Trump’s $2bn row with Harvard reveals his hypocrisy when it comes to free speech

Withholding funds from leading universities that refuse to bend to the president’s wishes show the true colours of the US administration, writes Alan Rusbridger

The guest at an Oxford lecture recently was rewriting his speech in the taxi. A professor at Columbia University, New York, Jelani Cobb had just learned of the arrest and imminent deportation of one of the college’s graduate students. Since his theme was free speech, he could hardly ignore the subject.

Cobb was about to give the annual Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism lecture las month when he was told that a member of the Columbia community, Mahmoud Khalil, had been snatched off the street by immigration agents in New York and taken into detention in Louisiana. Donald Trump said he would be stripped of his green card and deported. The president simultaneously revoked $400m in federal grants and contracts over what he claimed was the university’s failure to combat antisemitism.

There is no evidence that Khalil has done anything unlawful. But he stands accused of “un-American activity” for his role in helping to lead campus protests over Israel’s attacks on Gaza following the October 7 massacre in which nearly 1,200 were killed and many taken hostage. Some Jewish students have said that the protests veered into antisemitism and made them feel unsafe on campus. Other Jewish students participated in the rallies.

Just this past weekend, immigration judge Jamee E Comans ruled that the government could deport him.

Khalil speaks to the media about the Revolt for Rafah encampment at Columbia University in June 2024 (Reuters)

In Oxford, Cobb pointed to the irony that the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which is being used against Khalil, is “a piece of Cold War legislation that was commonly weaponised against Jewish immigrants during antisemitic purges of alleged subversives”.

There are, indeed, multiple ironies. It seems like only yesterday that vice president JD Vance was in Munich lecturing Europe about its alleged failure to protect free speech. Not a peep from him.

Britain’s own free speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, interviewed in The Telegraph, urged vice-chancellors to “show backbone” in championing free speech on campuses. He described a scenario in which a vice-chancellor might say to a troublesome academic: “‘You better tone it down a bit,’ in a vaguely threatening way. That’s contrary to everything a university is for.”

He was thinking primarily about China trying to muzzle free speech, but the same principle surely applies. Only it doesn’t, really, when it comes to speech defending the Palestinian cause.

Indeed, Columbia itself acknowledged the double standard when Stuart Karle, an adjunct professor and first amendment lawyer, advised students who were not US citizens to refrain from publishing work on Gaza. “If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East.”

When a Palestinian student protested, Cobb was blunt: “Nobody can protect you,” he said. “These are dangerous times.”

Indeed, they are. The president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, was forced to resign over her handling of the protests. Her peers, Liz Magill of Penn University and Claudine Gay at Harvard, were also effectively forced to quit.

Hundreds protest outside a New York court over the arrest and detention of Khalil (Getty)

A few brave voices defended them. At Harvard, a veteran African American law professor, Randall Kennedy, wrote: “The sad reality is that Claudine Gay and Harvard University were upended by a bunch of ruthless right-wing politicians and activists, desperate friends of Israel alarmed by the rise of a pro-Palestinian constituency, disturbed mega-donors and resentful insiders seething at a ‘diversity’ ethos that they perceive as lowering standards.” Claudine Gay is also African American.

Now the president of Harvard, Alan Garber, has said the university will not adhere to White House demands which include reporting students to the government who are “hostile” to American values and scrapping diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

In response, the US government has said it is freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in contracts.

The British writer Rachel Shabi’s recent book Off White dissects “how antisemitism has become a ‘Gotcha!’ moment: a stick with which the right clobbers the left”.

She watched with appalled fascination the congressional hearings at which American university chiefs were skewered: “It showed how claims of antisemitism are cynically involved to silence pro-Palestinian voices and then attached to a broader culture war that strikes out against antiracism, ‘wokeness’, critical race theory, diversity, equity and inclusion programmes or just a generalised ‘liberal elite’.”

At the same time, she noted, progressives often “lacked the ability to recognise actual antisemitism”.

The Free Speech Union, Toby Young’s energetic ginger group, has so far had nothing to say about Columbia University's latest debacle, though its website does quote Arif Ahmed’s remarks about the importance of free expression at universities at some length.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the Royal Television Society has been accused of cowardice for scrapping an award for journalists in Gaza because they did not want to deepen the controversy around a BBC documentary on the conflict.

More than 300 TV and film professionals have criticised the last-minute decision not to award the prize, with Jonathan Dimbleby saying: “The decision is craven and the grounds on which it has been made – the fact that there is an issue around one BBC film – are specious and shallow. No journalist working in Gaza was involved in the making of that film.”

He added: “We depend hugely on the reporting of those journalists who are in Gaza, who put their lives on the line every day, because no Western journalists can enter except on specially conducted trips.

“The RTS is rightly held in very high regard and that it should suddenly abdicate its role because it doesn’t want to muddy the water is cowardly and ill-judged.”

Back to Oxford and Cobb’s hastily rewritten speech, in which he drew comparisons between what is happening now and the 1950s McCarthy era in the US, when there was a witch hunt against people in public life with the “wrong views”. Then, as now, universities were targeted.

Cobb ended his speech with a passage on why it matters: “Institutions are created in order to codify values. Our universities, our governments – certainly, our news organisations – were meant to not only embody particular principles but to assure that they can be preserved and transmitted across generations.

“Values are meant to guide us in difficult times – in the easy times we already know what to do. The paradox, of course, is that the minute you establish something based upon principle you are confronted by the question of when you will bend for expediency.”

It is obvious that the attempted deportation of Khalil is an attempt to intimidate others – universities and individuals alike. His wife Noor Abdulla, an American citizen, is eight months pregnant. I very much hope her husband is freed in time to greet his new baby, and that the double standards around Palestinian speech are exposed for what they are.