[News] I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump

[Anti-Imperialist News]

theguardian.com
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/01/columbia-historian-rashid-khalidi-open-letter>
I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal
with Trump
Rashid Khalidi
August 1, 2025
------------------------------

Dear Acting President Shipman,

I am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate the
recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a
similar fashion.

These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump
administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East
history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years,
23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2024/oct/08/rashid-khalidi-palestine-israel-scholar-columbia-university-retires>,
I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall
as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia
has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.

Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in
light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition
deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with
Israel <https://www.theguardian.com/world/israel>, so that any criticism of
Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of
Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA
definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet
Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary
proceedings.

Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism
of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the
ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach
about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing
Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel
in Gaza <https://www.theguardian.com/world/gaza> with the connivance and
support of the US and much of western Europe.

The Armenian genocide, the nature of the absolute monarchies and military
dictatorships that blight most of the Arab world, the undemocratic
theocracy in Iran, the incipient dictatorial regime in Türkiye, the
fanaticism of Wahhabism: all of these are subject to detailed analysis in
my course lectures and readings. However, a simple description of the
discriminatory nature of Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law – which states that
only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in Israel, half
of whose subjects are Palestinian – or of the apartheid nature of its
control over millions of Palestinians who have been under military
occupation for 58 years would be impossible in a Middle East history course
under the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

It is not only faculty members’ academic freedom and freedom of speech that
is infringed upon by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s diktat. Teaching
assistants would be seriously constrained in leading discussion sections,
as would students in their questions and discussions, by the constant fear
that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome apparatus that Columbia
has erected to punish speech critical of Israel, and to crack down on
alleged discrimination – which at this moment in history almost invariably
amounts simply to opposition to this genocide. Scores of students and many
faculty members have been subjected to these kangaroo courts, students such
as Mahmoud Khalil have been snatched from their university housing, and
Columbia has now promised to render this repressive system even more
draconian and opaque.

You have stated that no “red lines” have been crossed by these decisions.
However, Columbia has appointed a vice-provost initially tasked with
surveilling Middle Eastern studies, and it has ordained that faculty and
staff must submit to “trainings” on antisemitism from the likes of the
Anti-Defamation League, for whom virtually any critique of Zionism or
Israel is antisemitic
<https://jewishcurrents.org/examining-the-adls-antisemitism-audit>, and
Project Shema, whose trainings link many anti-Zionist critiques to
antisemitism
<https://jewishcurrents.org/inside-the-new-group-giving-antisemitism-trainings-at-harvard>.
It has accepted an “independent” monitor of “compliance” of faculty and
student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor of
Israel. According to Columbia’s agreement
<https://president.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/July%202025%20Announcement/Columbia%20University%20Resolution%20Agreement.pdf>
with the Trump administration, this “Monitor will have timely access to
interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit all
Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of Agreement-related
meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews”. Classrooms are pointedly
NOT excluded from possible visits from these external non academics.

The idea that the teaching, syllabuses and scholarship of some of the most
prominent academics in their fields should be vetted by such a
vice-provost, such “trainers” or an outside monitor from such a firm is
abhorrent. It constitutes the antithesis of the academic freedom that you
have disingenuously claimed will not be infringed by this shameful
capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces animating the Trump
administration <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/trump-administration>.

I regret deeply that Columbia’s decisions have obliged me to deprive the
nearly 300 students who have registered for this popular course – as many
hundreds of others have done for more than two decades – of the chance to
learn about the history of the modern Middle East this fall. Although I
cannot do anything to compensate them fully for depriving them of the
opportunity to take this course, I am planning to offer a public lecture
series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed
and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s
universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US
munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US
university has seen fit to say a single word.

Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of
free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an
anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a
place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on
high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions.
Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest
crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which
Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.

* – Rashid Khalidi*

   -

   Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab
   studies at Columbia University
   <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/columbia-university> and author of
   The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
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