Columbia is a fortress, academically and literally. After months of protests since the 7 October attacks and the war in Gaza, the gates on either side of the Morningside Heights campus have been closed to the public. It is an attempt by authorities to stop outside agitators and usher in some normality. To its critics, it is a sign of a university shutting itself off.
Not that Columbia can shield itself from the outside world: the Trump administration is waging a war to change higher education.
It was in April 2024 that students staged the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia’s south lawn. Police were called in and more than 100 arrested. Protesters then took over nearby Hamilton Hall. Again, police were called in. Again, more than 100 arrested.
The following month, Donald Trump said at a campaign rally in New Jersey: “When I am president, we will not allow our colleges to be taken over by violent radicals. If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or anti-Semitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you.”
Less than a year later, on 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration officers outside his Columbia apartment. A Palestinian born in Syria and married to an American citizen, he had a green card and been a key leader in the encampment. A month after that, on 14 April, Mohsen Mahdawi, another Palestinian student with a green card, was arrested while attending a citizenship interview in Vermont. I spent time with Mahdawi last year for a Channel 4 Unreported World documentary, which I wrote about for the New Statesman. He was accommodating with his time and considerate in his speech. Though he was a vocal supporter of the demonstrations, he did not directly participate in the encampment at Columbia.
The US government claims Khalil is a threat to national security and he remains in detention. But Mahdawi was released on 30 April with the judge stating: “The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime”.
Though the Trump administration claims that they are trying to combat anti-Semitism and reform universities, Mahdawi’s treatment instead suggests presidential overreach and a threat to the First Amendment.
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For students like second-year Oscar Wolfe, that’s clearly the case. “I’m not buying the Trump administration’s use of anti-Semitism as the justification for their actions. I’m not buying that. I think there are ways to address the anti-Semitism issue, but to me it feels as if the Trump administration is just using that as the front, basically.”
It’s worth remembering that many at Columbia have not been demonstrating; rather, simply trying to go to class. The return of President Trump has changed that. Wolfe recently wrote an opinion piece for the college paper, The Columbia Daily Spectator. Why did he now feel a need to speak up? Wolfe, who is Jewish, spoke of a climate of fear. Adam Kinder, the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Political Review, described the campus climate more strongly: “Paranoia, division, anger.” Kinder said a key consequence of the changed atmosphere on campus since Trump came into office has been self-censorship. Kinder said he’s had multiple requests from students to have articles they’ve written be withdrawn, most about Gaza but also about a range of geopolitical issues. “We received one or two messages that have explicitly said, ‘I really am very paranoid about the situation right now. And I would prefer peace of mind of knowing that either employers or the government is not going to see that I wrote something about this or that issue.’”
That fear is particularly acute among international students. On 27 March, Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio said he’d already revoked “maybe more than 300” student visas. Many of those affected had taken part in pro-Palestine demonstrations. While the Trump administration on 25 April moved to restore those visas after a number of legal challenges, the Justice Department said they were still working on a new system to review and terminate visas.
“I’m terrified of ICE raids,” one woman told me, a female international student who has been part of pro-Palestine protests, who asked not to be named. “Right after Mahmoud was taken, it was really scary to go outside. I think twice about everywhere I’m going. I basically don’t go to campus.”
I was struck by how many students, even staff, did not want to go on the record. “Things are tense. I need to stay quiet for a while,” is what one professor wrote to me. Not just because of the climate Trump had created, but because of Columbia’s actions.
The White House had told Columbia it was withdrawing $400m in federal grants because of what they said was “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”. They presented a list of demands that the university would have to comply with if it wanted to get its funding back. Columbia agreed. That meant revising their harassment policy for students and groups – with the university incorporating a new definition of anti-Semitism that was recommended by Columbia’s Antisemitism task force. The university also agreed to hire a new internal security force and appoint a new “senior vice provost” to review Columbia’s programmes, “starting immediately with the Middle East”.
All these apparent capitulations drew the ire of students and faculty. “There’s a lot of critiques you could make about how higher education functions and I would be happy to make some of them,” Professor Joseph Howley tells me. “But the federal government and Donald Trump are not good faith partners in any kind of projects to reform higher education.”
His colleague, Professor Nadia Abu El Haj, agrees: “It’s a larger culture war, and in that culture war, what Maga-Republicanism cares about is actually not anti-Semitism, but once they get that wedge, right, one of the main demands is going after diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).”
Columbia is now on its third president since 7 October and is currently looking for a fourth: Minouche Shafik resigned last August, while the interim president who agreed with the White House’s demands has since been replaced. The new interim leader, Claire Shipman, has tried to row back somewhat on the charge that the university had given into the Trump administration. In a statement, the university told me, “The actions and ongoing work that Columbia has committed to undertake will help make our university a better, stronger place where our students, faculty, and staff feel safe, valued, and able to thrive. We appreciate the ongoing dialogue with our federal regulators and their willingness to engage with Columbia constructively and with the university’s future in mind.”
Is there anyone on campus defending what the university or the Trump administration has done? When I filmed at Columbia in 2024, I spent time with both Mahdawi and Elisha “Lishi” Baker, who is Jewish-American and a strong supporter of Israel. Both were trying to find a dialogue between their respective groups. But now, Mahdawi has been in and out of detention. Baker has not.
“I think when it comes to the actions of the US government, especially with regards to deportations, let’s see what judges say,” Baker told me before Mahdawi was released. “A judge is going to make a determination about what can and can’t happen to him.” But the administration accused Mahdawi of being a threat. Does Baker really think he was? “I don’t know everything about Mohsen. I’ve had good interactions with him. I’ve had negative interactions with him. He’s a complicated person.”
But surely, I pressed Baker, the worry is that if this can happen to Mahdawi, it could happen to anyone in Trump’s America? “Everyone will get due process, because that’s the way that it works in this country.”
In an attempt to address anti-Semitism, a task force was set up by Columbia to look into the experience of Jewish students on campus. Two reports have been published so far, detailing testimonies and outlining recommendations. I spoke to Nicholas Lemann, a senior member of the task force and a Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at Columbia.
The task force’s “working definition” of anti-Semitism is now to be used by the university. The definition can be read in the report, but it says that anti-Semitism “is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis”. It says that it can include “targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.”
When I spoke with Lemann last year, he told me that it was not necessarily the case that the task force would come to its own definition of anti-Semitism, given there was so much debate. I asked him why the change?
“There’s a huge debate about definitions of anti-Semitism,” Lemann said, so “we wrote our own definition of anti-Semitism.” Lemann argues their definition is not to limit free speech around Israel, but a way of “orienting students and faculty, staff… that things you say about Israel and Zionism will fall heavily onto the souls of many Jewish students in ways that you might not have expected. We want you to be aware of that. That’s not the same as a speech ban.”
Others on campus don’t agree. Professor Abu El Haj told me that, “Basically, there is no form of Palestinian politics or being Palestinian in this country that is not anti-Semitic by definition. Right? Being an anti-Zionist is anti-Semitic.”
Was it not possible, I asked Lemann, that others, including the Trump administration, could misinterpret the task force’s definition and use it to limit free speech? “When the task force was created, Trump was not president,” Lemann responded. “If I didn’t think there was a problem, I wouldn’t have accepted the assignment. And how the Trump administration is treating this issue should not take the work that we’ve done and invalidate it.”
Yet many academics, students and critics of the White House believe the Trump administration is using the issue of anti-Semitism as a way to pursue a much bigger agenda: attacking universities that conservatives have long believed are far too liberal. The White House also withdrew funding from Harvard University, demanding changes such as preventing the admittance of international students “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution”. Harvard declined to comply and sued. More recently, a statement signed by more than 100 college presidents recently criticised “undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses”, and that faculty, students and staff should not fear “retribution, censorship, or deportation”.
The free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) once lambasted those on the left for stifling free speech on college campuses during the 2010s. Now the group is critical of the Trump administration’s campaign against higher education. “I tend to think that there’s a lot of political grandstanding going on here,” said Will Creeley, the legal director of FIRE. “Universities are unpopular generally. They’ve lost the trust of much of the public. They are viewed as expensive factories for elitist conformity.”
For Creeley, this is an issue far bigger than Columbia itself. “This is something that I don’t think folks have seen since the McCarthy era. When people are scared to speak out, when institutions are cowering, when the federal government feels itself so emboldened as to demand that certain speech on campus can be restricted, when people are getting snatched off the street by masked federal agents for writing an op-ed – we’re in dire straits.”
Walking around Columbia’s campus now, the atmosphere is tense but also exhausted. After months of protests against a war that grinds on, students now face a battle with the US administration. Professor Abu El Haj, who is currently on sabbatical, told me she wasn’t even sure she’d come back to work. And it was Kinder, the editor of the CPR, who said that he and many other students were now reckoning with issues they didn’t think they’d need to deal with before they could legally drink. This wasn’t the university life they’d imagined.
Kiran Moodley is a correspondent at Channel 4 News. Watch his latest report from Columbia University here
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