The Hostile Takeover of Columbia University: A Federal Power Grab Disguised as Policy

Columbia University is staring down the barrel of the most brazen government power grab in modern academic history, a grotesque display of authoritarian overreach that should set alarms blaring in every institution that still values independent thought. The Trump administration, never one to pass up a chance to bulldoze its way into spaces it doesn’t belong, has issued a set of demands so outrageous, so shamelessly totalitarian, that they read more like the opening chapter of a dystopian novel than actual federal policy. The message is crystal clear: bend the knee, hand over control, and accept ideological purification—or lose hundreds of millions in federal funding.

This is not about addressing antisemitism. This is about raw, naked power. This is about a government that has spent years vilifying universities as breeding grounds for “wokeness” now making its move to forcibly reshape them into obedient factories of state-approved thought. They are demanding that Columbia gut its own governance, strip faculty of disciplinary authority, empower law enforcement to police dissent, and place an entire academic department under direct federal control for five years.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what that means. This is not just censorship; this is an academic purge. This is a precedent-setting act of intellectual colonization, where the government no longer just pressures universities but directly dictates what can and cannot be studied, which fields of knowledge are deemed dangerous, and which histories must be erased.

If Columbia folds, if it allows the government to march in and dictate what departments are allowed to exist without state supervision, it will not stop here. Today, it's Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under the knife—conveniently, the department most likely to produce scholarship critical of Western imperialism, Israeli policy, and U.S. interventionist narratives. Tomorrow, it’s gender studies. Then climate science. Then any research that doesn’t conform to the ideological whims of the ruling party. A direct government takeover of an academic department is not just unconstitutional—it is fascistic. It is a level of state interference in intellectual life that belongs in dictatorships, not democracies.

And let’s not pretend the other demands aren’t just as insidious. The push to ban masks on campus? That’s about silencing protests, plain and simple. The removal of faculty oversight in disciplinary matters? That’s about centralizing power so dissenters can be punished without resistance. The push to let campus law enforcement arrest “disruptors”? That’s about criminalizing student activism, about making protest a punishable offense, about turning university police into ideological enforcers. And the demand to “reform” admissions to align with federal standards? That’s about engineering the student body itself, deciding who is worthy of an education and who isn’t, ensuring that only those who fit a government-approved mold are granted access to higher learning.

This is not governance. This is not policy. This is state control, plain and simple.

This is the weaponization of federal funding to force universities into submission, to turn them into compliant institutions that serve the ideological interests of the ruling class. This is the federal government declaring open war on academic freedom, using antisemitism as a convenient moral shield to justify the unprecedented dismantling of intellectual autonomy. And if Columbia gives in, if it allows itself to be reshaped at gunpoint by a government that has made no secret of its disdain for independent thought, then no university is safe.

Every faculty member, every student, every administrator who still has a shred of integrity should be standing against this, loudly and without compromise. Columbia must fight. It must take this to court. It must rally public opinion. It must expose this for what it is—a flagrant, authoritarian attempt to strip universities of their independence and place them under direct state control. This cannot be the moment where higher education in America surrenders to government oversight. Because if this stands, if this becomes the new normal, then the very idea of a free university—of education as a space of independent inquiry, dissent, and discovery—will be nothing more than a relic of the past.