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      Columbia University’s Concessions to Trump Seen as a Watershed

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      Threatened with losing $400 million in federal funding, the university agreed to overhaul its protest policies and security practices.Many professors saw it as surrender, a reward to the Trump administration’s heavy hand. Conservative critics of academia celebrated it as an overdue, righteous reset by an Ivy League university.Columbia University’s concession on Friday to a roster of government demands as it sought to restore about $400 million in federal funding is being widely viewed as a watershed in Washington’s relationships with the nation’s colleges.By design, the consequences will be felt immediately on Columbia’s campus, where, for example, some security personnel will soon have arrest powers and an academic department that had drawn conservative scrutiny is expected to face stringent oversight. But they also stand to shape colleges far from Manhattan. “Columbia is folding and the other universities will follow suit,” Christopher Rufo, an activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote on social media after the university’s announcement on Friday.“They must restore the pursuit of truth, rather than ideological activism, as their highest mission,” said Mr. Rufo, who is close to the Trump administration and has helped make battles against diversity and equity into a conservative rallying cry. He added: “This is only the beginning.”The end is not clear. Columbia’s moves on Friday — revealed in a letter to the campus from the interim president, Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong — were essentially an opening bid in negotiations with the federal government to let the $400 million flow again. But the Trump administration has not publicly said what other concessions it might seek from Columbia or the dozens of other universities, from Hawaii to Harvard, that it has started to scrutinize since taking power on Jan. 20.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Says Khalil’s Deportation Case Can Be Heard in New Jersey

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      The Trump administration has sought to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, though he is a legal permanent resident and has not been charged with a crime.A New York federal judge on Wednesday transferred the case of a Columbia University graduate detained by the Trump administration this month to New Jersey, where his lawyers will continue their efforts to seek his release.The order will not have any immediate effect on the detention status of the Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests on the university’s campus, who after his arrest was swiftly transferred from Manhattan to New Jersey and then to Louisiana. The Trump administration has sought to deport him, though he is a legal permanent resident who has not been accused of a crime.The White House has said that Mr. Khalil spread antisemitism and promoted literature associated with Hamas terrorists. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers deny that he has done so and say he is being retaliated against for promoting Palestinian rights and criticizing Israel, views that the Trump administration disagrees with.Mr. Khalil’s legal team had been trying to move his case out of Louisiana since he was transferred there. Had his case been heard there, a conservative appeals court in New Orleans could have set a broad precedent for deportations.The New York judge, Jesse Furman, ordered federal authorities not to remove Mr. Khalil from the country. On Wednesday, in moving the case to New Jersey, he left that order in place.Mr. Khalil himself is expected to remain in Louisiana until a new judge weighs in.Judge Furman noted that Mr. Khalil’s lawyers had accused the government of punishing him for participation in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and that his First and Fifth Amendment rights had been violated.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a Columbia Student Fled to Canada After ICE Came Looking for Her

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      Ranjani Srinivasan’s student visa was revoked by U.S. immigration authorities. That was just the start of her odyssey.The first knock at the door came eight days ago, on a Friday morning.Three federal immigration agents showed up at a Columbia University apartment searching for Ranjani Srinivasan, who had recently learned her student visa had been revoked. Ms. Srinivasan, an international student from India, did not open the door.She was not home when the agents showed up again the next night, just hours before a former Columbia student living in campus housing, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained, roiling the university. Ms. Srinivasan packed a few belongings, left her cat behind with a friend and jumped on a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.When the agents returned a third time, this past Thursday night, and entered her apartment with a judicial warrant, she was gone.“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”Ms. Srinivasan, a Fulbright recipient who was pursuing a doctoral degree in urban planning, was caught in the dragnet of President Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators through the use of federal immigration powers. She is one of a handful of noncitizens that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has targeted at Columbia in recent days.In the week since that first knock at the door, Ms. Srinivasan says she has struggled to understand why the State Department abruptly revoked her student visa without explanation, leading Columbia to withdraw her enrollment from the university because her legal status had been terminated.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Really Easy Mark for Trump’: Three Columnists on the Threats to Elite Colleges

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      Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists M. Gessen, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Bret Stephens about Donald Trump’s attacks on Columbia University and other elite colleges and how they became vulnerable to a political and ideological reckoning.Patrick Healy: Bret, Tressie, Masha, I spoke on Thursday to a university president who told me he was just advised to hire a bodyguard. He said he’d never seen so much fear in the world of higher education — that many college presidents are “scared to death” about the Trump administration cutting their funding, Elon Musk unleashing Twitter mobs on them, ICE agents coming on campus, angry email flooding their inboxes, student protests over Gaza and Israel, and worries about being targeted for violence. I was a higher education reporter two decades ago, when universities were widely admired in America, and so I asked this president — what went wrong?He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.So I want to start by asking you the question I asked the university president — what went wrong for higher ed? How did colleges become easy pickings?Bret Stephens: Big question; lots of answers.The moment I realized something had gone terribly, maybe irreversibly, wrong in higher ed came in 2015, when Nicholas Christakis, a distinguished sociobiologist at Yale, was surrounded, hounded, lectured and yelled at by students furious that his wife, Erika, had suggested in an email that perhaps students could be entrusted to make their own Halloween costume decisions. The incident encapsulated the entitlement, the arrogance and the unbearably petty grievances of a generation who seemed to find their voice and power in the taking of offense. I was left asking: Who admitted these students? Who taught them to think this way? And why weren’t they immediately suspended or expelled?Healy: I remember that moment. A Harvard friend texted me and said, Glad you didn’t go to Yale? Then she backtracked with there-by-the-grace-of-God-goes-Harvard humility.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Yorkers Protest as White House Defends Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia

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      Hundreds of demonstrators marched downtown while a spokeswoman for President Trump said the president had the authority to detain Mahmoud Khalil.As hundreds of demonstrators made their way through Lower Manhattan on Tuesday to protest the detention of a prominent pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University, the White House defended the arrest and rebuked the school for what it called lack of cooperation.The activist, Mahmoud Khalil, was a leader of student protests on Columbia’s campus and often served as a negotiator and spokesman. Mr. Khalil, 30, who is Palestinian and was born and raised in Syria, is a legal permanent resident of the United States and is married to an American citizen.He was arrested on Saturday and transferred to detention in Louisiana.A spokeswoman for President Trump, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Tuesday that the government had the authority to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card under the Immigration and Nationality Act.“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers with the logo of Hamas,” she said.Her remarks came a day after Mr. Trump vowed that the apprehension of Mr. Khalil was “the first arrest of many to come.”Some free speech groups and civil rights activists have questioned the legality of Mr. Khalil’s detention, which his lawyers have challenged in court. On Tuesday, some New York Democrats expressed concern about the arrest. But Mayor Eric Adams shrugged off questions about it at a City Hall news conference, saying that the federal government, not the city, had authority over the matter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The U.S. Is Trying to Deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Legal Resident. Here’s What to Know.

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      Mr. Khalil, who helped lead protests at Columbia University against high civilian casualties in Gaza, was arrested by immigration officers and sent to a detention center in Louisiana.The Trump administration invoked an obscure statute over the weekend in moving to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the United States who recently graduated from Columbia University, where he helped lead campus protests against high civilian casualties in Gaza during Israel’s campaign against Hamas.Mr. Khalil was arrested by immigration officers on Saturday and then sent to a detention center in Louisiana. On Monday, a federal judge in New York, Jesse M. Furman, ordered the federal government not to deport Mr. Khalil while he reviewed a petition challenging the legality of the detention.Here’s what to know about the administration’s attempt to deport Mr. Khalil.Who is the Columbia graduate?Mr. Khalil, 30, earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December. He has Palestinian heritage and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant.At Columbia last spring, Mr. Khali assumed a major role in student-led protests on campus against Israel’s war efforts in Gaza. He described his position as a negotiator and spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian group.What’s the legal basis for his arrest?The Trump administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest. But two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.The provision says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Pulled $400 million From Columbia. Other Schools Could Be Next.

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      The administration has circulated a list that includes nine other campuses, accusing them of failure to address antisemitism.The Trump Administration’s abrupt withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University cast a pall over at least nine other campuses worried they could be next.The schools, a mix that includes both public universities and Ivy League institutions, have been placed on an official administration list of schools the Department of Justice said may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty.Faculty leaders at many of the schools have pushed back strongly against claims that their campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism, noting that while some Jewish students complained that they felt unsafe, the vast majority of protesters were peaceful and many of the protest participants were themselves Jewish. The Trump administration has made targeting higher education a priority. This week, the president threatened in a social media post to punish any school that permits “illegal” protests. On Jan. 30, his 10th day in office, he signed an executive order on combating antisemitism, focusing on what he called anti-Jewish racism at “leftists” universities. Then, on Feb. 3, he announced the creation of a multiagency task force to carry out the mandate.The task force appeared to move into action quickly after a pro-Palestinian sit-in and protest at Barnard College, a partner school to Columbia, led to arrests on Feb. 26. Two days later, the administration released its list of 10 schools under scrutiny, including Columbia, the site of large pro-Palestinian encampments last year.It said it would be paying the schools a visit, part of a review process to consider “whether remedial action is warranted.” Then on Friday, it announced it would be canceling millions in grants and contracts with Columbia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pro-Palestinian Activists Occupy Barnard Building for 2nd Time in Week

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      The Police Department said several demonstrators were taken into custody during the sit-in at the college’s main library.About two dozen pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Barnard College in Manhattan occupied the lobby of the school’s main library on Wednesday, escalating a confrontation with school administrators and leading to several protesters being taken into custody, the police said.Chanting “Free Palestine” and wearing masks and kaffiyeh over their faces, the protesters began their sit-in inside the Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning about 1 p.m. The school blocked access to the building shortly afterward, and classes were disrupted.The protest came at a moment when pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses is a subject of intense interest to the Trump administration. In executive orders, President Trump has threatened to revoke federal funding to universities that allow what he and his administration regard as antisemitic activity, and he has made clear that pro-Palestinian protests, particularly those that appear to support Hamas, can qualify as such in his view.Hours after the protest began on Wednesday afternoon, the situation remained fluid as Police Department vans and officers with zip ties began gathering near Barnard’s campus at 116th Street and Broadway. Shortly afterward, Barnard administrators announced to protesters that they had received a bomb threat, and police and security began evacuating the building.The protesters initially decided to remain, chanting over the sound of alarms, according to a witness and social media reports.At 5 p.m., Police Department officers walked through the lobby inspecting the building as chanting continued, according to a video shot on site. About 10 minutes later, the police began pushing the protesters out of the building.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More