These people play dirty and I don't trust Columbia or any other organization that Trump may "leverage."
In my opinion, it begins with the media. If the legacy media outlets don't change their tune (fat chance) or they crumble one-by-one (slim chance), no amount of leverage on other institutions will result in real change.
That’s the answer to all of these pushbacks. The consequences of them not living up to the “deal” need to be explicit and followed through. Words are cheap. Actions are all that truly matter.
Except that what really matters is the determination of the administration to see these changes through. The Biden administration was happy with any cosmetic changes to sweep the campus antisemitism issue under the rug.
Columbia University will find out the hard way that the Trump Administration is made of sterner stuff and cosmetic changes won't be enough.
Not the media, but the administrators (provost, deans, etc), who are neo-Marxists. The way to solve that is to exploit the tension between faculty and administrator. Empower the faculty to go after the admin when the admin engages in any of this behavior. That shuts down the 'academic freedom' and 'tenure' arguments because admin can be removed from their admin position at will.
Columbia is not actually cooperating. All they did was write a single non-binding letter, while the President of the University privately tells faculty that nothing will change. There were already masked protests the day after masked protests were "banned."
There are so many other examples of this, both externally visible and visible inside to people inside the university (but not yet reported).
The Trump admin's approach needs to be MUCH more aggressive. "Pausing" $400M is not enough -- they need to cancel 100% of all of Columbia's federal grants. They are blowing a generational opportunity for reform.
Chris Rufo, please hatch a plan to pay off student loans that pushes the burden back to the University Endowments that profited from the predatory lending to students and away from Taxpayers.
This would be a great thing to "Leverage" with government funding on the line for each school.
Tuition should drop and future loans should be on the University with no government backstop.
100% on target. The goal of the Left is not just subjugation of the Jews but of Western Civilization and Christianity too. Indeed, Europe has nearly capitulated to their goals already. Mass rapes by Muslim men are barely prosecuted. Priests are decapitated on the altar with nary a raised eyebrow. The US is the only stopgap save, perhaps, Hungary, Poland and the Baltics. The time is now or never.
I’d love to see your receipts on your claims. Also - serial rapists in the United States, mostly white men but also plenty of men of color, are rarely prosecuted. How does that make us any different than those heathens in Europe? Or is it only rape when a non-Christian forces sex on another person????
I’m sorry. What do you mean? I worked in sexual assault response. I know how few rapes in this country are prosecuted. Check out RAINN’s website sometime and learn just how little the public safety infrastructure protects people from rapists. It is no joke.
DEI must die! Indoctrination starts way before these stupid kids get to college. It starts in public school system. His is where we need to sow the seeds of meritocracy!
It is interesting to me that the left no longer looks to Martin Luther King for inspiration. He advocated for colorblind equality while condemning violent means for getting there. Note that the radical left tries to normalize violent protest and property damage. They have a Marxist agenda for sure.
They are all essentially offspring of the violent Marxist group Weather Underground. Essentially justifying terrorism as a means to undermine Western values and society. It’s still just a wet dream over “The Revolution”.
Well, Martin Luther King brought us Jasmine Crockett. The content of her character tells us all we need to know. And you are right, no one, NO ONE, looks to him for inspiration or even acknowledges his existence.
Another very important point: if we had simply insisted years ago on giving inner city kids (and all poor kids everywhere) a decent education (exit the teachers’ unions) , instead of this DEI nonsense, we would have solved much of the problem that DEI claims to address (but of course only makes worse). That’s on top of all the horrors that Christopher is writing about here.
We never gave inner city kids decent educations and it appears like we never will. It has nothing to do with DEI. DEI is a compromise, just like affirmative action was, because no one (and I mean right or left) was willing to spend the money to actually even the playing field at the start of the game - which is basically birth.
I got a great public school education and it didn’t cost all that much because it was before the teachers unions took over. If we had focused on actually teaching kids, the problem would be solved and it wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.
What state did you grow up in and during what time period? I grew up in California in the 1970s and 1980s and what killed the public schools there was not the teachers unions but Prop 13 (gutting the property tax system). It was tax protesters who killed my schools. And in the 1960s and 1970s the California schools didn’t even try to educate the Latino kids. They got sent to special ed, regardless of their intelligence. When was this mythical time when we educated everyone equally? Was is before integration of the public schools, which wasn’t finished in Texas until the 1980s? When the separate schools were falling down shacks?
I attended California public schools and I have plenty of friends whose kids are in California public schools. Blaming just the teachers and their union is way too simplistic. I agree that there is dead weight teaching in the public schools (Texas too even tho our unions have very little power). And I agree that California state government is too beholden to unions in general to always make the best choices for everyone. But that’s not just the teachers’ union; it’s also the prison guards union, the police unions, the district attorneys unions and likely other powerful public unions.
But we only talk about the teachers union messing up education. We don’t talk about how police unions protect cops with short fuses or cowboy complexes (remember what happened in Uvalde - Texas cops are often mediocre or even negligent at their jobs but our legislature and governor protects them).
The problems with public education are multiple but cutting public education budgets and demanding that stressed out and overworked teachers constantly do more with less is an inherently destructive cycle. And expecting the public schools to correct for all of the inequality among students that comes from parental and community lack of resources, historic inequality, and everything else (learning disabilities, coming from non-English speaking homes, birth defects, developmental delays and other disabilities) is ridiculous without providing robust resources for not just K-12 but pre-K also.
The most intelligent and well educated people in this country don’t go into teaching because they 1) want to make more money; 2) don’t want to be treated like garbage by parents, administrators, politicians and random members of the community.
We all benefit when our public schools are well funded and supported by the whole community. People seem authentically confused about why they should support the public schools if they 1) don’t have kids or 2) have kids in private schools.
The reason we should all support well funded public schools is that we all benefit from better educated nurses, EMTs, police officers, fire fighters, small business owners, engineers, teachers, doctors etc.
A great public education system lifts all boats. Hating on the public schools because of the absurdity created by very powerful unions in some jurisdictions is short-sighted and hurts all of us.
I want there to be well educated nurses to take care of me when I get older or get really sick. I want better educated postal workers and massage therapists and citizens. This is how we have nice things as a society.
My personal experience would argue that K-12 public school education starting going downhill soon after the Johnson administration’s “Great Society” began being implemented in the mid-late 1960’s.
My formative years were all spent in the Deep South: Alabama,Georgia, Tennessee. In all these states, I attended both inner city and suburban schools grades 1-12 from 1958-1970 (very fortunate timing for me !!).
I entered a rigorous Chemical Engineering public university program in Alabama in 1970. Our undergraduate cohort consisted of men, women, whites and blacks. We were all treated equally; we all worked like dogs !! And we loved it, mostly….. It was a wonderful time to get a public school education.
(PS: In truth, the best academic grade 1-12 schools even back then (50’s - 70’s) were widely known to be Catholic. I suspect that is still true today.)
ChatGPT estimates that Columbia's endowment in 1970 was $337 M. So $1 M in missing funds should have been highly material in an accounting sense.
They were also in the midst of a record (for all Universities at the time) $100 M fund drive, which got extended and then derailed by the SDS protests in 1968 and 1970. One protest in 1970, at the brand new School of International Affairs, resulted in $25,000 in damage, mainly to the exterior windows.
I have never contributed to Columbia since graduating; they don't value money.
It's 2.6% of their budget, so although a large sum of money (you can pop it in my bank account any time you like) as far as their budget goes, it's nigh on a rounding error....
Our government indirectly funds this behavior by funneling billions of dollars through their school by allowing tax-free donations, no property taxes, etc. If a university's exemption status was on the line because of these activities, the school president would give the requirements set forth by President Trump more serious consideration because the cost would be much greater than $400M.
It's ironic that Columbia University has long been a hotbed for Frankfort School Jewish intellectual Marxism, but now that philosophy has turned on them. The Semitic people are the Palestinians, and the Israelis are mostly tribal European Ashkenazi conquerors. Think about the word "antisemitic" and who is really guilty of antisemitism.
You surely can't believe you're the first person to try this line. "Antisemitism" is a made up word to mean anti-Jewish, it really isn't about "semites". "Palestinians" on the other hand, are a made up people, they're Arabs, as any DNA test shows. As she said, we will have peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews.
"Try this line?" No, I'm not the first. There are millions of others who agree to the true definition of Semitic. As for Arabs hating Jews, how much hate was there for Jews in the Middle East before land was conquerored for Israel? The U.S. has had a 20 year war spending $trillions with millions killed in the Middle East, all to protect Israel at the cost of U.S. taxpayers.
To answer your question, a lot. And, the land was not conquered for Israel. You think the U.S. has been at war in the ME for Israel’s sake? I’d like to think you’re just ignorant but it’s pretty clear that you also hate Jews.
Actually more than half of the Jewish population is descended from Arabic-speaking Jews from Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, etc. Sure there are many Israelis with European roots, but they are less than half.
I believe that the ruling class in Israel is mostly European Ashkenazi. On "Finding Your Roots" with Henry Louis Gates, jr., his genetic analysis of his Jewish guests almost always shows European Ashkenazi, not Middle Eastern or North African countries.
As for the rest of the many Jewish areas of population, at this late date why did they need to take land for their own state of Israel? They had their own autonomous region in Birobidzhan in the Soviet Union. They're doing well without war just about everywhere else they've settled, often better than Christians.
Before you bring up the Holocaust, remember that Judeo Bolsheviks reigned terror down on the Russian population. The Germans had a choice between Rosa Luxemburg's/Lenin's/etc. communism, starvation, and terror - or the Nazis - and they chose the Nazis. Both side were awful.
Again, Bolshevism had nothing to do with Judaism. Rosa Luxembourg was neither a typical Jew nor did she remotely approach Lenin (who had scant Jewish blood, let alone Jewish upbringing) in her impact on the spread of communism.
The semitic peoples are the progeny of Shem, one of the three sons of Noah. Many other Middle Eastern nations descended from Shem, but the Ashkenazi descended from Gomer, who descended from Noah’s second son Japheth. Many European nations descended from Japheth. The third son was Ham, whom many Middle Eastern and African nations descended from. This is outlined in Genesis 10. The Palestinian people lived in both Jordan and Assyria, but it is not clear when they began to inhabit Israel once the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple, beginning Jewish diaspora.
Robert. Let me understand your logic. When convenient, those Israelis are all semites--so they are the same. They're all Palestinians. But the semitic Ashekenazi subset are the conquerers. But I thought they are the Palestinians? So they conquered themselves? So how is your stupid oppressor-oppressed zero-dimensional analysis working for ya?
No institution in America should allow antisemitism to be taught or demonstrated in any of our schools nowhere in America is this permitted or should it be if you tried this in China or Russia you’d be killed on the spot why would you disrespect the one country that allows freedom I don’t know but it should not be even permitted in this country Stop supplying them with our children to make money for this purpose !!
I read somewhere that the president (I think) in a meeting said the masks will continue. I have a feeling they're just saying what the administration wants to hear. You know, like the head of NPR who is now backpedaling from previous public statements and sentiments.
While I agree Chris with the overall sentiment of this article, I would not be so hasty as to proclaim any form of victory. What is "administrative oversight" anyway? Has the oppressor-oppressed narrative really been defeated? Have its leaders at Columbia; the professors and administrative peddlers been dismissed? Have they really caved? Maybe they are just going dormant to protect themselves. Perhaps I am just ignorant, but somehow I think the oppressor-oppressed narrative is still alive and well at Columbia. Prove me wrong. 🤷♂️
While I am sure you are aware of this, It is questionable whether Columbia actually acceded. In a Columbia faculty Zoom call, Columbia president Katrina Armstrong suggests the "changes" at Columbia are all show. https://freebeacon.com/campus/what-columbia-university-president-really-told-faculty-members/
These people play dirty and I don't trust Columbia or any other organization that Trump may "leverage."
In my opinion, it begins with the media. If the legacy media outlets don't change their tune (fat chance) or they crumble one-by-one (slim chance), no amount of leverage on other institutions will result in real change.
Totally agree. See my comment in agreement. They are not actually cooperating and Trump needs to push harder.
That’s the answer to all of these pushbacks. The consequences of them not living up to the “deal” need to be explicit and followed through. Words are cheap. Actions are all that truly matter.
There are $11M more dollars waiting to be used to create citizens that respect civil rights.
I’ve heard this too. Speaks volume about her integrity!
Except that what really matters is the determination of the administration to see these changes through. The Biden administration was happy with any cosmetic changes to sweep the campus antisemitism issue under the rug.
Columbia University will find out the hard way that the Trump Administration is made of sterner stuff and cosmetic changes won't be enough.
We hope!
Not the media, but the administrators (provost, deans, etc), who are neo-Marxists. The way to solve that is to exploit the tension between faculty and administrator. Empower the faculty to go after the admin when the admin engages in any of this behavior. That shuts down the 'academic freedom' and 'tenure' arguments because admin can be removed from their admin position at will.
Columbia is not actually cooperating. All they did was write a single non-binding letter, while the President of the University privately tells faculty that nothing will change. There were already masked protests the day after masked protests were "banned."
There are so many other examples of this, both externally visible and visible inside to people inside the university (but not yet reported).
The Trump admin's approach needs to be MUCH more aggressive. "Pausing" $400M is not enough -- they need to cancel 100% of all of Columbia's federal grants. They are blowing a generational opportunity for reform.
Chris Rufo, please hatch a plan to pay off student loans that pushes the burden back to the University Endowments that profited from the predatory lending to students and away from Taxpayers.
This would be a great thing to "Leverage" with government funding on the line for each school.
Tuition should drop and future loans should be on the University with no government backstop.
100% on target. The goal of the Left is not just subjugation of the Jews but of Western Civilization and Christianity too. Indeed, Europe has nearly capitulated to their goals already. Mass rapes by Muslim men are barely prosecuted. Priests are decapitated on the altar with nary a raised eyebrow. The US is the only stopgap save, perhaps, Hungary, Poland and the Baltics. The time is now or never.
I’d love to see your receipts on your claims. Also - serial rapists in the United States, mostly white men but also plenty of men of color, are rarely prosecuted. How does that make us any different than those heathens in Europe? Or is it only rape when a non-Christian forces sex on another person????
Don’t be silly.
I’m sorry. What do you mean? I worked in sexual assault response. I know how few rapes in this country are prosecuted. Check out RAINN’s website sometime and learn just how little the public safety infrastructure protects people from rapists. It is no joke.
DEI must die! Indoctrination starts way before these stupid kids get to college. It starts in public school system. His is where we need to sow the seeds of meritocracy!
But why is even 1 penny of taxpayer money going to ANY university?
They’re mostly tax-exempt on top of it all.
It is interesting to me that the left no longer looks to Martin Luther King for inspiration. He advocated for colorblind equality while condemning violent means for getting there. Note that the radical left tries to normalize violent protest and property damage. They have a Marxist agenda for sure.
They are all essentially offspring of the violent Marxist group Weather Underground. Essentially justifying terrorism as a means to undermine Western values and society. It’s still just a wet dream over “The Revolution”.
Well, Martin Luther King brought us Jasmine Crockett. The content of her character tells us all we need to know. And you are right, no one, NO ONE, looks to him for inspiration or even acknowledges his existence.
Another very important point: if we had simply insisted years ago on giving inner city kids (and all poor kids everywhere) a decent education (exit the teachers’ unions) , instead of this DEI nonsense, we would have solved much of the problem that DEI claims to address (but of course only makes worse). That’s on top of all the horrors that Christopher is writing about here.
We never gave inner city kids decent educations and it appears like we never will. It has nothing to do with DEI. DEI is a compromise, just like affirmative action was, because no one (and I mean right or left) was willing to spend the money to actually even the playing field at the start of the game - which is basically birth.
I got a great public school education and it didn’t cost all that much because it was before the teachers unions took over. If we had focused on actually teaching kids, the problem would be solved and it wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg.
What state did you grow up in and during what time period? I grew up in California in the 1970s and 1980s and what killed the public schools there was not the teachers unions but Prop 13 (gutting the property tax system). It was tax protesters who killed my schools. And in the 1960s and 1970s the California schools didn’t even try to educate the Latino kids. They got sent to special ed, regardless of their intelligence. When was this mythical time when we educated everyone equally? Was is before integration of the public schools, which wasn’t finished in Texas until the 1980s? When the separate schools were falling down shacks?
I attended California public schools and I have plenty of friends whose kids are in California public schools. Blaming just the teachers and their union is way too simplistic. I agree that there is dead weight teaching in the public schools (Texas too even tho our unions have very little power). And I agree that California state government is too beholden to unions in general to always make the best choices for everyone. But that’s not just the teachers’ union; it’s also the prison guards union, the police unions, the district attorneys unions and likely other powerful public unions.
But we only talk about the teachers union messing up education. We don’t talk about how police unions protect cops with short fuses or cowboy complexes (remember what happened in Uvalde - Texas cops are often mediocre or even negligent at their jobs but our legislature and governor protects them).
The problems with public education are multiple but cutting public education budgets and demanding that stressed out and overworked teachers constantly do more with less is an inherently destructive cycle. And expecting the public schools to correct for all of the inequality among students that comes from parental and community lack of resources, historic inequality, and everything else (learning disabilities, coming from non-English speaking homes, birth defects, developmental delays and other disabilities) is ridiculous without providing robust resources for not just K-12 but pre-K also.
The most intelligent and well educated people in this country don’t go into teaching because they 1) want to make more money; 2) don’t want to be treated like garbage by parents, administrators, politicians and random members of the community.
We all benefit when our public schools are well funded and supported by the whole community. People seem authentically confused about why they should support the public schools if they 1) don’t have kids or 2) have kids in private schools.
The reason we should all support well funded public schools is that we all benefit from better educated nurses, EMTs, police officers, fire fighters, small business owners, engineers, teachers, doctors etc.
A great public education system lifts all boats. Hating on the public schools because of the absurdity created by very powerful unions in some jurisdictions is short-sighted and hurts all of us.
I want there to be well educated nurses to take care of me when I get older or get really sick. I want better educated postal workers and massage therapists and citizens. This is how we have nice things as a society.
My personal experience would argue that K-12 public school education starting going downhill soon after the Johnson administration’s “Great Society” began being implemented in the mid-late 1960’s.
My formative years were all spent in the Deep South: Alabama,Georgia, Tennessee. In all these states, I attended both inner city and suburban schools grades 1-12 from 1958-1970 (very fortunate timing for me !!).
I entered a rigorous Chemical Engineering public university program in Alabama in 1970. Our undergraduate cohort consisted of men, women, whites and blacks. We were all treated equally; we all worked like dogs !! And we loved it, mostly….. It was a wonderful time to get a public school education.
(PS: In truth, the best academic grade 1-12 schools even back then (50’s - 70’s) were widely known to be Catholic. I suspect that is still true today.)
Totally agree with Mr. Rufo but nearly spit out my coffee at “…a relatively small sum: $400 million…”
In 1970, when I graduated from Columbia College, they lost $1M in their accounting system ($8,187,397 in 2025 $$). They just wrote it off.
So yes, $400 M is a rounding error for the University.
I hate to quibble, but an $8 million accounting error doesn’t seem quite the same as foregoing $400 million of cash.
ChatGPT estimates that Columbia's endowment in 1970 was $337 M. So $1 M in missing funds should have been highly material in an accounting sense.
They were also in the midst of a record (for all Universities at the time) $100 M fund drive, which got extended and then derailed by the SDS protests in 1968 and 1970. One protest in 1970, at the brand new School of International Affairs, resulted in $25,000 in damage, mainly to the exterior windows.
I have never contributed to Columbia since graduating; they don't value money.
What would be the problem with levying a fine?
Sorry, a fine for what?
It's 2.6% of their budget, so although a large sum of money (you can pop it in my bank account any time you like) as far as their budget goes, it's nigh on a rounding error....
Well, it’s actually 2.6% of their endowment, but what’s nearly half a billion among friends?
Our government indirectly funds this behavior by funneling billions of dollars through their school by allowing tax-free donations, no property taxes, etc. If a university's exemption status was on the line because of these activities, the school president would give the requirements set forth by President Trump more serious consideration because the cost would be much greater than $400M.
It's ironic that Columbia University has long been a hotbed for Frankfort School Jewish intellectual Marxism, but now that philosophy has turned on them. The Semitic people are the Palestinians, and the Israelis are mostly tribal European Ashkenazi conquerors. Think about the word "antisemitic" and who is really guilty of antisemitism.
You surely can't believe you're the first person to try this line. "Antisemitism" is a made up word to mean anti-Jewish, it really isn't about "semites". "Palestinians" on the other hand, are a made up people, they're Arabs, as any DNA test shows. As she said, we will have peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews.
"Try this line?" No, I'm not the first. There are millions of others who agree to the true definition of Semitic. As for Arabs hating Jews, how much hate was there for Jews in the Middle East before land was conquerored for Israel? The U.S. has had a 20 year war spending $trillions with millions killed in the Middle East, all to protect Israel at the cost of U.S. taxpayers.
To answer your question, a lot. And, the land was not conquered for Israel. You think the U.S. has been at war in the ME for Israel’s sake? I’d like to think you’re just ignorant but it’s pretty clear that you also hate Jews.
Actually more than half of the Jewish population is descended from Arabic-speaking Jews from Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, etc. Sure there are many Israelis with European roots, but they are less than half.
I believe that the ruling class in Israel is mostly European Ashkenazi. On "Finding Your Roots" with Henry Louis Gates, jr., his genetic analysis of his Jewish guests almost always shows European Ashkenazi, not Middle Eastern or North African countries.
As for the rest of the many Jewish areas of population, at this late date why did they need to take land for their own state of Israel? They had their own autonomous region in Birobidzhan in the Soviet Union. They're doing well without war just about everywhere else they've settled, often better than Christians.
Before you bring up the Holocaust, remember that Judeo Bolsheviks reigned terror down on the Russian population. The Germans had a choice between Rosa Luxemburg's/Lenin's/etc. communism, starvation, and terror - or the Nazis - and they chose the Nazis. Both side were awful.
Again, Bolshevism had nothing to do with Judaism. Rosa Luxembourg was neither a typical Jew nor did she remotely approach Lenin (who had scant Jewish blood, let alone Jewish upbringing) in her impact on the spread of communism.
False. And, the Frankfurt School had nothing to do with Judaism.
The semitic peoples are the progeny of Shem, one of the three sons of Noah. Many other Middle Eastern nations descended from Shem, but the Ashkenazi descended from Gomer, who descended from Noah’s second son Japheth. Many European nations descended from Japheth. The third son was Ham, whom many Middle Eastern and African nations descended from. This is outlined in Genesis 10. The Palestinian people lived in both Jordan and Assyria, but it is not clear when they began to inhabit Israel once the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple, beginning Jewish diaspora.
Robert. Let me understand your logic. When convenient, those Israelis are all semites--so they are the same. They're all Palestinians. But the semitic Ashekenazi subset are the conquerers. But I thought they are the Palestinians? So they conquered themselves? So how is your stupid oppressor-oppressed zero-dimensional analysis working for ya?
No institution in America should allow antisemitism to be taught or demonstrated in any of our schools nowhere in America is this permitted or should it be if you tried this in China or Russia you’d be killed on the spot why would you disrespect the one country that allows freedom I don’t know but it should not be even permitted in this country Stop supplying them with our children to make money for this purpose !!
I read somewhere that the president (I think) in a meeting said the masks will continue. I have a feeling they're just saying what the administration wants to hear. You know, like the head of NPR who is now backpedaling from previous public statements and sentiments.
While I agree Chris with the overall sentiment of this article, I would not be so hasty as to proclaim any form of victory. What is "administrative oversight" anyway? Has the oppressor-oppressed narrative really been defeated? Have its leaders at Columbia; the professors and administrative peddlers been dismissed? Have they really caved? Maybe they are just going dormant to protect themselves. Perhaps I am just ignorant, but somehow I think the oppressor-oppressed narrative is still alive and well at Columbia. Prove me wrong. 🤷♂️
Thank you for not capitalizing "black" and "white."
The Free Press reports that Columbia doesn't expect to follow or implement what it agreed to. (Sorry if this duplicates another post.)