Below menace from the Trump administration, Columbia College agreed to implement a collection of coverage modifications Friday, together with overhauling its guidelines for protests and conducting a right away evaluate of its Center Jap research division.
The modifications, detailed in a letter despatched by interim president, Katrina Armstrong, got here one week after the Trump administration ordered the Ivy League college to implement these and different modifications with a view to proceed receiving federal funding, an ultimatum extensively criticized in academia as an assault on educational freedom.
In her letter, Armstrong stated the college would instantly appoint a senior vice provost to conduct an intensive evaluate of the portfolio of its regional research applications, “starting immediately with the Middle East.”
Columbia will even bar protests inside educational buildings and the carrying of face masks on campus “for the purposes of concealing one’s identity.” An exception can be made for folks carrying them for well being causes.
The Trump administration pulled $400 million in analysis grants and different federal funding, and had threatened to chop extra, over the college’s dealing with of protests in opposition to Israel’s army marketing campaign in Gaza. The White Home has labeled the protests antisemitic, a label rejected by those that participated within the student-led demonstrations.
As a “precondition” for restoring funding, federal officers demanded that the college to position its Center Jap, South Asian and African Research Division beneath “academic receivership for a minimum of five years.”
Additionally they instructed the college to ban masks on campus, undertake a brand new definition of antisemitism, abolish its present course of for disciplining college students and ship a plan to ”reform undergraduate admissions, worldwide recruiting, and graduate admissions practices.”
Columbia stated it had agreed to do a lot of these issues, together with undertake a definition of antisemitism.
