Prominent historian cancels course at Columbia University over Trump deal

Historian Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, has cancelled plans to teach this fall in response to the school’s recent agreement with the Trump administration.

Khalidi made the announcement in an open letter to Columbia’s acting president published in the Guardian on Friday.

“Although I have retired, 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,” Khalidi wrote.

Columbia announced last week that it would pay more than $200m in a settlement with the federal government after the White House claimed the university failed to adequately address alleged antisemitism on campus amid protests over the Israel-Gaza war, and threatened to pull significant funding.

The Trump administration has accused several major US academic institutions of failing to tamp down on antisemitism during pro-Palestinian protests and sought to cut millions of dollars in support if the schools fail to submit to the government’s demands.

Columbia, which was the site of major protests over the war in Gaza, has served as a test case in the administration’s efforts to gain greater control over higher education in the US.

Under the deal, which will be overseen by an independent monitor that will report to the government, the university has agreed to expand its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and review its middle east curriculum. It also pledged to cut programs promoting “unlawful efforts” related to diversity. Along with the $200m, Columbia will pay $21m to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over alleged civil rights violations of Jewish employees.

The agreement has drawn criticism from faculty, students and alumni who argue it amounts to capitulation that will have have significant repercussions for academic freedom, hamper the university’s independence and restrict pro-Palestinian speech.

In his open letter, Khalidi, who retired last year after teaching at the university for more than 20 years, fiercely criticized the agreement.

Columbia chose to adopt a definition of antisemitism that “conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews”, Khalidi said. The definition makes it impossible to teach honestly about the creation of Israel or the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel, he wrote.

The deal will infringe upon faculty members’ academic freedom and speech, as well as that of teaching assistants and students, Khalidi said, who will be forced to constrain their speech in order to evade “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”.

,Agreeing to submit the syllabi and scholarship of prominent academics for review by outside actors is “abhorrent” he added.

He concluded: “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 place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can say and teach, under penalty of severe sanctions.”