The Trump administration’s attempts to bring elite schools to heel appear to be working. This morning, the Washington Post reported that Columbia could regain the funding the Trump administration is currently withholding. The university has agreed to measures addressing protest and alleged antisemitism on campus, including putting the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) department into academic receivership. My friend Rajiv Sethi teaches economics at Barnard and Columbia, and he’s been writing incisively about the free speech and economic implications of Trump’s promised interventions in higher ed, so I thought he’d be the perfect guest to discuss these developments.
Rajiv is concerned about Trump’s actions—he and some other observers saw this coming—though he agrees that some of the president’s accusations are legitimate. The administration has couched its demands in concerns over allegedly antisemitic protests sparked by the October 7 attacks, but Rajiv thinks we would have seen this sort of thing even if the massacre and the war that followed had never happened. Now, with Columbia giving in to the administration, Rajiv is concerned that scholars in the MESAAS department will have their academic freedom curtailed and protestors will have their right to free speech abridged. He points out the cracking down on the small amount of clearly antisemitic protest material risks squelching speech that is ambiguous or not antisemitic at all.
All major research institutions rely on federal funding. What’s happening at Columbia is likely a first attempt at a broader intervention in higher ed. The American research university may well be undergoing a seismic shift, and Rajiv is at the epicenter. You can bet I’ll be talking with him about this again.
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0:36 How Rajiv saw Trump’s assault on elite higher ed coming
4:26 The Trump administration’s legitimate complaints against higher ed
9:41 Rajiv: The crackdown on campus protest would have happened even without the October 7 protest
17:10 How test scores can marry merit and diversity on college campuses
21:06 Glenn: Doesn’t SFFA v. Harvard justify JD Vance’s criticisms of higher ed?
25:30 Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump administration
33:06 Columbia’s new measures against antisemitism
38:09 The opportunistic adoption of contested phrases
43:27 How bad is the antisemitism problem at Barnard and Columbia?
50:44 Who has the authority to police Columbia’s MESAAS scholars?
1:00:55 Facing the prospect of Trump-generated American brain drain
Recorded March 23, 2025
Links and Readings
Rajiv’s Substack, Imperfect Information
Rajiv’s post April 2024 post, “Minority Report”
Rajiv’s post, “The Lion Hath Roared”
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “Working Definition of Antisemitism”
Eli Lake’s X post questioning the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil
Preorder Glenn’s book, Self-Censorship
Noam Dworman moderates a debate between Eli Lake and Norman Finkelstein
Lex Friedman hosts a debate between Norman Finkelstein, Mouin Rabbani, Benny Morris, and Destiny
Dworman interviews Rashid Khalidi
Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Mari Matsuda’s Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment
Killer Mike’s 2024 FIRE keynote
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