The screaming headline was prophetic: “Trump’s Policies Shake Academic World and May Reshape U.S. Culture.”
My first reaction was YES, that’s the whole point!
The president aims to shake up the arrogant, radical university system and save taxpayers money at the same time.
Somebody finally gets it, I thought.
Alas, that headline appeared in The New York Times, and writer Alan Blinder definitely doesn’t get it.
His article was drowning in doom and gloom.
“If the President realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors,” he wrote.
Unfortunately for Blinder and others with a pornographic-like addiction to seeing Trump through the darkest possible lens, their version of Armageddon is a big step closer.
Within hours of the article’s publication, Columbia University agreed to all of Trump’s demands to protect the civil rights of Jewish students and others who don’t subscribe to the school’s hard-left indoctrination against America and Israel.
By also agreeing to ban face masks during demonstrations, give 36 campus police officers the power to arrest students and appoint a senior official to oversee two faculty departments that are hotbeds of antisemitism, Columbia presumably gets to keep the $400 million in grants and contracts Trump threatened to cancel.
Money talks, who knew?
Falling in line
Most important, with some 60 other schools in the federal crosshairs for similar misconduct, including Harvard, Penn and Northwestern, a clear settlement pattern has now been established.
Bet your bottom dollar the other schools will fall in line.
They can’t afford not to.
Like Columbia, they are addicted to federal money.
Without it, much of the research they do wouldn’t be affordable.
And without that research, which ranges from the hard sciences to social sciences, and carries global implications in such areas as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, the schools would not be able to attract the best and brightest talent.
But even allowing for the fact that Columbia caved because it would be a shadow of itself without taxpayer funds, the agreement is a tremendous victory for the US and for common decency.
It is obscene how far elite universities have strayed from their basic missions.
Many schools have become propaganda factories that turn impressionable young minds against their own country and Western civilization itself.
That gushers of taxpayer money have been crucial to this abomination was a scandal that few outsiders appreciated until Trump connected the dots.
Thankfully, he didn’t merely complain about the terrorist-supporting professors and the kaffiyeh-wearing students who called for the elimination of Israel.
And he didn’t regard it as acceptable that classes would be disrupted, buildings seized and Jewish students harassed and intimidated as the crazies played out their hateful fantasies.
Nor did Trump stop with just threatening the cash cow.
His double-barrel approach became clear with the arrest of and the plan to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia grad who led protests on its campus last year and the Barnard campus as recently as this month.
Although the left would have you believe the bid to revoke Khalil’s green card and send him packing violates the First Amendment, the administration cites his alleged “activities aligned to Hamas” as the reason for his removal.
It is also seeking to deport a Cornell student on similar grounds.
Momodou Taal, who has a student visa, has been asked to surrender to ICE.
‘Not a suicide pact’
These are not free speech cases.
They are about actions that oppose American policies and interests and we are not obligated to welcome those who came here to do us harm.
As the late Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg eloquently declared in a 1963 case, “the constitution is not a suicide pact.”
The campus crackdown is long overdue and serves as the latest reminder that elections have consequences.
Among the many differences between Trump and Joe Biden, this is another very important one.
Biden ignored the radicals when he wasn’t tacitly agreeing with them that Israel, not Hamas, was the problem in Gaza, as if the horrors of the Oct. 7 invasion never happened.
Similarly, Kamala Harris, when she became the party’s nominee, looked away from the attacks on Jews in a pandering bid to win the support of Muslim voters in swing states.
In fact, with the exception of New York’s Rep. Ritchie Torres and a few others, nearly all top Democrats simultaneously denounced Israel and were silent in the face of the antisemitic mobs at home.
While Republicans in Congress were condemning Ivy League presidents for failing to protect Jewish students in the face of clear intimidation, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was privately telling the same people to “keep heads down” because their “problems are really only among Republicans,” according to a message Schumer sent that was released last week.
Even now, most Dems are opposing the White House bid to rid campuses of those who openly support terrorists and call for the death of Jews.
The rush to protect Khalil is a continuation of a shameful pattern.
But thanks to Trump, college leaders no longer have the luxury of keeping their heads down and ignoring Republicans and the travesties unfolding on their campuses.
With a new sheriff in town, resistance would be very, very expensive.
$5B in fed contracts
Columbia, for example, gets about 25% of its operating money from Washington, and reportedly has federal contracts valued at $5 billion over several years.
The prospect of losing even $400 million in a first round of penalties set off alarms bells and led to disputes in faculty meetings about who would lose their sinecures if Trump turned off the spigot.
Meanwhile, other schools on the list imposed hiring freezes over the possibility they would also have to absorb major cuts.
Already some of these schools are facing budget problems because the White House, in a bid to save money, plans to limit the overhead funds that follow federal grants.
Those added funds can be as high as 75% of the grant itself and are used to pay for everything from turning on the lights to hiring assistants.
In some cases, the grants are treated as slush funds for star faculty members and university leaders.
A Trump plan in the works would limit those added funds to 15% of the underlying grant, which is adding to the campus panic.
Naturally, some members of the academic ecosystem are losing their minds over the changes and see Columbia’s surrender as the end of the world.
That implies a childish fantasy that it’s unfair to attach conditions to taxpayer money.
Baloney.
Besides, what Columbia agreed to are things it should have been doing all along.
But nothing would have changed if Trump hadn’t dropped the hammer.
All the pleading and scolding and jawboning in the world would have come to nothing without his threat to take away the money.
Well done, Mr. President.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
