I appeared on Fox News Radio’s Evening Edition with Eben Brown, on the topic of how the Attempt To Deport Anti-Israel Activist Sparks Legal Discussion:
Anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil will remain in ICE detention in Louisiana as he faces possible deportation proceedings, sparking more protests at Columbia University in New York City. Khalil, 30, a Palestinian raised in Syria, was arrested by ICE at his university-owned apartment for his alleged involvement in the massive anti-Israel protests at Columbia last year. Khalil’s green card has been revoked by the Trump administration but his supporters question why he hasn’t been charged with a crime.FOX’s Eben Brown speaks with William A. Jacobson, Cornell University Law Professor & Founder of EqualProtect.org, who breaks down the legal reason these students can be removed from the country.
The audio is embedded at the bottom of this post.
At lot of what I said about Khalil and “free speech” was similar to what I said in my interview with Tony Katz and on Fox Business Evening Edit, though I did also get into recent developments and what we now know (and don’t know) about Khalil.
But towards the end I took a detour, and spoke about how there is a brewing conflict between STEM and other legitimate research faculty, on the one hand, and the radical anti-Israel faculty from the Humanities and Social Sciences who are encouraging the campus riots and mayhem that has resulted in Columbia University losing $400 million in federal grants.
My thoughts on this we sparked by two tweets from Steve McGuire on March 10 and 11:
NEW: Columbia has begun notifying faculty of cancelled grants. From an internal source there: “Grant cancellation notices flowing in now. Labs shutting down. Layoffs imminent. Faculty apoplectic at [Columbia President] Katrina Armstrong for letting it get to this point. She has to fix this fast.”***The funding cuts at Columbia are stoking a civil war among the faculty.On one side: scientists who are losing their grants and just want to do their research.On the other: scholar-activists in the humanities who have little grant money to lose and support the protests.
The problem is much deeper and has lasted much longer than than the anti-Israel protests. The radicalization of the campuses has turned half the country against academia, and that half of the country currently is in power.
In a political climate where higher education desperately need allies, it’s not going to find many because it spent several decades — but particularly the last decade — mocking, belittling, and denegrating the rest of the country. Not all of academia of course and not all institutions have been at war with the rest of the country, but enough of them have been, particularly elite schools like Columbia.
Much like the STEM researchers suffering because of the radical Humanities professors, the non-radicalized higher education institutions will be harmed by the backlash against higher ed in general.
Particularly in STEM the loss of federal funding can be devasting to a professor’s professional standing in more ways than you can imagine. In STEM its very common for professors to have “labs” (or similar groupings) to which they recruit graduate students to help on the research as they seek Ph.D.s. The loss of grant money and this support structure can be turned off like a switch when grant funding is lost, but it can’t be turned back on so easily if and when the money reappears.
So will STEM researchers and other non-political faculty stand up for themselves? Will administrators act to protect the institution. Will they go to war with the faculty who are ruining their life’s work to “free, free, Palestine”?
I’m not hopeful. The anti-Israel faculty as a group are just as belligerant and malicious as the anti-Israel students taking over and trashing buildings, setting up check points, and creating “Zionist Free Zones”. Faculty who take scientific and other research seriously are not cut from that activist cloth, but if they do nothing, their life’s work will be destroyed.
Here’s a short transcript excerpt of my full interview (my segment starts at about the 2:00 mark, and the discussion of the civil war starts at 17:50):
Brown (17:28):Is there a lot of faculty pushback yet there? I know there’s been a lot of fear among faculty members at these institutions, and it’s not just in the Ivy League. This happens at state schools, this happens at smaller schools, but that faculty may not be standing up for what we would say is right, because there’s a fear of a backlash.WAJ (17:50):Faculty, I think it’s probably true, are afraid of student intimidation. I mean, when you take over a building, when you do these things like at Columbia and if you’re a faculty member who’s going to speak against that, you’re putting yourself at real risk, real physical risk. So I think a lot of faculty have been intimidated about speaking out about this.But I think there’s a different type of backlash brewing, which is that a lot of the federal grants that are being pulled are for the hard sciences. So you have faculty in the hard sciences who are not as political, who are now paying the price for their gender studies and anthropology and political science faculty who have aided and embedded these protests, who have dug this hole for them.So I think there’s going to be a lot of tension brewing on campuses between the faculty who instigated this situation and the faculty who are actually the ones paying the price because they’re losing their research grants and their funding. So that’s something to keep an eye on. Whether it bubbles up to the surface, I don’t know.But there’s no question that there’s going to be a lot of tension from faculty who lost their federal grants because of the person down there who’s out in the streets rioting with the students, and got the school in trouble.
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