A “Coup” at Columbia? Former Law Prof. Katherine Franke on School’s Capitulation to Trump

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Princeton has become the latest university to be targeted by the Trump administration. The federal government is pausing dozens of federal grants to Princeton. The news came a day after the Trump administration threatened to cut off nearly $9 billion to Harvard over the school’s response to student-led campus protests in solidarity with Gaza. Earlier, the Trump administration had suspended $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania and $400 million to Columbia University. At Columbia, the board of trustees responded by agreeing to a series of demands from President Trump in an effort to keep the federal funding.

This all comes as Columbia is in a state of turmoil. On Friday, Columbia’s interim President Katrina Armstrong resigned as president. Columbia’s board of trustees then elevated its own board co-chair, Claire Shipman, the journalist, to become the school’s new interim president.

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia student protest leader, remains locked up in an immigration jail in Louisiana more than three weeks after he was abducted by ICE agents at his Columbia University housing, after appealing to the president of Columbia to help him. On Tuesday, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled Khalil’s lawsuit should move forward to New Jersey, where Khalil was taken before being sent to Louisiana.

We’re joined now by Katherine Franke, former professor at Columbia Law School.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! So, how unusual is it? I mean, this is now the third woman, the first three women, to be president of Columbia University. First it was Minouche Shafik, and now Katrina Armstrong being fired and replaced by the board co-chair, the board of trustees co-chair?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, what we’re seeing is a continuation and an escalation of the board of trustees of Columbia University basically going rogue. There was also a report issued yesterday by the Columbia University Senate, almost 400-page report, documenting the ways in which the trustees abused their power over the last two years in mismanaging events at Columbia. So, Claire Shipman being appointed, outside of the normal process, president at Columbia is part of that pattern of really a takeover of the university by the trustees, by these corporate officers of the university, who quite clearly have demonstrated that they do not feel any fidelity to protecting our academic mission, but, in a way, are working hand in glove with the Trump administration to destroy that very mission.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Katherine, when you say the board is going rogue, what would be the normal process for the selection of a president at Columbia?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, Juan, I’m glad you asked. I brought Columbia’s charters and statutes with me. And one section within there very clearly says that where a president or an acting president has stepped down, resigned or otherwise stepped down from office, the provost is supposed to become the acting president, until such time as the trustees conduct a regular search, that would involve many stakeholders in the university community. But instead of allowing Angela Olinto, who is the provost of Columbia, who I think is widely well regarded and, I think, would have been welcomed as an acting president by everyone in our community — instead of that, following the rules of the statutes, they appointed their own co-chair of the board of trustees.

And, Juan, I have to say it feels like Columbia University has become the Tesla of the U.S. academic community, where wealthy people buy their way onto the board of trustees and then appoint themselves CEO of the organization, only to ruin the brand of that institution. No one in their right mind wants a Tesla right now, and people are heading for the doors at Columbia. The admissions just went out for the undergraduate program, and the numbers are way down. Students don’t want to come to Columbia. So it feels very similar, that we have this kind of hostile takeover of our institution, the one that you’ve had a long legacy with, Juan, that mirrors what’s happening in other parts of the country, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you about this, the Trump administration’s threat to cut off $400 million in federal funding to the university that forced it to back down on some key issues. Columbia has, by my last reading, a $14.8 billion endowment. It could easily have replaced that $400 million for the four terms of the — four years of the Trump administration from its own endowment, which I suspect that’s what an endowment is for, for emergency situations. What is your sense of how these universities over the last decades, by depending largely on either corporate donors or federal grants, have put themselves in a bind where they’re basically under control by outside forces?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, I think that’s exactly right, that the business model of a university, particularly large research universities like Columbia, is one that has come, over the last many years, to depend so heavily on federal money for its budget. It’s the largest part of our budget, that along with the fees and other income we get from running the medical school. It’s not tuition. It’s not major donors. It’s those two: the federal money and the medical school income. And when we are in alignment with the U.S. government, that’s a great thing. But when we’re not, we’re incredibly vulnerable. And so, I think this is a moment where all universities — and higher education, more generally — needs to have a kind of reckoning of a new kind of business model of how to run a university, that isn’t so incredibly dependent upon shifts in the political winds in our country.

Now, I don’t actually think that the endowment is going to save our problem. Much of those funds in Columbia’s endowment, which is the smallest endowment of all of the Ivy League schools, I’ll note, are tied up in ways where they have to be allocated to particular funding streams. They can’t just be reappropriated to fund or replace those federal grants. And it, in any event, would be a short-term Band-Aid. There’s too much of the budget to cover with these federal grants that have been pulled. It’s $400 million-plus now, but it will be a lot more. You look at Harvard, they’re talking about billions of dollars. The endowment can’t possibly fill that gap.

So it’s time for us to think about things like why are faculty or, more importantly, university presidents paid so much. We need to think about who gets paid and valued within the university. It is those very researchers in the medical school who make many times more in salary from a philosophy professor or an English professor at Columbia, in part as a reward for the fact that they’ve been drawing these federal funds to underwrite the university’s business model. So, it’s time for us to step back and not say, “Oh, the piggy bank is going to save us,” but actually think more critically about how we run our universities.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Jeff Sovern. He’s one of the four children of Columbia University’s first Jewish president, Michael Sovern. On Tuesday, Democracy Now! reached Jeff and asked him to read out loud the open letter he and his siblings just published in The Washington Post.

JEFF SOVERN: Our father, Michael I. Sovern, was the first Jewish president of Columbia University, which he served for more than 60 years. We believe that if he were alive today, he would be disgusted by the government’s coercion of Columbia, purportedly in the name of our religion. We don’t believe that President Donald Trump is sincere about protecting Jews from antisemitism. We find it more likely that an administration whose vice president has agreed with Richard M. Nixon that “professors are the enemy” is using antisemitism as a pretext to damage Columbia and America’s other elite universities. …

Our father is one of only three people interred on his beloved Columbia campus. Trump’s attack on the university desecrates a place our family holds sacred. It is both plausible and disturbing that some at Columbia are antisemitic. But we do not believe attempts to force the university to relinquish its independence are an appropriate response. And we wish the Trump administration would stop gaslighting us all.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that is Jeff Sovern, one of the four children of Columbia University’s first Jewish president, Michael Sovern. He was reading from an open letter he and his siblings had published in The Washington Post. Professor Katherine Franke, you taught at Columbia for close to a quarter of a century. You ultimately were forced to retire around your support for pro-Palestinian students, Jewish students, Muslim students, students who consider themselves atheists, whatever, but who all share their concern about Israel’s assault on Gaza. Can you talk about what he’s saying and this hammer of accusations of antisemitism, equating them with anti-Zionism?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, Michael Sovern was an incredible president of our university. And his office, after he stepped down from being president, was down the hall from me, so I saw him daily. He led the university through very difficult times and actually was president when I was an undergraduate at Columbia — at Barnard. Columbia didn’t admit women at the point that I was an undergrad. And so, his children’s statement resonates so strongly with those of us who knew President Sovern very well.

I know that Lee Bollinger, our most recent — well, not most recent president, because we’ve had so many, but our most recent long-term president — is also, finally, expressing real concerns about the leadership at the university. And I’ve spoken to a number of the former provosts, who feel that Columbia has lost its way in the name of protecting Jewish students — some Jewish students — from bias.

And, of course, we shouldn’t have any form of antisemitism on our campus, but this is being used as a fig leaf for a political project. If Columbia really cared about eradicating all forms of bias from our university, then Columbia would have done something seriously about one of my male colleagues at the law school who uses the N-word in class regularly, a white male colleague who thinks that’s funny and makes him cool, or another who tells slavery jokes to Black students in the classroom and thinks that’s a very funny and appropriate thing to do in the classroom. And the Black students in those classes brought complaints to the administration, and nothing happened.

So we have an overreaction in the case of antisemitism — and again, I don’t want to say that there aren’t any incidents; there always are forms of antisemitism in all the institutions we’re part of — but we have absolutely no reaction to issues of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. In fact, they’ve taken all that language down off the university’s website at this point. I have trans colleagues at Columbia who are afraid for their own safety in the law school building. So, the environment is not one that has made any of us feel safer. It is one in which our safety has been weaponized in the name of advancing this larger political project, which is ultimately, I think, about dismantling the very university itself.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Katherine, I wanted to ask you about the Trump administration’s campaign of terror, really, against international students, revoking immigration statuses. The Times of India reports that the State Department has emailed hundreds of international students, asking them to self-deport for allegedly participating in campus activism. The United States has long been a place where students from all around the world come to study here. What’s the impact of this on not just Columbia, but all universities across the country?

KATHERINE FRANKE: Well, Juan, I can’t overstate how terrified our students are. And it’s not just the students who are on visas or even green cards. It’s all of our students who come from other countries, who may even be citizens at this point, because it seems there’s no limit to the ways in which this administration is going to both test and violate the law in cleansing — it feels like a kind of racial and ethnic cleansing that is happening on our campuses.

One of the reasons I loved being a Columbia professor was that in many of my classes, half of the students came from other countries. They brought their experiences, their wisdom, other — notions of other legal systems, other cultures into the classroom, and it made it such a rich learning environment. I learned so much from them.

And when I talk to my colleagues now — I’m not teaching anymore, but I’m hearing that those students are not saying a word. And some of them are not even coming onto campus anymore, because they’re afraid of getting nabbed and of having the administration actually turn over their cellphones and home addresses. So, the classes are actually being emptied of those voices and of those bodies. And it’s a loss for the Columbia community, but it’s a horrible form of terror for the actual students who are so frightened.

AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about what’s happening to students, I wanted to end — we only have about a minute. On Tuesday, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled that Mahmoud Khalil — he was the negotiator between the students and Columbia University; he was a grad student at SIPA, who had a green card — that his case — he was taken from Columbia University housing; his green card was revoked; taken away from his wife, who is about to give birth; and sent to a Louisiana ICE jail. The judge in New Jersey ruled his case should move forward in New Jersey, where he was taken before being sent to Louisiana. What’s happening in this case? You were an adviser to Mahmoud Khalil.

KATHERINE FRANKE: I worked very closely with him for a year and a half, as did the university. They picked him as the student that they wanted to sit in the middle, between the students that were protesting and the administration itself, because they knew he was mature, he was reasonable, everyone trusted him. He was the exactly right person to be the negotiator between the university and the students. And then they put a target on his back, essentially, by allowing untruths to circulate in social media and elsewhere, to come out of the mouth of the secretary of state and other Trump administration officials. You know, it just breaks my heart, Amy, to see what’s happening to him and his family, but not only them.

He is still in that detention center, that horrible place in Louisiana, even though the case is in New Jersey. And his lawyers are fighting very hard — I know all of them well — to get him moved. His case has been moved, but he has not been moved. And they’re still making arguments to the judge to bring Mahmoud home, so that he’ll be — home-ish, in New Jersey, so that he’ll be closer to his family and to his lawyers. It is a horrendous object lesson of how the institutions that you think you’re part of and can trust turn on you, whether it’s Columbia or the United States government, and how hard it is to then bring him back to a place of security and freedom. And we’re all just hoping that these next arguments in court will bring Mahmoud back at least to a detention center in New Jersey, which is better than where he is now.

AMY GOODMAN: Katherine Franke, former professor at Columbia Law School, she was there for a quarter of a century, forced to retire in January.

Coming up, Trump’s immigration crackdown coming under increased criticism as the administration admits it flew a Salvadoran father, a Maryland father with protected status, to a prison in El Salvador. Back in 20 seconds.