Posted on 03/12/2025 4:53:30 AM PDT by MtnClimber
I almost cheered out loud when I read that the Trump administration has cancelled $400 million in funding for Columbia University, despite the fact that when I taught there about three-and-a half-decades ago, I no doubt directly benefitted from federal money flowing in, enjoyed my colleagues, and was treated very well.
My animus and support for the cuts derives from the reluctant conclusion that as an institution, it has been corrupted, and nothing less than traumatic levels of change are required.
The level of change required includes firing administrators, faculty, and admissions officers, expelling students, and revising hiring and admissions criteria. Only fear of financial catastrophe would suffice to strengthen sufficiently the spines of trustees and the administration sufficiently.
Consider this abuse:
Some Columbia University professors canceled in-person classes on Monday in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the student activist and foreign national whom the Trump administration moved to deport over his pro-Hamas campus organizing. The cancellations—which came amid a pressure campaign from the school's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter—put the professors at odds with Columbia's provost, who emailed "faculty colleagues" Monday morning to issue "a reminder that faculty must meet all scheduled classes."
Faculty who cheat their students in order to make a political point should be immediately fired.
They are defrauding the young minds whose families have coughed up the exorbitant tuition Columbia (and every other prestige college) charges: $71,170 per year.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Columbia’s renamed School of International and Public Affairs is where the author taught.
Columbia needs to be shut down before it can build its army of Jew killers any larger.
Two Words: CULTURAL MARXISM
The cost per canceled class can easily be determined and every single professor needs to have all of that money taken from his/her/its salary and repaid to the students who missed a class.
Interesting background on Lifson.
Pull their accreditation. It’s really that simple. A university promoting hate has no place in educating our children.
We shouldn’t be sending money to institutions that want our demise. Tell them to use some of their own moldy money
They have a 56 billion dollar endowment. No pity for them.
Forgetting politics… federal money to schools should be based on a schools balance sheet.
Wow!
They are free to teach whatever they want, just can’t do it with our taxpayer money.
‘ Forgetting politics… federal money to schools should be based on a schools balance sheet.’
Probably not the best tactic.
Universities do a lot of research, scientific and medical. John Hopkins and MIT get a lot of money for that because they’re good at it.
Yes they can do that and not charge tuition, fees, etc and do it for a long time. Their endowment is huge!
If only. The sad truth is that the freaks now own the place and aren't giving it up, and will be defended by a swarm of lawyers equally corrupt. This takeover has taken a long time but its seeds were in place when a fellow named Max Horkheimer was given refuge there in the 30's and brought his Frankfurt School communists with him. From the Wiki article:
He emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland, and then to New York City the following year, where Horkheimer met with the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, to discuss hosting the institute [Institute of Social Research]. To Horkheimer's surprise, the president agreed to host the Institute in exile as well as offer Horkheimer a building for the institute. In July 1934, Horkheimer accepted an offer from Columbia to relocate the institute to one of their buildings.
It took nearly 40 years, but the result was Critical Theory, now nearly omnipresent on the Left - Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory are offshoots that are highly influential ninety years later. To call this set of doctrines divisive and corrosive is to state the obvious: that was the idea from the very beginning.
Columbia endowment is just shy of $15 billion, not $56 billion.
Harvard is close to the latter figure.
bump
Thanks. I recently heard that number and got the university wrong.
In 2024, Columbia had a total enrolment of 35,279, and a foreign student enrollment of 23,914. Two-thirds of their students are foreign! They are essentially a foreign school, and should be getting ZERO dollars from the US taxpayers, and zero access to sensitive research.
https://isso.columbia.edu/statistics
cityjournal.org——excerpt
We have identified Columbia professor, neuropsychologist Jennifer J. Manly, who participated in the pro-Hamas protests and stood in a human blockade intending to prevent administrators from dismantling the unauthorized encampments last April. In photos taken of the event, Manly is visible wearing an orange vest and standing with fellow Columbia professors as they marched for Gaza, in front of banners reading “Demilitarize education” and “Palestine is Everywhere”; others called for financial boycott and divestment from Israel.
Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Our research has revealed that Manly is subsidized by the American taxpayer. According to the National Institutes of Health and other publicly accessible databases, she has been named in connection with over $100 million in grants over the past 20 years. Much of her research is based on the so-called social determinants of health thesis, which posits that racism, sexism, and homophobia can cause brain disease in “Black and Latinx communities”—a thesis that critics have described as pseudo-science. (Manly, Columbia, and NIH did not return requests for comment.)
Manly’s appearance at a pro-Hamas rally, coupled with her activist academic research, raises serious questions about the medical establishment, which has directed large sums of taxpayer dollars to ideologues disguised as professors and to activism disguised as science. And it gives further grist to officials in the Trump administration, who have argued that funding cuts are necessary to disrupt the pipeline of left-wing radicals.
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