Image by Tobias Pfeifer.

On September 17, 2025, one month before I was to teach my annual social justice reporting class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the campus lowered its flag to half-mast in honor of far-right pontificator Charlie Kirk.

Nobody deserves to be murdered, as Kirk was, but to honor a man of his White supremacist, Christian nationalist, and misogynist beliefs was to spit in the face not only of all the women on campus, but of students and staff of color; the queer and trans students and employees whose identities he characterized as “abominations“; the Muslims whose religion, he said, “is a sword being used to slit the throat of America“; the immigrants he insisted will “replace us” with their “anti-white agenda”; and the Jews he accused of controlling America’s institutions.

Columbia did not have to lower that flag. Trump ordered federal institutions to do so, but the university is private, not part of the government. No, lowering the flag was a choice.

That Columbia made such a choice is nothing short of astounding, given that its past two years of capitulations to the Trump administration have rested upon the school’s promise to protect its Jewish students and staff from antisemitism. As our current acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote to the university community this past summer in classic Orwellian double-speak:

“While Columbia does not admit to wrongdoing… the institution’s leaders have recognized, repeatedly, that Jewish students and faculty have experienced painful, unacceptable incidents, and that reform was and is needed.”

So why honor a man who espoused Nazi conspiracy theories?

I bring this up because this flag business was only the latest example of the groveling submission Columbia’s trustees have shown toward this country’s proto-authoritarian government since the 2023 student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza gave Republicans the idea of using accusations of antisemitism to attack liberal arts colleges.

Allow me to illustrate with a brief history of this groveling.

The First Year of Capitulation: 2023

In 2023, not long after the horrific Hamas attack on Israeli citizens and Israel’s insanely outsized retaliatory slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, Columbia called in the police against our nonviolent student protesters, locked down the campus for the first time in history, and suspended both its own and Barnard undergraduates, most of them teenage girls, in punishment.

That same year, Columbia’s administration allowed Trumpian Christian nationalists to define who was antisemitic and who wasn’t. It succumbed to and accepted the right-wing false narrative that the campus was rife with Jew-haters. And it refused to stand up for the Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and Jewish students who were being harassed, threatened, and doxxed on and off campus for protesting Israel’s murderous policies.

The Second Year of Capitulation: 2024

In 2024, Columbia groveled even more. It kept the campus locked down (as it does to this day). It put in place so many rules governing protests that it effectively squashed the ability of students to voice their opposition to Israel’s genocide, or even to the government of President Donald Trump. And it refused to offer any support to Palestinian students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi when they were arrested and detained by ICE in violation of their First Amendment rights, or when their visas were revoked.

Other universities have not been so cowardly. For example, when Bard College student and Afghan refugee Ali Sajad Faqirzada, who had fled the Taliban regime with his sister, was arrested and detained by ICE at his asylum hearing........

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