Columbia needs to stop doing politics and start doing higher education

Last month, FIRE released a report on Columbia University’s disastrous year titled “What Went Wrong: Columbia’s Year-in-Review,” in which FIRE examines 2023-24’s campus events, administrative decisions, and student survey data to find out just how dismal the speech climate is there. (Very. Columbia was #250 in our rankings–out of 251 colleges!)

Columbia was the birthplace of the pro-Palestinian encampments that started this spring. Campus leaders, including then-President Minouche Shafik, handled the situation so poorly that it ended only when the NYPD stormed a building taken over by the protesting students and arrested more than a hundred of them—56 years to the day after they stormed the same building because of anti-war protests in 1968.

You will notice the words “then-president” in the preceding paragraph. That’s because Shafik resigned after only a year in office, preferring to return to England and take up a part-time advisory position with its government rather than continue in the (usually) coveted position of Ivy League president. 

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Columbia’s mistakes were a direct result of making ill-considered decisions based on political calculation rather than the fair and consistent application of its policies and principles. As FIRE’s report explains:

When the protests hit, Columbia wasn’t ready, and that’s inexcusable. As a result, it was forced to change its policies, or its enforcement of those policies, in reaction to fast-moving events. Whether or not they actually are politically motivated — and in Columbia’s case, they certainly were — such changes will always appear to be politically motivated, undercutting confidence in both the decision-makers and the policies.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce released its own report erasing any remaining doubts that Columbia was playing politics when it was supposed to be running an institution of higher education that would best benefit all of its students and faculty members.

If you ask a politician for advice, you are going to get political advice.

As The Washington Free Beacon reported, Shaifik wrote in a January 2024 Whatsapp message to other Columbia leaders that she had spoken with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who reportedly told her that universities’ “political problems are really only among Republicans,” and that his staff recommended that the “best strategy is to keep heads down.”

In hindsight, the best strategy was most certainly not to “keep heads down.” Not just because it failed miserably on every level, but because it was wrong.

This is not a partisan point. If you ask a politician for advice, you are going to get political advice. And while politics no doubt factors into the job of a university president, college leaders must understand that they owe allegiance to a deeper set of principles than the question of how to most quickly escape from a PR crisis or build a coalition of 51% of constituents. 

Columbia’s leaders were consulting politicians on what to do when they should have been doing the job of an academic leader: thoughtfully considering their policies and principles and then applying them fairly and in a way that will best advance the search for truth. Columbia is an institution older than the United States itself, and may well continue to exist (like so many European universities) even after the nation that nurtured it is gone. It’s not too much to ask university leaders to be proper stewards of that legacy.