Cowardice and Capitulation: Columbia Has Sacrificed Its Own Students to Authoritarianism
Statement from AAUP President Todd Wolfson on Columbia’s announcement of student punishments in response to Trump administration threats.
Statement from AAUP President Todd Wolfson on Columbia’s announcement of student punishments in response to Trump administration threats.
The recent proliferation of these new restrictive policies seems to be an attempt to appease politicians who are calling for university administrators to use a heavy hand against faculty and student protestors. We must reiterate, as we said in our November 2023 statement Polarizing Times Demand Robust Academic Freedom, “By acceding to external political pressures and demands for political censorship instead of encouraging the utmost freedom of discussion, college and university administrations abandon their own responsibility for protecting the academic community’s central mission of education, research, and service to the broader society and to the public good.”
The following statement was approved by the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure in July 2024 and adopted by the Association’s Council in August 2024. It supersedes Committee A’s 2006 report On Academic Boycotts.
On April 30th 2024, 77 percent of the faculty of Barnard College voted no confidence in President Laura Rosenbury. This week, the Columbia University Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted no confidence in President Nemat Shafik with a 65 percent majority. These motions insist on the vital need for shared governance and due process and call for resistance against external influences over our university community.