Exporting the Columbia Prototype

The Trump administration should leverage its successful approach to the troubled Ivy League university to fight anti-Semitism and racialism elsewhere.

Last week, the Trump administration won a high-stakes showdown with Columbia University. Following the October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, Columbia has been ground zero for pro-Hamas agitation on America’s campuses. It has seen marches, occupations, vandalism, and violence. In response, the White House threatened to withhold $400 million in public funding unless the university enacted meaningful reforms.

The administration’s hardball approach paid off: Columbia has now acceded to virtually all the administration’s demands. The university has banned masked protests, boosted campus security, and established administrative oversight over its radical “post-colonial” academic departments, which have been hotbeds of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism. The relationship between the White House and American universities now enters a new phase, and the Columbia episode could serve as a prototype for the administration’s approach going forward.

The administration should understand that anti-Semitism is just part of the Left’s ideological nesting doll. For campus activists, the Jews are the Middle East’s oppressors, while the Palestinians are the oppressed and are therefore justified in violent revolution. The narrative is attractive because it can be scaled symbolically: in the progressive imagination, Israel is to the Palestinians as white America is to black America and as Western society is to the Third World. Anti-Semitism is a stand-in for anti-whiteness and, ultimately, for anti-Western ideologies.

Left-wing activists’ opposition to Israel is so frenzied in part because of that country’s small size and relative vulnerability. Campus activists celebrated the October 7 Hamas paragliders because the terrorists drew blood, enacting a brutal form of “justice” that the radical Left would like to see perpetrated everywhere but lacks the power to implement at home.

While the administration’s actions have thus far focused on anti-Semitism, the next step should be to apply this prototype to the entire nesting doll of left-wing racialism. Conservatives have developed a habit of grounding their arguments against racial discrimination in the harms that it visits on “model minority” groups, such as Jews or Asians. While that may have been tactically prudent years ago, it’s time to go further and defend the benefits of colorblind equality for all groups—including the racial majority.

The reality is that, in absolute numbers, whites are the biggest victims of racialist discrimination. One can consult almost any university diversity training materials and immediately understand that they are predicated on a domestic oppressor-oppressed narrative, which assigns whites the arch-oppressor role and legitimizes discrimination against them. The success of “model minorities,” such as Jews and Asians, might scramble the progressive narrative, but those groups are simply suffering collateral damage from the Left’s fundamental white-black political distinction.

The Trump administration has a historic opportunity to abolish policies predicated on these distinctions and to advance the principle of colorblind equality. Discrimination against any group—white, black, Asian, Jewish—is wrong. The better policy is to treat all individuals equally, regardless of ancestry. The next phase of the White House’s campaign should be to target the entire nesting doll of discrimination and export the new Columbia prototype to all universities—starting with those in the Ivy League.

The other lesson from the Columbia saga is that the president has all of the leverage. Trump extracted significant concessions from Columbia with a relatively small sum: $400 million, less than 3 percent of Columbia’s $15 billion endowment. Though elite universities are among the nation’s wealthiest institutions, they are vulnerable to financial pressure and fold easily.

Columbia could mark a turning point. Universities know that their DEI policies are unpopular and often illegal. They know, despite the insistence otherwise of their activist students, that colorblindness is just. Equality should mean equality—not just for minority groups, but for everyone.