[D66] Surrendering to Authoritarianism?

[René Oudeweg]

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Surrendering to Authoritarianism
Liberal institutions, including universities, traditionally surrender 
without a fight to the dictates of autocrats. Ours are no exception.
Chris Hedges
Mar 24
	

I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina 
Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed 
to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic 
buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City 
Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or 
arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of 
academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by 
appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s 
department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the 
Center for Palestine Studies.

Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were 
created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never 
have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to 
dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral 
probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic 
power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall 
headlong into authoritarianism.

Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly 
humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her 
office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she 
does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is 
sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, 
groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will 
be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those 
seeded throughout the Trump administration.

The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that 
they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply 
with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination 
based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, 
stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to 
restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults 
against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. 
The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool 
being used to achieve that end.

The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 
3 urging Columbia University implement measures to “protect Jewish 
students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph 
Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the 
university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the 
university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 
(IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of 
Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured 
pro-Israel faculty.

These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at 
Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of 
their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak 
out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of 
Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn 
of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the 
academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the 
witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turned on their students protesting 
the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them 
now.

Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these 
elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also 
attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise 
Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of 
Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated 
from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of 
Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton 
University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of 
Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a 
review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of 
antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.

Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 
years, recently lost her position at the university for defending 
Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the 
Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from 
Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on 
the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.

“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not 
just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite 
universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of 
people who are involved in education — committed to the educational 
mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as 
custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” 
she told me.

“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate 
lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:

     And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. 
I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in 
New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side 
hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a 
business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started 
here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait 
a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, 
we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living 
room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that 
House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more 
importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend 
Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being 
one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled 
before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it 
encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until 
today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on 
terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, 
will never be the same if it survives at all.

You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.

Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech 
and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, 
suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry 
the genocide. They have called police to their campuses — in the case of 
Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with 
trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they 
subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out 
front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in 
Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in 
Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a 
ceasefire, long before the protests and encampments began.

Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its 
campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way 
for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the 
School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent 
resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration 
had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, 
many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.

The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by 
plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs 
Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling 
reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of 
Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the 
powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of 
citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step 
from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card 
to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.

Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 
1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of 
State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable 
ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would 
have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was 
used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian 
writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It 
was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil 
rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, 
an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid 
antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and 
communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban 
Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due 
to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.

“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that 
are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in 
the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with 
the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this 
administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. 
They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, 
no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese 
people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to 
use those at some point.”

James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany 
in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He 
worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing 
Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw 
how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were 
considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of 
fascism and self-destructed.

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, 
was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks after the 
Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist 
Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran 
pastor, along with the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max 
Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of 
authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted 
and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the 
Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The 
vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the 
philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him 
appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.

Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German 
Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard 
refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us 
about universities and academics which, if the country fell into 
authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and 
privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.

“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would 
happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.

And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including 
the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will 
defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed 
principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves 
into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most 
courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and 
journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being 
expedited.

Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.