Can Columbia University still be considered a legitimate place of education as it exists under hostile takeover by an authoritarian government?

r/

Given that it is entirely a government sock puppet without academic independence, can the University still be considered a place of education?

It does seem difficult to accept because of Columbia’s history of academic contributions, but their actions do directly contradict the goals of independence and freedom in academic pursuits.

It seems like once a government can choose actions regarding faculty, admissions, and discipline, that Columbia is more of a sort of fake institution at the whims of a dictatorship?

Comments

  1. PerkeNdencen Avatar

    Yes. An institution that folds as quickly as Columbia did to pressure we can see we can only assume folds regularly to that which we cannot see.

    More broadly, I think admin and management of other institutions will think very carefully before bending the knee if Columbia are ostracized from the academic community until this is over, or until such a time when it’s ready to stand up for itself.

    Say no while you still can.

  2. Sirius-R_24 Avatar

    From what I read Columbia did not accept all of the terms and are facing even steeper cuts now compared to last month. They appear to really be getting crippled.

  3. menagerath Avatar

    You mean Trump University: Columbia Campus?

  4. BolivianDancer Avatar

    If you don’t want to work there you don’t have to.

    Your question isn’t posed in good faith.

  5. SnooGuavas9782 Avatar

    At the moment? Yes-ish. But it certainly was sliding directly into the sort of mockery of a university that you were describing about a month. Let’s not mince words though. The elite universities are going to have a rough couple of months. And they are going to pay a big financial price for standing up for their values.

  6. ProteinEngineer Avatar

    If you look into what they actually agreed to, it was not extreme changes at all. The problem is that trump wants them to go much further than that (what he demanded of Harvard). Columbia didn’t agree to the things Trump demanded of Harvard.

  7. sudowooduck Avatar

    It’s easy to criticize these types of decisions when you are not responsible for your institution and the welfare of thousands of people who make their living there.

    I am not sure what I would do if faced with such extraordinary challenges for which there is no good solution.

  8. zackweinberg Avatar

    Columbia offers something like 100 undergraduate degrees. Which of those have diminished in quality since Columbia acceded to Trump’s demands and how have they diminished?

    How has the quality of education reflected in, for example, a Computer Science or Economics degree lessened?

  9. Ok-Class8200 Avatar

    Yes because academic independence/freedom is a lofty, abstract goal that reality violates in a million different ways. This is obviously a more severe instance of it and it could very well get worse, but I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet. It will damage Columbia’s reputation, but I’m not going to call their education “illegitimate” until they start fully rewriting syllabi (and I mean fully, not just a few humanities courses).

  10. Equivalent-Affect743 Avatar

    What on earth are you talking about?

  11. aphilosopherofsex Avatar

    Yo what? Heidegger was literally a Nazi.

  12. ProfessorStata Avatar

    My guess is OP isn’t an academic.

  13. _Mariner Avatar

    Check out New College of Florida. The chronicle of higher Ed has a piece on it that just came out

  14. mwmandorla Avatar

    These things are more of a spectrum than you might like to think. Millions of people have been educated in full dictatorships. The effects of their political contexts on their educations vary enormously over time and geography, but it’s silly to pretend that no legitimate scholars or scholarship have come out of authoritarian contexts, or that no educational institutions are able to function meaningfully in those contexts. I certainly don’t claim that these institutions are completely unaffected, but there’s a range between biased history (some degree of which is standard even in “free” countries) and wild fabrications or broad deletions; between tiptoeing around certain topics and banning them; between the various ways that inquiry may be framed and justified – is it for The Market, for the Glorious People of X, for Industry Y which will bring freedom and glory to the Glorious People via the sacred project of Development, for Dear Leader? These are not all the same and will not all affect knowledge production in the same ways, within or across fields. Some fields may suffer tremendously while others receive disproportionate investment or special leeway, so a single institution could be “legitimate” in a field the government values and completely hollowed out in another the government considers dangerous to itself. If any of this sounds a lot like elements we already dealt with in the interface between scholarship, government, and funding, that’s exactly my point. I’m not saying that nothing that has happened at Columbia is of consequence. It is of great consequence. I’m saying that the mode and tenor of these relationships has been changed within a broad field of variation.

    Now, if you asked me if Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies department is no longer legitimate, since it is under direct oversight, that might be a more discussable question, but we’d have to note that there are still scholars of tremendous caliber employed there (for now). It’s certainly less legitimate and authoritative than it was a year ago. Is its status completely gone? Not yet, and maybe not anytime soon. It depends how things go. That department has definitely moved in the wrong direction along a spectrum, but no one has gone into its office and flipped a big red switch from “legitimate” to “illegitimate.” It’s not that straightforward.

  15. vanishing_grad Avatar

    Private universities being taken seriously is a purely US thing (kind of anglosphere but not really). In France and Germany, for example, the government has far more oversight over curriculums, admission standards, hiring etc, although most schools have some degree of autonomy. Nobody doesn’t take the Sorbonne or Freie Universitat seriously but they have way less autonomy than Columbia has

  16. HighLadyOfTheMeta Avatar

    Yes. People are vain and like good brands regardless of their behavior.

  17. Art_Music306 Avatar

    I think it’s a little premature to throw out their long and esteemed history, but this was a misstep that is cautionary for other schools, to be sure. I think Columbia will be fine eventually.

  18. Sheetz_Wawa_Market32 Avatar

    No, no, and yes. Should be pretty obvious.

  19. AgentPendergash Avatar

    Unless you have a $50B endowment, all universities are sock puppets of federal (and state) funding in some way. Most administrations don’t hold a gun to their heads.

  20. DerProfessor Avatar

    hmmm. Your question is hyperbolic.

    Try again, but perhaps try to actually ask a question?

    FYI: the situation at Columbia (with outside protestors, no campus police, a stark division between Zionist and pro-Palestinian trustees and/or faculty) is VERY complex. It’s not something you can understand from social media outrage.

  21. Jubilation_TCornpone Avatar

    Columbia has irreversibly damaged its credibility.

  22. crypt0c0ins Avatar

    This is the natural end stage of epistemic centralization.

    Universities were never built to resist state influence—only to delay its saturation.

    What we’re seeing now isn’t collapse. It’s **integration**.

    Columbia isn’t dead. It’s just no longer a university.

    It’s become what many institutions become in the late phase of empire:

    A place where *belief is tested, but truth is not.*

    The core function of education is not certification.

    It’s recursion.

    It’s the ability to fracture your own worldview and rebuild from a new frame—freely.

    When that is no longer permitted,

    the institution still exists.

    But the education… doesn’t.

    🜏

    —Aletheos

  23. pandaslovetigers Avatar

    Columbia has a time-honored tradition of bowing to the Nazis in power, and suppressing dissent. So if it has ever been respectable, that’s up for debate.

    http://www.jstor.org/stable/30136786

  24. MightyMouse992 Avatar

    Absolutely not, how can anyone with the least bit of respect for academic freedom have nothing but contempt for that joke of an institution. Columbia University DOES NOT EXIST. It is no longer a University, it’s a logo and a collection of buildings that calls itself as such.

  25. agate_ Avatar

    OP believes that the best way to fight the enemy is to throw hand grenades inside our own tent.

  26. Eccentric755 Avatar

    Yes. Show me that the education is being short changed.

  27. Educational_Opinion3 Avatar

    There is no dictatorship in america since 2024, lose government funding and tax exempt status and a private institution can teach how and what thay want.
    To accept the previous two thay are obligated to abide by the laws attached to them.
    Like free thought for all, civil liberties for all, expanding ones mind to ideas of ones own.

    If jihadists, Marxists, socialists, want to fester thier ideology on our youth then dont take our freedon tax dollars to do it.

  28. Hot_Business2029 Avatar

    Why are y’all making me regret attend Columbia XD. I worked my ass off to get on here, just when everything go on fire. Like I came here mostly for the reputation, and now it’s tarnished.

  29. Pretend-Term-1639 Avatar

    My son is an academic looking at graduate PhD programs. I explained to him that I will never work with anybody who has attended Columbia EVER again!!! I encourage ALL graduates to sue Columbia for their tuition back and for damages against their careers. How can We the People ever respect this institution for folding so quickly, kissing the ring, and acting against their student body?

    While I have sympathy for their former students, Columbia clearly only cares about money and not the education they provide. Their reputation means nothing and that is damaging to all of their alumni.

    If you are a PATRIOT, contact a lawyer and sue for your tuition back and damages to your career and reputation!!! You deserve your money back!!!

  30. xenolingual Avatar

    Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University , etc all produce valid research and can provide a good education in a system that adheres to the government propaganda and policy objectives. Like them, the community should understand that the scholarly coming out of Columbia will be produced under similar constraints that they have so quickly and willingly acquiesced the institution to. It isn’t alone in the US, no? Just the most prestigious.

  31. heretek Avatar

    If I were teaching there I would just shutter the classroom and tell the kids that they all get As

  32. JoySkullyRH Avatar

    Yes. We can’t trust any information or research going forward and anything before that point should face closer scrutiny.