish student holding an Israeli flag was physically assaulted, and the attacker even tried to set fire to the flag while the victim held it!
So how did the university respond? While some staff seemed sympathetic, there was rarely ever any action – and some faculty even declared that these threats of violence and terrorism are examples of “free speech rights.”
Antisemitism Far and Wide
Columbia, of course, is far from the only Ivy League school that has turned against its Jewish students. In October of 2023, a student at Cornell threatened to “shoot up” the college’s Center for Jewish Living, “stab” and “slit the throat” of anyone found within, and a variety of other despicable acts against Jewish women and children that Liberty Nation News will not repeat in print.
A 2024 lawsuit against Harvard, which famously resulted in the resignation of then-president Claudine Gay, exposed how other students and even some faculty members harassed, threatened, and physically assaulted Jewish students both in and out of the classroom, including by calling for the murder of all Jews and the destruction of Israel. “What is most striking about all of this is Harvard’s abject failure and refusal to lift a finger to stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it,” the complaint stated.
A Classic Trump Solution
Since the October 2023 attack on Israel, there has been a boom in antisemitism at many left-leaning institutions, from Princeton to MIT and beyond. President Trump’s funding cuts force school administrators to make a choice: Stick to your guns, keep championing the antisemitic cause, and lose out on millions in tax dollars – or forsake the progressive virtue signaling to protect Jewish students.
And Columbia isn’t alone. The New York Times published a list of ten universities President Trump allegedly hopes to defund over antisemitism: The others are UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Southern California, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, New York University, Harvard, George Washington University, and the University of Minnesota. It’s unclear how much each school stands to lose, but Columbia’s $400 million sets a precedent likely to inspire a whole new perspective in educators and administrators nationwide.
