Universities exist to promote the discovery, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. While they can help make to make a society virtuous, prosperous, and free, they do so by pursing their mission, which is truth. They can offer their service to government, but it is not their purpose to serve it. If the civil power makes demands of them that are incompatible with their commitment to the freedom of thought, they are bound in conscience to refuse.
In pursuit of its political goals, the Trump administration has attempted to intimidate and extort numerous universities. It has threatened them with with severe consequences, including the loss of federal funding, termination of accreditation, and denial of the ability to enroll foreign students. Some have resisted, filing lawsuits against these unlawful threats. Others have capitulated, including most recently Columbia University.
Columbia’s agreement with the federal government includes a $200 million fine, restrictions on its admissions and hiring processes, modified disciplinary processes, mandatory faculty appointments, and changes to its curriculum and educational programs. No court has held that these changes are required by law, and many of them are seriously inconsistent with Columbia’s purported commitments to institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and a campus environment that is welcoming to all.
Columbia’s actions are immoral, unwise, and dangerous. In the name of compromise with the administration, it has compromised the core values to which universities are dedicated. Worse, it has done so in the face of a widespread authoritarian crackdown not just on higher education, but on all the civic instutitions of a free society: the legal profession, the news media, nonprofit organizations, and many more. Columbia’s failure to defend its own freedoms threatens those freedoms for all. It gives aid and comfort to tyrants, and exposes others to the same kind of extortionate threats.
Universities have institutional moral standing because they stand apart from private profit and public power. The knowledge they produce and maintain is not reducible to the coin of the realm, and so they can legitimately call upon the generosity of others to sustain their mission. The alumni donor who writes a check and the outside reviewer who writes a tenure letter are participating in a gift economy built on payment forward rather than on payment in return. They give purely so that knowledge may grow and continue—or at least that is what the university should be able tell them with a straight face when it calls upon their aid.
Columbia can do so no longer. Along with the $200 million and the laundry list of promises, Columbia has traded away its soul. How can a university that lets the government illegally dictate who it admits and hires tell its faculty and students that they are truly free to think for themselves and say what they believe? It cannot. How can a university that pays Dane-geld promise donors that their geld will not go straight to the Dane? It cannot. How can a university that grovels in the face of demands for ideological control assure speakers that they are contributing to learning and not just the accumulation of power? It cannot.
Or so it seems to me. As an academic, I have committed myself to the mission of the university, to the pursuit of knowledge, to the continuation of the three-thousand-year tradition we have inherited. And unlike the cowards, quislings, and fools who run Columbia, I remember why we do what we do—and what we must not do.
I pledge that I will not provide any service to Columbia University. I will not speak at conferences held at or organized by Columbia. I will not publish with Columbia publications or provide peer reviews for them. I will not provide outside tenure evaluations for Columbia departments. I will not contribute in any way to the institution until everyone who is responsible for this week’s shameful decision has resigned, retired, or been fired, and until Columbia repudiates their catastrophic choice.
Although it may seem like a thin distinction, this is not a boycott of Columbia’s faculty and students. I have many Columbia-affiliated friends and colleagues who are in no way responsible for this week’s debacle—indeed, many of them made heroic efforts to prevent it. They are committed to knowledge and freedom, even if their university is not. I will continue to work with Columbia scholars and speak with Columbia students, as I always have. That too is part of the mission of the university; the community of scholars knows no borders and answers to no authority. It is Columbia the institution that has gone wrong, and it is from Columbia the institution that I withhold my aid.
I have a choice of where I will put my efforts in my limited time on this earth. There are many good causes, both within the academy and beyond. There is no shortage of work to be done, now more than ever. I will do what I have always done, which is what I can. It just won’t be for Columbia.