Cottom: Few things annoy me more than the overpaid, cowardly university president. No institution wins if the sector is demoralized, defunded and delegitimized. Our profession has never selected leaders on courage, but the lack of even basic survival instincts is an embarrassment. Anticipatory obedience, indeed. Donald Trump is not loyal enough to reward obedience should it conflict with his own interests. Better to fight like men than die like cowards, or something like that.
Healy: Last weekend, immigration agents showed up at the New York apartment building of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia, and told him that he was being detained. He had a green card; it was revoked, and he was removed to a detention facility in Louisiana.
Masha, you went to a court hearing on Khalil’s case this week, and Bret, you have written about the Columbia protests writ large. Tressie, you teach at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, one of America’s great universities — and part of what makes them great is freedom of speech, thought and dissent. I want to hear from each of you about what stands out to you most about the Khalil case, and in what ways do you think it’s a sign of things to come for higher ed?
Cottom: This is a stress test, like many of this administration’s actions. There is no defensible legal argument here. As legal tests go, this is a weak one. But it will have several effects that this administration wants. It wants fear and compliance. Look, I don’t think you can separate this case from the decades-long push for graduate student labor unions. Punishing protesters solves for two G.O.P. interests. It looks like power and it threatens organized protest.
Stephens: We ought to be able to have four thoughts alive in our mind: First, that Khalil was a prominent spokesman for a campus group that believed Hamas’s violence against Israelis was a legitimate tactic — a despicable point of view, in my book, and something no university would tolerate if he had been an advocate for, say, white-supremacist violence against a racial minority. Second, that the secretary of state almost certainly has the statutory effect to remove him from the country.
