Columbia University Sold its Soul for $400 Million

The integrity of one of the country's most famous institutions has a clear price tag.

Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

I moved to New York City in the summer of 2014 to go to Columbia University. I knew about Columbia when I was growing up, like, as a concept, but it wasn’t until late in my undergraduate degree that I considered the possibility that I could actually go there for something. My school in rural California didn’t send many — I can’t think of any, actually — students to Ivy league universities, and it wasn’t until I started to take journalism seriously as a future career that I really gave the university much thought. Once I did, though, like a classic small-town idiot who doesn’t know anything about anything, I fixated on it. I wanted to get into the prestigious journalism school there so badly. I was convinced that going there would funnel me directly into a job at a five-star, prestige publication, where I would pay my dues for anywhere from 6 to 18 months at the max before a gruff but nurturing editor recognized my brilliance and sent me off to report from far-flung locations and warzones. I spent weeks at my job as a substitute teacher at that same rural high school with my guts in knots thinking I’d blown the application, and when my acceptance letter finally came, I burst into the PE office and triumphantly informed a guy who I think was the JV football coach that I had gotten in. I don’t remember what he said in response, but in his head he probably thought I was the biggest asshole he had ever met, which is really something considering that he was a JV football coach.

When I got to Columbia, however, things were a bit different. I realized that my getting in wasn’t really that much of a triumph — the year I attended, the acceptance rate for its prestigious journalism school was something like 50 percent. The entry requirements were basically a functional knowledge of English, a pulse, and the financial ability to give the school an enormous amount of money. Despite that, I made friends. I learned things. I had “mentors.” Sure, the career services office recommended that I apply for a job as a writer at a local alt-weekly paper, which was coincidentally the job I’d left to go be a substitute teacher and apply for grad school in the first place, but nevertheless. I was in New York! A stellar career as a freelance journalist awaited! It was in some small part due to the monumental weight of Columbia University — those hallowed halls, the grounds where former presidents and generals and musicians (if you consider the Vampire Weekend guys musicians) had walked. Columbia had flaws, to be sure, but its reputation was something you could fall back on.

We now know what that reputation is worth: $400 million.

That seems like a staggering amount of money, but in Columbia’s world, it’s not, really. The university’s endowment, the general financial pool of investments that a private institution has to fund its general long-term operations, largely donated by rich people seeking to offset their taxes, is $14.8 billion. It is the 8th largest private school endowment in the country. That money is supplemented by federal grants; Columbia has up to $5 billion in federal grant commitments. And that, we have seen, is enough to buy them wholesale. One of the most famous private institutions in the country — an institution funded by private individuals in order to be remain outside of the scope of the federal government — is now owned, for a cut-rate price, by perhaps the most fascist administration we have ever seen.

The crux of this issue, of course, is Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate who was arrested in the university housing he shared with his wife, a pregnant U.S. citizen. The Trump administration canceled the $400 million grants a few days before Khalil’s arrest, claiming it was punishment for Columbia’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The administration punctuated that threat by taking a direct hand in what at the absolute most should have been a university disciplinary matter, as Khalil was one of the most prominent leaders of Columbia’s home-grown protest movement against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Khalil’s arrest is horrific and unjust: You have read a lot about it on this site since it happened. But I don’t want Khalil’s case specifically to outshine the focus of this piece, which is that when faced by a direct challenge from the federal government, Columbia rolled over.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

Columbia University is getting close to yielding to President Trump’s demands in
negotiations to restore $400 million in federal funding, according to people close
to the discussions.

Columbia has until Thursday to agree to nine far-reaching demands by the
Trump administration. The government canceled the grants and contracts over
campus antisemitism allegations earlier this month but gave the university a
review period.

The demands include banning masks, empowering campus police and putting
the school’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies under
“academic receivership,” which means it would no longer be controlled by the
faculty.

In context, this is not a surprise. Columbia has for more than a year made it clear that its institutional sympathies are with both Israel and the small minority of aggressively Zionist students on campus who have tried to disrupt, attack, or malign the protests against the ongoing genocide in any way they can. I was up at Columbia last week and saw them doing it directly, filming the meager crowds of student protesters that still manage to demonstrate on campus, compiling their lists of people who they will likely lobby the university to expel or discipline. Columbia, broadly, has indicated this is fine, despite rolling out some weak new guidelines about “doxxing,” which are unlikely to apply when the university itself has said its students are fair game for both internal security and federal law enforcement to prosecute however they see fit. We have all seen which side the university was on.

And yet, when faced with such a stark binary choice — to support and shield its students from state violence and injustice, or to feed them to a hostile government — there was still a part of me that found it hard to believe that Columbia University would choose the latter. I know that part was stupid and naive. I know how the world works. But if the feds can grab someone off university property and detain them for weeks without accusing them of a crime simply for expressing an opinion on that university’s campus — what is the point of a private university? If the President can then go on to levy a set of insane terms including, essentially, the university taking unilateral control over its Middle Eastern studies department to make sure there’s no more ThoughtCrime, what is the point of college at all? What is the point of Columbia University in the City of New York?

What I now know is that an institution’s “reputation” is not built on crucial moral decisions like this. It is not built on principle, or ideals, or any sort of unifying belief that a school should be smarter and braver and freer than society writ large or its competitors throughout New England. The Ivy league does not compete with each other on the basis of academic or philosophical merit. They compete with money. Their reputation is money. Their power is money. Their students, at their core, are just money.

When you understand that, Columbia’s decision makes perfect sense. Weighing a loss of $400 million against one man who has stopped paying the university tuition? That’s an easy bargain. Why not throw in a few more: Grant Miner, the president of the student labor union, who was expelled days before beginning negotiations on a new contract. There are at least 22 others who have been expelled, suspended, or had their degrees revoked for their roles in protesting a genocide on campus. All of those careers, futures, perhaps even lives — to Columbia University, they’re not worth $400 million. I doubt they’re even getting close. It’s going to get worse. The university still has plenty more to give. There are roughly 30,000 students at Columbia, all told. Can we call them students, really? A more fitting term would be assets. We now know that if the government asks, any one of them could be sold.