24/07/2025 13:11
The Guardian
Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s close associate, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking in Tallahassee, FloridaColumbia University’s long anticipated deal with the Trump administration after months of negotiations has drawn both condemnation and praise from faculty, students, and alumni – a sign that the end of negotiations will hardly restore harmony on a campus profoundly divided since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.The deal will reinstate $400m in federal funds the administration cut from the university after it accused it of allowing antisemitism to fester on campus. But it will cost Columbia some $220m in legal settlements, as well as a host of new measures that critics warn significantly restrict the university’s independence and will further repress pro-Palestinian speech.The means being used to push through these reforms are as unprincipled as they are unprecedented. Higher education policy in the United States is now being developed through ad hoc deals, a mode of regulation that is not only inimical to the ideal of the university as a site of critical thinking but also corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself.Columbia is abdicating its mission as a center of learning, and agreeing to operate like an arm of the state to censor and punish speech the Trump administration doesn’t like. With its newly announced policies, Columbia is threatening to bulldoze over the rights of all of its Palestinian and associated students to an even greater degree than before. Continue reading...
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