A well-known historian has cancelled a planned course at Columbia University, saying the school gave in to pressure from the Trump administration.
Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, announced the decision in an open letter published by The Guardian on Friday.
“Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a ‘special lecturer’, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted,” he wrote.
The letter refers to a $200 million agreement between Columbia University and the US government. In June, the Trump administration accused the university of not doing enough to address antisemitism during protests over the war in Gaza. Columbia also agreed to pay $21 mn to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over alleged civil rights violations involving Jewish employees.
As part of the deal, which will be overseen by an independent monitor, Columbia has promised to expand its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and review how it teaches about the Middle East. It will also cut some diversity programmes.
The historian said that the university had accepted a definition of antisemitism that “conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews”.
“This definition makes it impossible to teach honestly about the creation of Israel or the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel,” he wrote.
Story continues below this ad
Khalidi warned the deal would affect academic freedom and make students, lecturers, and teaching staff afraid to speak freely.
Faculty members would have to “constrain their speech in order to evade the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel”, he said, adding that agreeing to submit syllabi and scholarship for external review was “abhorrent”.
“Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self,” he said. Khalidi taught at Columbia for more than 20 years before retiring last year.
