If you want to see how democracies cede to autocracies, watch as US universities bend to Trump

Irish Times

20-05-2025

Democracies don't turn into autocracies easily or overnight. There has to be a critical mass of true believers – but more important is the critical mass of appeasers. These are the people and institutions who imagine that if they capitulate early they will avoid the worst of it. They cede their own power in the deluded hope that, if they don't fight back, the bullies will leave them alone. And, if they are intellectuals, they smother their humiliation in upbeat, high-flown language.
A case in point is one of the world's great universities, Columbia in New York. It is an American institution, but also a global one: nearly 14,000 international students and more than 3,000 faculty members and researchers at Columbia depend on US government-issued visas and green cards. It also runs joint academic programmes with European universities – among them Trinity College Dublin.
Which makes it a hugely important test case. If a rich and famous institution doesn't stand up for itself, what chance have millions of ordinary people or vulnerable communities with few resources?
I've been looking at the internal messages Columbia's leadership has sent to its staff in recent months to explain – or, more accurately, explain away – its attempts to appease the Trump administration. They exemplify the deterioration of language that is the inevitable side effect of servility.
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Bringing American universities to heel is an important part of Trump's authoritarian agenda. They are centres of independent thought and producers of evidence-based research, neither of which is compatible with the imperial presidency he is creating. In addition, Columbia was in Trump's sights because it has been one of the largest centres of protest against Israel's mass killing in Gaza.
This has provided the very thin semblance of justification for taking over the universities – it is being done, allegedly, to protect students from anti-Semitism. As Simon Schama put it in The Financial Times: 'Coming to the aid of campus Jews was always a pretext. Forgive us if we doubt that presenting the subjection of higher education's independence to an ideological purge, labelled 'defence of the Jews', will work as an antidote to anti-Semitism.'
On March 7th, the Trump administration announced that it was withholding $400 million of federal grants to Columbia, most of it for medical research, while warning that this was the 'first round of action'. Instead of making clear that it would defend its independence, Columbia responded by saying it 'pledged to work with the federal government to restore the funding'.
The administration reacted in typical Trump fashion. It demanded that Columbia concede on the most important principle of any university – academic freedom – before it would even negotiate on the funds. And the university capitulated. It agreed to 'expand intellectual diversity' – code for hiring more Trump-friendly faculty – while 'reinforcing the University's commitment to excellence and fairness in Middle East studies'.
It would also hire a new senior vice provost (implicitly one acceptable to Trump) to 'review' the university's 'Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; the Middle East Institute; the Tel Aviv and Amman global hubs; the School of International and Public Affairs Middle East Policy major; and other University programs focused on the Middle East'.
This is bad enough. Worse, though, is the way it was presented to the Columbia faculty wrapped in a snakeskin of emollient evasion. The university's president told faculty that 'both within and beyond our campuses, we need to understand the sources of discontent with Columbia and identify what we can do to rebuild credibility and confidence with different stakeholders'.
This is what happens when institutions decide to 'work with' incipient dictatorships. They internalise servility, reimagining humiliations as exciting opportunities
In this Orwellian language, the inevitably messy life of an institution committed to intellectual freedom becomes 'sources of discontent'. An authoritarian government becomes a 'stakeholder' with whom the supposed upholders of that freedom have to 'rebuild credibility'.
And once you start down this road, it's all good news. Instead of saying 'we have, under duress, appointed a new vice provost to comply with the Trump administration's demands to supervise our Middle East-related programmes', Columbia management announced that the person in question had been appointed to 'focus on cross-school academic excellence' – adding, as though it were an afterthought, 'starting with a comprehensive review of Regional Studies programs. This work will begin with a faculty committee review of Middle East programs'.
The dean announced that 'we are so excited' that this 'stellar faculty member' will be 'advancing important University priorities on our behalf and in support of the broader Columbia community'.
And then on April 16th, in a cheery email beginning with 'Happy Weekend!' the faculty was told that the university had established a special portal in which they could 'share with leadership as they navigate the challenges of the moment'. The kicker is that 'the portal is totally anonymous'.
In other words, one of the major universities in what used to be called the free world has had to establish a forum in which its teachers can express themselves anonymously for fear of consequences if they do so publicly. This, of course, reinforces the message already sent by the Trump administration's arrests of students
Mahmoud Khalil
and
Mohsen Mahdawi
who protested against the killing in Gaza: if tenured faculty members have to resort to anonymity, wouldn't it be wise for students – especially those on visas – to just shut up?
This is what happens when institutions decide to 'work with' incipient dictatorships. They internalise servility, reimagining humiliations as exciting opportunities. They slide from reassuring themselves that they are merely making a few compromises for the greater good to presenting the abandonment of fundamental principles as excellent news.
And, of course, it's all futile. One of the heroes of this moment is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan university. He had described himself as 'a little neurotic Jewish kid from Long Island – afraid of everything'. But he has had the courage to say: 'If we don't speak up, it's going to get worse. Much worse, much faster ... [Appeasement] doesn't work, because the other side just keeps wanting more and more power.'