The last thing I want to say is this is not just a capitulation to the Trump administration. This was an inside job. There was a fifth column, members of the Board of Trustees, senior members of the faculty of some of the professional schools, and a clutch of donors, who have been beating the drums for years and years, more than a decade, to the effect that Columbia is deeply, profoundly antisemitic. This is a — this is a despicable lie.
Rashid Khalidi, the renowned Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, says he is withdrawing from teaching his fall course after the school has agreed to pay a $200 million settlement in a major new deal with President Trump, who accused the university of failing to protect Jewish students during campus protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Columbia will also pay $21 million to settle investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and agreed to end the consideration of race in admissions and hiring. Columbia has accepted values that “are dear to people who want to protect Israel from criticism at all costs while it slaughters people by the hundreds daily,” says Khalidi. In his piece in The Guardian, he wrote, “The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible.”
***
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
One by one, major universities have been making deals with the Trump administration. In the most comprehensive of all the deals with schools so far, Columbia University recently agreed to pay a $200 million settlement to the Trump administration after it accused the university of failing to protect Jewish students during campus protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Columbia will also pay $21 million to settle investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, by agreeing to end the consideration of race in admissions and hiring.
The settlements will restore hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of canceled or frozen grants from National Institutes of Health and Department of Health and Human Services. As part of the deal, Columbia also agreed to appoint a senior provost to oversee the Middle East Studies Department, will further crack down on campus protests and will appoint three dozen new security officers with arrest powers. The agreement includes a little-reported provision that commits Columbia to, quote, “examine its business model and take steps to decrease financial dependence on international student enrollment.”
For more on this major settlement, we’re joined by Rashid Khalidi. He’s the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of several books, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. He has a new essay in The Guardian. It’s headlined “I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump: The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible,” he wrote.
In the piece, Khalidi explains why he now finds it impossible to teach at Columbia, given its adoption of International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA’s definition of “antisemitism,” and cites parts of his lecture that would run afoul of it. Khalidi writes, quote, “The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings,” unquote.
Khalidi also writes in the piece, quote, “It is not only faculty members’ academic freedom and freedom of speech that is infringed upon by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s diktat. Teaching assistants would be seriously constrained in leading discussion sections, as would students in their questions and discussions, by the constant fear that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel, and to crack down on alleged discrimination,” unquote. Professor Khalidi, welcome back to Democracy Now! We’ve read some of your rationale. I’m sure there are hundreds of students who are extremely disappointed to hear that you’re not going to be teaching this course. Though you did retire, you were continuing with this course. Can you more fully explain why you’ve said no to Columbia?
How Trump and Miller are rewriting US higher education to shut out international students
***
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, you already laid out — thanks for having me, Amy, again. I’m sorry that for 22 months you and I have been talking about the same genocide. And that’s the background to my decision. You’ve already mentioned a couple of the reasons that I gave. Columbia has agreed to a number of conditions that the Trump administration wanted to impose. You mentioned some of them. Another of them is the imposition of an outside monitor, so called, who will have access to absolutely everything, including classrooms, meetings and so forth, to ensure compliance with the various diktats of the Trump administration. Basically, it’s going to be impossible to teach a whole range of topics, not just including modern Middle East history or the history of Palestine or Israel, but things like genocide, things like settler colonialism, things like the Holocaust.
One of my distinguished colleagues, a Holocaust scholar, Marianne Hirsch, has just mentioned in an interview that she’s not going to be able to teach. She’s also retired, but, like me, was also teaching a course, in fact, I believe, on the Holocaust. And she said, “I cannot teach this course under the IHRA definition,” because it makes it almost impossible to say certain things which are critical of either Zionism or Israel. She said, “How can I teach Hannah Arendt?” Hannah Arendt, one of the great figures of the 20th century, was an anti-Zionist. She’s also one of the great commentators and writers about the Holocaust. She said, “I can’t teach Hannah Arendt. Somebody’s going to come and lodge one of these spurious complaints under this new dispensation, and I’m going to be brought up before a kangaroo court.” And that’s essentially what Columbia has agreed with the Trump administration to establish, as has already happened to her and as has happened to a number of my colleagues.
And so, I figured I had to take a stand. I mean, they have been putting pressure on faculty and students, really, since the war began, to shut down any advocacy for Palestine, any opposition to this horrific genocide. You ran a piece at the very beginning of this segment where you quoted a speech that I gave a year ago talking about how the students are on the right side of history. They are. A year later, it’s even more true. The starvation, the mass death, the extraordinary callousness that Israel has shown have been exposed to the world. You don’t have 300,000 people crossing Sydney Bridge in Australia unless they realize that something horrific is happening at the hands of Israel. So, I realized that I cannot simply — I simply cannot teach under these circumstances in this institution….
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Rashid Khalidi: ‘Israel Has Created a Nightmare Scenario for Itself. The Clock Is Ticking’
Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy
Israel’s Genocide Is Big Business – and the Face of the Future
USA + Israel + UK = moral depravity + mass murder. Period
Gaza’s Guernica / Guernica stands in solidarity with Gaza (2024)
New Footage Exposes Ragtag US Mercenaries Firing Toward Gaza Aid Seekers
A Massive Database of Evidence, compiled by a Historian, Documents Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza
After the truth-shower 