Taking Names at Columbia University

Nationalism, Antisemitism, Trump, and Universities

Many of us looked on with disgust when several of the country’s most “elite” universities permitted student protestors of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas to cross the line into antisemitism and harassment. As a result of Columbia University’s complicity in such events, its president, Minouche Shafik, resigned. Shafik was in an almost impossible position, attacked from both sides. Washington DC criticized her unwillingness to draw a clear line between peaceful protests and harassment, while at the university itself students camped her house and violated her privacy due to the reasonable actions that she did take, such as removing the students who forcefully occupied one of its halls.

A new chapter in the story comes with the Trump administration. There have been several instances of DC-ordered authorities tracking down non-citizen resident university students who are suspected of sympathizing or affiliating with anti-American groups. This is totally new territory.

What’s more, the civil rights attorneys that the administration has sent to universities like Columbia are asking for the names and ethnic/national backgrounds of the students who participated in what were deemed to be antisemitic anti-Israel protests. Let that sink in for a second: In an effort to protect the rights of American university students and Jewish students in particular, civil rights attorneys are looking into the family backgrounds of student protestors. And, as these things go, people are accusing these very investigations of violating privacy and civil rights.

And I’ll throw one more log on the fire. All of this comes at the same time as Trump issues an executive order to close, or at least extremely diminish, the United States Department of Education.

So what is it that causes these three things to become so entangled? — 1) government oversight of education, 2) civil rights, 3) free speech

An argument can be made that the answer is money. After all, the main function of the Department of Education for higher education is to adjudicate which universities qualify for federal funding and which don’t, especially in their capacity for accepting federally subsidized student loans. I’ve written about this mostly vicious cycle before.

But when I discussed these recent developments with students, discussion turned to the influence of Nationalistic ideology. One student said, “Universities should protect free speech,” and tying their statements to their ethnic and national backgrounds seemed like a violation to him. Another student voiced support for the nation to act in its own “self-interest, just as universities should act in their own self-interest.” But why are we even talking about Nationalism in the context of universities? …because the Trump administration wants to protect the U.S.’s investment universities — with Columbia, as one example, receiving $400 million in government funding, currently at risk of being revoked.

It’s a dizzying experiment to try to nail down a definition of Nationalism. Some define it ideologically, as “a set of ideas and prejudices” through which a group identifies with its nation-state. Others define it more matter-of-factly, simply as a “consciousness” of one’s national identity. Way back in 1939 (remember what was happening then) the Royal Institute of International Affairs defined nationalism as a kind of desire, specifically “a desire to forward the strength, liberty, or prosperity of a nation.”

In popular media, we’re most used to pejorative uses of the term “nationalism,” since nationalistic groups are typically highlighted when they in fact violate somebody else’s rights and break the law. There have been efforts, on the other hand, to defend “the virtue of nationalism,” as Yoram Hazony has recently done in his book of the same title, where he writes, “the world is governed best when nations agree to cultivate their own traditions, free from interference by other nations." This seems to be something like the kind of nationalism that Trump endorses.

But why should nationalistic policy target students specifically?

At a base level, it’s jarring to see the juxtaposition of civil rights efforts with an all-too-McCarthyist-feeling outing of students’ family backgrounds. In the current context, nationalism is a practical worldview. I mean that it’s a lens through which the administration views its actions alongside those of other nations. It’s not a choice to be nationalistic, so the argument goes, but a recognition of how things are.

And why students in particular? That’s the question that most interests me. What about business owners, civil servants, or religious leaders? When they voice nationally antagonistic opinions, are we asking for their family information too?

I’m of two minds about this. I oppose the administration’s use of judicial power to collect family information about student protestors, even if they go too far, simply because it doesn’t seem necessary to do what the administration is chiefly trying to do: to hold university’s accountable for protecting the civil rights of its students. The fact is that we generally hold students to be in a protected category. In university contexts, we give adults permission to experiment with ideas, even if they’re criticizing the U.S.’s actions on the international stage. Otherwise, what’s the use of protecting if we don’t grant the freedom to do something that might require protecting? This Tufts graduate student was arrested by unmarked “police” and taken to an unmarked vehicle. Why? As far as has been publicly released, it seems that all she did was to write a school newspaper article asking the university to recognize Palestinian genocide. We’re using military dark ops tactics against student journalists.

Still, zooming out from the disturbing nature of the actual incidents, there is good reason to target students specifically. And as expected, it comes down to money — not just profit but the goods represented by money. The federal government spends approximately $121 BILLION annually on student aid in higher education, through grants and loans. They know that they won’t recoup this money directly through dollars repaid. Instead, the investment is in the welfare of the federation insofar as education contributes to it by producing graduates capable of self-governance. As usual, I remember Aristotle. The virtue of a city-state is measured by how well it enables its citizens to live lives of excellence and virtue. There’s a reason why the National Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth inscribes “Education” in its four cornerstones, alongside Liberty, Law, and Morality. And on the monument, under “Education,” are “Youth” and “Wisdom,” as well as “Compact.” At least as represented in this monument, we commit to education in the form of a compact by investing in the wisdom of our youth. Things become tricky when this “youth” reach an age of legal accountability. We ask college students to act as adults while acknowledging that they have a long way to go to become morally accountable and professionally productive.

My gripe with the orders that Trump has given the attorneys investigating students’ backgrounds is that it seems misdirected on students when it should be directed more toward the universities. But universities are, by my estimation, the least accountable major institutions we have. They’re not accountable to the market — since people keep buying what they sell while acknowledging that the return on investment isn’t worth it. They’re certainly not accountable internally — as tenure long ago outstayed its shelf life. And most alarmingly, they’re unaccountable economically — since they’re so incredibly subsidized by the government. Universities are like little fiefdoms in a perpetual state of rebellion against the king (a sketchy analogy to make for multiple reasons). But that’s where these three things come full circle — government, civil rights, and free speech.

This is the time of the semester when students begin working on their term papers for their Foundations of Thought classes. One thing that is unique about the liberal arts curriculum at Hildegard is that classes are consolidated under common banners, which which we name the classes.

So this term, students are taking a 9-unit course (3 typical courses combined into one) called, “What is Nature?” The goal is simple, though not easy: to become fluent in some of most important answers history has to offer to the question, What is Nature? Currently, they’re reading and discussing Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (what we call “science”).

In their papers, we ask students to act as students. That sounds obvious, but in many college classrooms, students are asked to pretend as if they’re industry experts. They are required to interact with and even disagree with scholarship published by professors and researchers who have spent 30 years in a field. What typically results from this exercise is bad writing because students try to overcompensate by generalizing, or abandoning simple principles of rhetoric and logic, or, in the worst cases, by plagiarizing. But at Hildegard, we remind them that they’re students and ask them to imagine that they’re reading audience also consists of students.

As they write their term papers in an attempt to answer the question, what is Nature?, they might turn to Aristotle’s definition of nature as a direction of motion and change in the Physics, or they might look at Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, or at Galileo’s use of the dialogue form as a method of presenting new ideas about our solar system during the scientific revolution. An essential ingredient for a successful paper is authenticity, by which I simply refer to being honest about what a student writer has the authority to say — not because they’re “just a student” but because their understanding may be deep but still limited. Fortunately, in a Great Books program like ours, students have direct access to the text. That’s one thing that puts them on par with every other researcher or scholar out there. They can read what Newton or Copernicus say just as anyone else can. Context knowledge aside, these books are endlessly rich in wisdom and nuance.

Paper proposals are due this week, followed by one-on-one coaching meetings, and then Draft 1 (of several).