The Case for Boycotting Columbia University

On March 25, CUNY Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine called for a boycott of Columbia University, citing the university’s active participation “in an authoritarian assault on universities aimed at destroying their role as sites of teaching, research, learning, and activism essential to building a free and fair world.”

Signatories pledge not to participate in academic events at Columbia or Barnard College, or collaborate with scholars who hold administrative positions at either institution. To date, more than 75 organizations (mostly faculty groups) across the nation have endorsed the call, and almost 2,000 individuals have signed the pledge.

The organizers of this call, me included, appreciate that Columbia faculty are exhausted, besieged, demoralized and threatened. We did not take lightly a call to boycott academic events organized by colleagues.

There seem to be four primary concerns among academics about a boycott.

1. Any call must come from within the university.
2. An academic boycott will harm faculty who are already under attack by the university and who are our best allies within the institution.
3. A boycott will only aid the Trump administration’s aim of destroying higher education.
4. The reactionary Columbia administration will be indifferent to a largely symbolic and toothless act that will fail.

These are valid points that warrant consideration. But they proceed from several mistaken assumptions: that Columbia remains a normal and legitimate university, that it is not only possible but desirable to proceed with academic business as usual there—and, more generally, that the academic world that university workers have long inhabited will persist in its current form.

By weaponizing accusations of antisemitism against students and faculty expressing legitimate opposition to the genocide in Gaza, Columbia has colluded with the government’s project to destroy higher education and criminalize protest and dissent. It has thus betrayed its fundamental responsibility to protect students, defend academic freedom, respect faculty governance and promote a climate of open discussion and dissent. By effectively firing longtime Columbia Law School professor Katherine M. Franke, the administration has put faculty members on notice that public criticism may cost them their jobs. There are objective reasons why this faculty would have neither the will nor the capacity to organize a collective response to this scandalous situation.

Because Columbia is only the first target of a broader program to destroy the university, no academic worker, no American citizen, can remain indifferent to the authoritarian drama unfolding there. We are all implicated. In capitulating to the Trump administration’s demands in a bid to restore $400 million in federal funding cuts, Columbia has set a dangerous precedent for other universities to follow. Indeed, despite this act of craven submission, the National Institutes of Health reportedly froze additional hundreds of millions of dollars of biomedical research grants to the university earlier this week.

Capitulation is a losing strategy. The very future of higher education, so indispensable for a democratic society, now hangs in the balance. A forceful collective response by university workers, within and outside Columbia, is urgent.

So, why a boycott?

In a Guardian article, Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, who recently retired from Columbia as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, wrote, “Columbia has long been run more like the vast, wealthy business and real estate empire that it is, than as an educational institution.” But since its recent capitulation, Khalidi wrote, “Columbia barely merits the name of a university … it should be called Vichy on the Hudson.”

If we agree with Khalidi’s assessment, we must ask ourselves what it means to continue to engage normally with an institution that has proven itself to be an enemy of university life and a threat to its students, faculty and staff. The boycott proceeds from the conviction that it would be obscene to pursue academic business as usual there, as if teaching, learning, discussing and dissenting could possibly take place under such conditions.

We recognize that Columbia is not exceptional. The government’s aim is to impose these conditions on all universities, which is precisely why Columbia must somehow be held accountable immediately. Given the current situation, we support a variety of means to do so, whether a faculty strike, lawsuits or censure by the American Association of University Professors. But the crisis is urgent, and these other tactics will take longer to work effectively. An academic boycott offers the possibility of an immediate mass censure of Columbia.

In July 2024, the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure declared,

If, as Khalidi contends, conditions at Columbia are now fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education, we should accept that a boycott is a legitimate, if inadequate, tactic through which to protect the mission of higher education. Although it risks alienating some Columbia faculty members who already feel besieged, there is no reason to assume that all Columbia faculty members would oppose a boycott that can bring much-needed pressure on their administration.

I recall, for example, an invitation I received to speak at Goldsmiths, University of London. Shortly before the planned talk, the institution was hit with an academic boycott over planned job cuts; my hosts, whose jobs were suddenly being threatened, informed me that they would of course respect the boycott. They arranged for the discussion of my book to take place in an anarchist community center in a working-class neighborhood outside the university. The talk was well attended and one of the best academic experiences I have ever had.

This boycott is similarly directed at the institution, not individuals. We have carved out an exception for participation in events of targeted programs at Columbia. We are ready and eager to work with Columbia faculty and programs to find creative ways to refuse to normalize this state of emergency. This might entail moving events off campus, new collaborations with programs at other universities or reconstituting “in exile” programs like the Center for Palestine Studies or the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. We are eager to act in solidarity with Columbia faculty members’ own resistance actions. We envision the boycott as only a first step and a single element in what should be a broader mobilization, on multiple fronts, by faculty and students everywhere to protect higher education and oppose fascism.

As conditions change, tactics will surely have to change as well. If, for example, a strong directive from resistant Columbia faculty made a persuasive case for a different strategy to oppose the Columbia administration and refuse business as usual, this could lead organizers to reconsider, even rescind, the boycott. Or if more and more universities follow Columbia’s lead, which seems likely, it will no longer make sense to boycott Columbia. But right now, at this crucial crossroads, here is something we can do.

I invite academics who feel uneasy about a boycott to be less focused on hypothetical harms—poorly attended or canceled events sometime down the road?—and more on how a boycott might be one of many interventions right now that could help call out Columbia in a consequential way.

Critics have declared that that the boycott will fail to move Columbia’s administration in any meaningful way. They may well be correct. But who knows?

Perhaps, with the support of high-profile scholars, this call could become massive. It might then help to interrupt, hold accountable or awaken the Columbia administration to its educational responsibility. Perhaps it will encourage, even galvanize, Columbia faculty to organize more intentionally. It has already served to provoke a national conversation between angry, frightened and bewildered academics (among whom I count myself) about what can and should be done to oppose the “Palestine exception” to free speech and to protect academic freedom. Already, as more and more organizations endorse the boycott, the contours of a nationwide network of academic groups and individuals is coming into view. This is precisely the political infrastructure we will need to wage the uphill battle into which we’ve all been thrown.

Many onlookers are rightly shocked by how easily a reactionary bloc (i.e., Zionist pressure groups, media outlets, politicians, donors, the Board of Trustees, feckless administrators) has induced such a wealthy and powerful university to betray its stated mission and values. But we should not be surprised. Columbia only exemplifies, and illuminates, the decline of the university under neoliberal conditions: hollowed out by austerity, beholden to big money and anti-intellectual interests, where free speech, academic freedom, faculty governance, open dissent and student safety no longer have a solid foundation whether among administrators or an empowered faculty. Relative to other countries, there does not exist a robust tradition of collective action in the U.S. This has left university workers—like the legions of federal workers whose jobs and lives have been deemed expendable—stunned and paralyzed before this first brush with authoritarian state power.

To rally to defend higher education against this far-right attack is not a call to preserve the actual existing university. Just as a boycott seeks to disrupt business as usual at Columbia, we academics should not be hoping to simply resume business as usual in our own institutions. MAGA fascism has revealed the rot at the core of the neoliberal university and the damage it has done to rank-and-file faculty. This crisis offers us a historic opportunity to struggle to create a different kind of university. Since at least the global 1960s, universities have served as galvanizing flashpoints for societal insurgencies against existing arrangements. This modest academic boycott is one wager on collective action when the stakes could not be higher.