Front Burner - ‘Professors are the enemy’: Trump’s war on higher education

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

In a 2021 speech entitled ‘The Universities are the enemy,’ Vice President JD Vance laid out a plan for America’s universities saying in part “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”Columbia University has become ground zero for the Trump administration's war on higher education. Following a year of pro-Palestinian protest on campus, Trump revoked $400-million in funding and has instructed federal agents to oversee raids on campus, looking to deport international students and permanent residents that have been involved in protest. Joseph Howley is a professor at Columbia and joins the show to discuss the last year and a half on campus, at a time students are being hunted, and some feel the university has capitulated to the demands of a hostile government. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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There was a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said This is a CBC podcast. What you just heard is the 37th President of the United States, Richard Nixon, in a 1972 conversation with advisor Henry Kissinger. He says, quote, never forget the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy, the establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times. The words were echoed by now US Vice President JD Vance in 2021 in an address called the universities are the enemy.

Because I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. Many feared a second Trump administration would begin an era of war between the federal government and its nation's universities.

And for many, those fears have been corroborated in ways that we haven't seen in America for a very long time. But maybe nowhere in the country is that more present than on the campus of Columbia University, a school known for its tradition of radical protest and activism. The campus has become a kind of national experiment in protests, surveillance, law enforcement, and limits to free speech. So what does it mean when a country declares war on its own institutions of higher learning? Where have we seen this before?

And where is it likely to lead? Joseph Howley is a professor of classics at Columbia and he has expressed great concern with events at the school. And he joins us to talk about life at the center of the Trump storm. Professor Hawley, thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. Thanks so much for having me. So this story begins as early as October 12th, 2023, the week after Hamas's attack in Israel, as students began to protest what they consider to be Israel's indiscriminate response. Students demanded that Colombia divest financially from Israel,

and these demands quickly turned into a network of encampments on campus, which then spread to universities around the world. At one point, House Speaker Mike Johnson even visited the campus. If this is not contained quickly, and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard.

We have to bring order to these campuses. We cannot allow this to happen around the country. The police were eventually called in to raid the encampments and forcibly remove students from them. As someone who is there as a Jewish professor yourself, what were these encampments like and what was your reaction to these police raids? So one thing I want people to picture in their heads when they picture the Gaza Solidarity encampment at Columbia is that it was in an enclosed lawn in the central part of campus.

So you certainly couldn't avoid seeing it, you know, or hearing it if there were chants or something, but it was kind of by definition like not blocking any traffic. It was in an enclosed space. I think it was really an attempt by the students to create a kind of radical community in a university that had rejected them and attacked them and frankly slandered them all year for protesting Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, they kind of created their own space that was not just about protest but also about community and about education. I think it's important that we make our voices heard and also for people over there to know that they're not hidden. Even though they're hidden from American media, we still very

much think about them and we share their struggle. Some people were not happy that it was there. Some people were not happy to see it. Some people were not happy to hear every slogan that was chanted. I'm Jewish, I'm Israeli. My mother's Israeli. I have family there. And honestly, we're in pain. But I think that if you were there,

and if you went and checked on it every day like I did, I think that what you saw was something that was peaceful and focused and principled and organized around a few basic ideas, which were solidarity with the Palestinian cause and a really focused, determined effort to make the university pay attention to serious and I still think reasonable demands around divestment and disclosure that, you know, the institution had responded to with, you know,

derision and contempt. And what was your reaction to those police raids? You know, we had two police raids around the first and second solidarity in Kamen. So two police raids around the first and second solidarity encampments. And the reason I keep saying first and second is, on April 17th, a group of students set up an encampment on the east lawn in front of our library. About 24 hours later, police came onto campus

and carted them all off. It was remarkable. We know, we almost never have police on campus except in a real emergency. And here you had a few dozen peaceful protesters who were not impeding the flow of traffic or anything. Even the police themselves later said they weren't violent. They didn't seem to be posing a threat. The university had basically declared them trespassers and then asked the police to carry them out. So that was very upsetting. I mean, we had an emergency press conference that night in front of the university president's house where I spoke

as a faculty member and a couple of students spoke. And it was, it's a real violation of Columbia University's values and history to have police on campus to clear out a peaceful protest. We had a very famous, high profile, very ugly set of incidents in 1968 where there were large student protests on campus and a very violent police crackdown. They were protesting Columbia's ties to military research and plans to build a new gymnasium in a public park in Harlem. The 1968 Columbia uprising led to one of the largest mass arrests in New York City history

as more than 700 people were arrested on April 30. After that, we had real changes to how we run things at Columbia. And one of the changes is that the president of the university is supposed to consult with the university senate before they bring police onto campus. And that was just thrown right out the window. And, you know, in the intervening decades, we have had other, you know, peaceful sit-ins and building occupations and it's never needed the police. So that first police raid was very distressing. Yeah.

And then there was the second one, right? And am I correct to say that following failed negotiations with the university students breached and occupied a building on campus, which they renamed Hind's Hall after Hind Rezhab, a six-year-old girl that had been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza? This building is now liberated. Can you walk me through what happened there? In the days leading up to the building occupation, the second police raid, the university was really ramping up its threats against the students. There were disciplinary measures taken against students in the encampment. More disciplinary measures were threatened. The university issued a deadline, although it wasn't clear what would happen after the

deadline. I think it gave a real impression that there was going to be some further enforcement action or clearance of the lawn. And it was very strange because faculty who were concerned were reaching out to university leaders and saying, we can't have another police raid. The leaders were saying, no, we're not going to do the police again. Of course, that would be disastrous because everyone could see what a PR disaster and how divisive it was the last time.

Yet the university was just being very aggressive towards the encampment. I know a lot of students in there were expecting that the encampment would be cleared in some way. Then late at night on April 30th, a small group of students breached Hamilton Hall, the building where my office is, took over the building and had control of the building for about a day on May 1st. And after sundown on May 1st, the New York police department sent in, frankly, they sent in the troops. Police drove an armored SWAT vehicle

known as a Bearcat up to Hamilton Hall. A line of cops stormed up a ladder into a second story window to get access to the building. stormed up a ladder into a second-story window to get access to the building. Outside police methodically cleared the encampment 10 by 10. They sent in something called the strategic response group which is a squad of the New York Police Department that is officially tasked with anti-terror response but in recent history has only ever been used against protest in the city. They broke a window and sent really heavily armed cops in through a window. A

lot of students were hurt, thrown downstairs, violently arrested. A lot of students who were just standing around were arrested. The cops discharged a firearm in the admissions office. Apparently the firearm was discharged by accident, although that doesn't really make me feel much better. A lot of this comes down to the fact, some say that Colombia has become an unsafe place for Jewish students, that these protests and encampments have become incubators of virulent anti-Semitism and even violence. And it was largely on this basis that that kind of law enforcement was needed to intervene, right? And just what specifically are people pointing to as evidence of this rampant anti-Semitism?

And what do you make of it? If we talk about the climate on campus after October 7th, and then after the encampment went up, I think something we have to understand is, you know, for years, the extreme pro-Israel right in this country and in other countries has tried to normalize the idea that any pro-Palestine protest is anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic or presents a threat to Jews. And the political right in this country, Donald Trump and his friends, who have been looking for any opportunity to punish dissent generally and to crush universities in particular, saw an opportunity here to pick up this charge

of anti-Semitism against Palestine protests. And so in a really sad way, the attacks of October 7th were kind of a gift for this far-right sort of marriage of convenience, where this explosion of outraged protest against what Israel was doing in Gaza was a perfect opportunity and pretext to invade universities literally and figuratively and crush dissent on this issue as a way of establishing a precedent for crushing dissent on any issue. So I think this is where we need to actually talk about the big lie that's underpinning the Trump administration's attack on universities now, even though this big lie started more than a year ago.

When I say the big lie, what I mean is this. The claim that American universities have some widespread structural endemic problem with antisemitism that needs to be addressed through some sort of massive overhaul or intervention. I call this a big lie because it's being used to justify something outrageous, but it's also not an accurate assessment of what was going on. So what was going on, you know, a year and more ago on American campuses, particularly my campus, was that you had a widespread protest movement full of a diverse cross-section of the student body, including Jewish students. You had incidents of harassment and prejudice and bias towards Jewish and Israeli students, particularly ones who identify strongly with the state of Israel or simply who are visibly Jewish in some way. They wear kippot or something like that. You also had harassment and prejudice towards Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.

And you had harassment of anti-war Jewish student activists by pro-Israel Jewish student activists. When I think as an academic, when I wanna have a model that explains what's going on, I want a model that explains all the data points. So if you just draw a kind of gerrymandered squiggle around a few of the data points, you could say, well,

I think this whole protest movement is anti-Jewish and I see this really ugly harassment of Jewish students. Therefore, I think that we have a widespread anti-Semitism problem. But that doesn't explain why you also had harassment of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students. And it doesn't explain the harassment of anti-war and pro-Palestinian Jewish students.

So I think we need a better model. And I think a better model would have to go something like this. In October of 2023, an Islamist militant group killed a bunch of civilians in Israel in the name of Palestinian liberation. This kind of thing provokes harassment and prejudice towards Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims around the world. The Israeli military then began a genocidal campaign of devastation in Gaza that has killed at least tens of thousands of people, tens of thousands of people,

tens of thousands of children. And they have done it wrapped in our holiest symbols and in the name of collective Jewish safety. And that kind of thing provokes harassment of Jews and Israelis around the world. And wars provoke protest. In free societies, we often have protests when we have wars. So what's going on is there's been a bloody, devastating,

painful conflict that's affected many members of our community in many different ways. And instead of being able to tell a true and responsible story about everything that's happened, we've been coerced into this big lie that's been sold by the pro-Israel far right and the general Republican white supremacist far right that says what's going on here is antisemitism.

It's all antisemitism and it's only antisemitism. And that's been used as the pretext for a number of outrageous measures that frankly are not keeping Jews safe and are never going to keep Jews safe because they're not coming from people who really care about keeping Jews safe. You know, you just have to look at Donald Trump and the people around him to understand that this is a pretext.

My first week back in the Oval Office, my administration will inform every college president that if you do not end anti-Semitic propaganda they will lose their accreditation and federal tax pay. Support. Truth is you don't have to do much after that. Will you do that? It's gonna work miracles. The following is advertiser content from Emirates. Private suites on Emirates First Class make the journey to your next destination something

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interior designers protect the public through the design of safe, code compliant, and accessible spaces. Learn more at cidq.org slash design. I wanted to ask you about this task force that was formed on anti-Semitism at Columbia, and just explain to me what the task force ended up doing and how their findings go on to shape much of what was to come on campus. After October 7th and after protests around the country against Israel's military campaign in Gaza,

far right pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, started calling for American universities and colleges to set up these anti-Semitism task forces. Colombia set up an anti-Semitism task force where the primary criterion for membership seemed to be being Jewish or Israeli and holding generally pro-Israel political views. In other words, there were no anti-Zionist Jewish faculty on the group and there were few, if any, experts on anti-Semitism per se. So when this group was created, it was already seen by many on campus as politicized, ideological, and not really legitimate. The Anti-Semitism Task Force then issued another report at the end of the summer of 2024 that basically drew together what I would describe as real and ugly incidents of anti-Jewish prejudice and harassment with stuff from the protest movement that I really don't think qualifies as anti- antisemitism in any way.

And the task force's report really affirmed and contributed to this big lie of a pervasive antisemitism problem that's somehow cultural on the campus. Members of this task force accompanied our university president and members of our board of Trustees to Congress in April where they also affirmed this big lie of pervasive

endemic campus anti-Semitism. So I think there have been anti-Semitic protests so I would say yes. There have been anti-Semitic events on campus which I interpret as anti-Jewish. I know there have been a number of incidents especially one at our law school recently that the students were trying to call a protest but it was an event to harass admitted students who were Jewish and it's... And at every step of the way other Jewish faculty and other colleagues at Columbia have been saying this is not a responsible way to go about this because it's not a comprehensive accounting of the whole picture,

because it's a very politicized and ideological view of the intersection between protest and anti-Semitism per se, and because it's going to get us in trouble. It is loading the gun for the political far right in this country to open fire on American universities, if you'll forgive the expression. So am I correct to say that the findings in this report, and general reports of anti-Semitism on campus, formed at least some of the basis for what the Trump administration announced recently, that it would be cutting $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia due to the university's inability to, quote, squelch anti-Semitism on campus.

And Columbia actually responded by suspending and expelling dozens of students. The Department of Middle East and Palestinian Studies, okay, where'd that come from? Middle East and Palestinian Studies will be put into a receivership under strict control of the vice provost, all right? And they will ban masks and they will put in new police powers.

One student is under investigation for discriminatory harassment, reportedly largely for writing a pro-divestment op-ed in the student newspaper. And just walk me through the implications of the Trump administration's announcements and how you feel your employer has been handling all of this. Well, the first thing we have to say is that although this narrative, this false narrative of pervasive campus

antisemitism, which is a misleading way of framing and analyzing what's been happening, although that has served as the pretext for this, there has not been any finding by an official body of an antisemitism problem at Columbia University. There's been a lot of talk, there's been a lot of social media posts, and there's been a lot of vibes.

But the Department of Education of our federal government has an Office of Civil Rights that is meant to investigate things like this. But the Trump administration is actually busy shutting down the entire Department of Education and defunding that office. I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the Federal Department of Education and defunding that office. I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the Federal Department of Education once and for all. He's not able to fully eliminate the department without congressional approval,

but his executive order will dramatically scale down its function. Nearly half of its staff has already been laid off. It's doing us no good. Instead, they're resorting to a political strategy where they simply send threatening letters, pull a bunch of federal funding, and hope that universities will comply so that they don't actually have to have a real investigation

or prove any of these claims. The university has tried very hard to show that it's taking this problem seriously, but there's two things that are wrong with that. One, it rests on a incorrect and I think malicious bad faith assessment of what the problem is. And two, the people whom we're trying to convince

that we're taking it seriously, don't care about us taking it seriously. So all they want is to see increased measures to suppress dissent. So they're just going to keep coming until they get that. I want to ask you now about Mahmoud Khalil. He was a graduate student that had worked as a negotiator between the university and protesters during these encampments on campus and he was arrested by ICE agents earlier this month. Turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around. Stop resisting.

For those who might not have seen it, Khalil's wife, who is eight months pregnant, managed to take a video of her husband's arrest as it happened. Yeah, they just handcuffed him and took him. I don't know what to do. And you can see at least four men on camera, all of whom are in plain clothes and refuse to identify themselves. There's no specified cause of arrest and they refused to clarify when asked. I understand the lawyer is asking for your name. The lawyer is asking for your name. She's saying that he's saying they don't give their names.

Can you can you please specify what agency is taking him please? Excuse me. They're not talking to me. Both his wife and lawyers didn't even know where he was for at least two full days. What was your reaction to the news of this and now a few weeks later, how are you making sense of it? Well, it was really upsetting to hear. It still remains upsetting to watch that video.

I got to know Mahmood after the encampments went up and over the course of the subsequent months because of his work as a mediator and a spokesman. He's someone I always know I can pick up the phone, a call and get a straight answer or talk about something difficult. It's very scary to think that as part of Donald Trump's political campaign to show that he's tough on this or that, and as part of his attempt to coerce our university, that we're being hit with a one-two punch of on the one hand having federal funding for research suspended or canceled,

and on the other hand, having our students and community members disappeared by federal agents. That's like not a great feeling. Here's the thing I wanna say about Maqbool Khalil. He is someone who, when you have a difficult or tense situation, you want him there to help calm people down and talk through the conflict.

He is not someone who gets people riled up or advocates violence. He preaches an inclusive vision of liberation and solidarity for the movement. He was on CNN last spring when the encampments were up and he was asked about Jewish students not feeling safe on campus and he said that the safety and liberation of Palestinians and Jews are intertwined and that anti-Semitism and racism have no place in the movement or on campus.

His views and principles are very clear and he's been targeted not just because he's Palestinian, but because he represents an aspect and a vision of the movement for liberation and solidarity in Israel-Palestine that is very inconvenient to the people who want to convince us all of these big lies that all Palestine activism is Antisemitic or that this campus Protest movement is somehow fundamentally anti-jewish So in some ways he was the perfect target for this kind of awful persecution Joseph we've also heard reports of federal agents in the halls of student housing facilities at Columbia looking for students.

One student from Indiana, student visa actually fled to Canada after US immigration agents reportedly tried to detain her at Columbia. After a lot of pushing, they kind of yell in the corridors saying, we want Ranjani Srinivasan, your visa has been revoked. We want to put you in removal proceedings. And this is all while I'm on the call with my advisor. She turns to me and says, just here's a list of lawyers. Don't worry, things will be sorted out.

Start contacting immigration lawyers. I said that I haven't let them in. And then they said, just keep doing that. Homeland Security accused her without evidence of being a terrorist sympathizer linked to Hamas due to her participation in the campus protests. So she fled essentially as an academic refugee. The head of Colombia's famed journalism program sent a note out to students which read in part quote, if you have a social media page make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle program, sent a note out to students which read in part, quote, If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East.

It continued, we cannot protect you. These are dangerous times. How would you describe the vibe on campus today? How are the students feeling? And is it true? Is there nothing that you can do or that the school can do to protect them at a time when they're clearly being targeted by the government?

You know, since these ICE incursions into our neighborhood started, many students and even colleagues have been expressing their fear to walk around the neighborhood, to walk between their apartment building and the gates of campus. And students have been asking for classes

to be made hybrid or put online for their safety. And I'll just say that last April, when the solidarity encampment was up and some Jewish students reported that they did not feel comfortable coming to campus, we immediately made all classes hybrid. In the current situation,

with international students actually being hunted by ICE in our streets, and students actually asking for protection in this way, there has been silence from the university, except that we've all been reminded that we have to teach in person. And what's so frightening here, right, is that Mahmoud is accused of no crime. The reason he got targeted by ICE was that some pro-Israel activists put his picture on social media and made a big deal out of it. Now, people have been slandering

our student activists online all year, but suddenly it turns out there's a hotline from that kind of social media posting to getting people deported. And some people, unfortunately, in our community seem to like the idea that they might be able to do that to their fellow students or even faculty. So there's a real threat here.

The other thing I just want to say is this. The students who have been targeted so far, in one way or another, for all the students I know who have been targeted, it seems pretty clear that they haven't broken any laws, that there is kind of slander, guilt by association, insinuation. And what's so troubling about this is that the university apparently is not able to say

this. We are not able to say basic truths about what people did and didn't do because we are so frightened by the pressure from the federal government. We open this episode with the words of Richard Nixon and then JD Vance, the professors and the universities are the enemy. That same sentiment half a century apart. JD Vance has also said, quote, the closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán's approach in Hungary. Those comments made by Vance, who is a graduate of Yale University and who is working under

Trump, who is also a product of the Ivy League, were understood as a declaration of war by many who work in higher education, and many of those same people now consider that war to be at their doorstep. This is not just happening at Columbia University. A grad student at Georgetown has been arrested in much the same fashion as Mahmoud Khalil for not committing a crime,

but as his lawyer has said, quote, because of the Palestinian heritage of his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and because the government suspects that he and his wife oppose U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. Do you feel like war has been declared on you and on your students by your government? I think we would have to say that that's true. I mean, the anti-higher ed politics of the right have been clear for years in this country. But the war is now openly declared.

And the most baffling thing is why the leadership bodies, the boards of regents and trustees of the universities that are now on the crosshairs, can't acknowledge this or say this. And the most troubling implication, of course, is that they somehow agree with this agenda, that they find something convenient or appealing about this.

In other words, that they agree with JD Vance that Orban's assault on universities in Hungary is something to be emulated. Well, look, I'm not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orban has ever done. I don't know everything he's ever done. What I do think is on the university principle, the idea that taxpayers should have some influence

in how their money is spent at these universities, it's a totally reasonable thing. And I do think that he's made some smart decisions there that we could learn from the United States. Well, he was just welcomed up. It's not a surprise. Universities create the possibility of asking questions and coming to greater degrees

of understanding of ourselves, of other people, of the world around us. Those basic capacities are fundamentally dangerous to authoritarian regimes and it's very clear that the Trump administration, the Republican Party, will be very happy to preside over an authoritarian regime in this country. So of course they're coming for the media institutions, for the major law firms, and for the universities. And I'm just waiting for, you know, our leaders or the members of the notional opposition party in this country to, you know, acknowledge that this is happening and do something about

it. Um, professors across the country have referred to this time as a return of McCarthyism, a campaign that will uproot professors unwilling to cooperate and fall in line, one that appears to be targeting people of all citizenship statuses, one that is sending people into the law enforcement void where even family and friends cannot locate you for days. On a personal level, as someone that is highly visible and outspoken on this issue, do you have any fear over your future, over your employment, or even your safety?

I have tenure. I have done nothing that would warrant my dismissal from the university. To get me fired from the university would require breaking its fundamental structures. On the other hand, I think there's a lot of people who would be happy to get those fundamental structures broken, so it's hard for me to say. I am a U.S. citizen. I was born in this country.

But what the White House is now asserting is that non-citizens do not even have rights of due process around deportation. And what's so frightening about that is that if non-citizens don't have the right to due process, then the government can just declare that you're a non-citizen. Due process is what would have been used to determine that you in fact are a citizen. So then nobody has due process. So I believe that I still live in New York City, one of the best and safest places

for a Jewish person to live in the world. I believe I live in a free city and a free country, but I know that my neighbors are in danger right now. I know my friend Mahmoud Khalil is in a cold cell in Louisiana right now because the people who run the government don't believe in basic constitutional rights, don't believe in basic human rights. And I see that the people with the power to speak out against this, to name this or do something about it, are by and large remaining silent.

So I have never before been so uncertain about what the future holds or about who's safe and who isn't. Professor Hawley, thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you tomorrow.