On submission – Adam Shatz in LRB:

“On Friday, 21 March – two weeks after the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student from a refugee camp in Syria; a week after Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian graduate student, fled to Canada to avoid being detained by ICE; and just a few days after Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas, killing more than four hundred Palestinians in less than 24 hours – Columbia University capitulated to the Trump administration’s menu of demands, including a ban on the wearing of non-medical masks on campus, adherence to a broad and highly tendentious definition of antisemitism that would forbid almost any criticism of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, and the imposition of a ‘senior vice president’ to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.
Columbia’s surrender – a ‘shameful day’, in the words of Sheldon Pollock, who oversaw MESAAS – took place hardly a week after the Trump team presented its ultimatum. Four hundred million dollars in federal funds for scientific research were at stake, but it would be a mistake to view Columbia’s decision as a painful concession under financial pressure. The university could have compensated for the loss by dipping into its $14.8 billion endowment; it could have taken the administration to court for its extortionate assault on academic freedom and the right to assemble; it could have sought to build a united front with other universities facing unconstitutional demands from the White House. Instead, the board of trustees – stacked with supporters of Israel – took advantage of Trump’s ultimatum to accelerate a campaign against pro-Palestine dissent launched when Joe Biden was in office.”

(…)

“There were disturbing incidents of aggression against Jewish students on some campuses, including Columbia. But there were also cases of physical violence against Palestinians and pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including a mob attack at UCLA, and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont, one of whom was left permanently paralysed. Columbia and other universities could have punished individual incidents of anti-Jewish hatred, while defending the right of student protesters – many of them Jewish – to call for divestment from a state that, with American weapons, has carried out the destruction of an entire society.
Instead, Columbia embraced the narrative of its accusers, amplified by highly selective accounts of the protests by ‘liberal’ writers sympathetic to Israel. On this view, the protests were themselves antisemitic, or at the very least caused Jewish students to feel unsafe, and therefore could not be tolerated. The rights of Palestinian students, whose voices, unlike those of conservative Jewish students, are not echoed by members of the board of trustees, were ignored, as were their much more serious concerns over discrimination and safety.”

(…)

“The night before his arrest by agents from the Department of Homeland Security, Khalil wrote to the university administration: ‘I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home.’ Armstrong not only failed to come to his aid; she has not been able even to mention his name in any official correspondence since he was handcuffed in his apartment, where he had just returned from dinner with his pregnant wife. As the Trump administration hailed the detention of Khalil, a green card holder and legal resident (‘Shalom, Mahmoud,’ the White House wrote on X), Armstrong claimed that her university was committed to making ‘every student, faculty and staff member safe and welcome on our campus’.
Shortly after Khalil’s detention, in a meeting with international students, Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, urged them to remove posts about the Middle East. ‘Nobody can protect you,’ he said. ‘These are dangerous times.’”

(…)

“Mahmoud Khalil, who never wore a mask, had a strong premonition that he would be arrested. Having grown up in a refugee camp in Syria and fled the civil war, he’d never had the luxury of safety, unlike his accusers. As a Palestinian, he knew his rights were conditional – even in a ‘country of immigrants’. After his unlawful detention, only thirteen members of the House signed a letter demanding his release. In his letter from prisonin Louisiana, he said: Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.
Khalil’s invocation of the ‘right to have rights’ is an allusion to Hannah Arendt. Arendt was thinking of Jewish refugees like herself, whom the Germans had stripped of their citizenship. Today it is refugees from the Global South, and above all Palestinians, whose right to have rights, whose very existence as a people, is under threat. (The law under which Trump seeks to deport Khalil is the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which originally targeted suspected Communists among Jewish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust.)”

Read the article here.

Threaten people with deportation and incarceration and people will decide that it’s better to be silent about certain issues. A very effective way to preventively silence dissent.

The obedience of Columbia is telling indeed. But as Shatz points out, man people and most institutions love to be obedient. After all, that’s part of how we are raised, and the rewards can be seductive.

As a middle-aged man told me: “I don’t like my job, but my salary makes me overcome my dislike.”

Money, the fear of deportation, and most people step into line.