Latest news with #KatrinaArmstrong
CBS News
28-04-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Columbia University faculty, staff, students, alumni engage in day-long speakout
Columbia University faculty, staff, students and alumni are staging a 25-hour speak out Monday. They say they are doing it in defense of academic freedom, to protect student safety, and to demand accountability. The name of the action is "All day, all night, all of us." An organizer told CBS News New York the goal is to create a larger tent, to hear voices from many different groups, including students and professors with varied viewpoints. Demonstrators are being led by tenured professors in multiple departments. The schedule allows for 20 departments to take care of a single hour each of demonstration time. Participants will drift in and out to air their concerns. The event comes on the heels of Columbia announcing it would comply with a list of Trump administration demands in order to preserve hundreds of millions in federal funding. Those changes include hiring dozens of new officers with arresting power, altering the disciplinary process, and appointing a new senior official to review programs related to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Teachers unions subsequently sued the Trump administration, accusing it of holding the funding hostage. The school's then-interim president Katrina Armstrong subsequently stepped down, and was replaced by Board of Trustees co-chair Claire Shipman while the school searches for a permanent president. It also comes on the heels of the detention of prominent pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested in the lobby of his Columbia University housing before being sent to Louisiana, where's he's being held pending the outcome of his deportation proceedings. Khalil's arrest and detention sparked nationwide protests.
Wall Street Journal
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Little-Known Bureaucrats Tearing Through American Universities
Columbia University's president had already been hounded out of office, but her ordeal wasn't over. Four days after she stepped down under government pressure during fraught federal funding negotiations, Katrina Armstrong spent three hours being deposed by a government attorney in Washington, D.C. The lawyer grilled Armstrong over whether she had done enough to protect Jewish students against antisemitism.
New York Times
14-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
This Is How Universities Can Escape Trump's Trap, If They Dare
Almost three months into the Trump administration's war on universities, and a year and a half into the Republican Party's organized campaign against the presidents of top colleges, it is clear that antisemitism and D.E.I. are mere pretexts for these attacks. Like much of what this administration does, the war on higher education is driven by anti-intellectualism and greed. Trump is building a mafia state, in which the don distributes both money and power. Universities are independent centers of intellectual and, to some extent, political power. He is trying to destroy that independence. There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump's will, and it requires more than forming a united front. They must abandon all the concerns — rankings, donors, campus amenities — that preoccupy and distract them, and focus on their core mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. Intellectuals have adopted this strategy to fight against autocrats in other countries. It works. Because Trump views everything as transactional and assumes everyone to be driven by profit, he has approached universities the same way he approached law firms and, arguably, countries: by deploying devastating financial threats against each one individually, to compel compliance and prevent coalitions. Trump could have started by imposing a tax on universities' endowments, a move that almost certainly would enjoy broad popular support. That, however, would presumably affect every major university, which could prompt them to band together. Research grants, which are specific to each university, are an ideal instrument to divide and weaken them. His first target, Columbia University, acceded to his demands within two weeks of losing $400 million in grants and contracts. When Columbia's first sacrifice didn't bring back the money, the university made another: its interim president, Katrina Armstrong. That didn't satisfy Trump, who now reportedly wants Columbia to agree to direct government oversight. He is also brandishing financial threats, separately, at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern — and still there is no sign of organized resistance on the part of universities. There is not even a joint statement in defense of academic freedom or an assertion of universities' value to society. (Even people who have no use for the humanities may see value in medical schools and hospitals.) It shouldn't be this easy to cleave universities from one another, but, so far, it seems to be easier even than making law firms compete for the don's business and favor. This may be because law firms define success in a way that is at least marginally closer to their ideal function (helping to uphold the rule of law) than the way universities define success is to their ideal function, which is producing and disseminating knowledge. Most prominent American universities, most of the time, measure their success not so much by the degree to which their faculty and graduates contribute to the world as by the size of their endowment, the number of students seeking admission and their ascent in rankings by U.S. News & World Report and others, which assess the value of a university education in part by looking at graduates' starting salaries. As for professors, while universities do compete for the best minds, they more frequently compete for the loudest names, in the hopes that these will attract the biggest bucks. In conversations with my colleagues on these pages, I have compared the universities' current predicament to the prisoners' dilemma, the game-theory model in which two people accused of a crime have to decide to act for themselves or take a chance and act in concert. It's a useful model to think about, but it doesn't quite fit. The universities are not co-conspirators: they are competitors. And they want more than to return to the status quo ante: They want growth. They might even want to win the research funding that the other guy lost. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Fox News
09-04-2025
- Health
- Fox News
Federal government questioned former Columbia University president over campus antisemitism
Investigators from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) interviewed former Columbia University interim President Katrina Armstrong over campus antisemitism issues, according to a report. The Wall Street Journal reported that investigators from HHS interviewed Armstrong on April 1 during a closed-door deposition following her resignation on March 28. Armstrong also announced Sunday she's taking a leave from her position at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she was the chief executive officer. During the deposition, Armstrong said she didn't know about allegations of Jewish students being spit on and didn't know names of several faculty members who allegedly handed out pro-Hamas material that defended the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Armstrong also said she didn't know students at Columbia University were calling for Israel's destruction. Sean Keveney, acting general counsel of HHS, wasn't pleased at Armstrong's answers, according to portions of a transcript released by the Wall Street Journal. "I'm just trying to understand how you have such a terrible memory of specific incidents of antisemitism when you're clearly an intelligent doctor," Keveney said. Armstrong told HHS officials that "It has been a very, very, very challenging year," according to the New York Times. "I do not have specific recollections, sitting here, of what is in this report or what I recall from this report," she added. Columbia University's former interim president said several times during the deposition that portions of the past year are a "blur" and said she had issues remembering specific details. Columbia University's board of trustees attempted to separate itself from Armstrong's testimony to HHS officials in a statement. "Columbia University is firmly committed to resolving the issues raised by our federal regulators with respect to discrimination, harassment, and antisemitism," the board said. "This testimony does not reflect the hard work undertaken by the University to combat antisemitism, harassment, and discrimination and ensure the safety and wellbeing of our community." Armstrong's testimony to HHS comes after the Trump administration in March moved to pull back over $400 million in funding to the institution. Negotiations on restoring the funding began after the university agreed to several demands, such as revamping its protest policies. Fox News Digital reached out to HHS and Columbia University for comment.
Washington Post
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Conservative plan: Destroy Columbia to get other colleges to comply
Months before Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong stepped down, conservative policy circles were buzzing about ways to force elite universities to change. Critical of college admissions, diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and campus protests that he lambasted as pro-Hamas, Max Eden, then a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote an outline that presaged what was to come in the new Trump administration. He singled out Columbia as the top target.
