Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

There is one thing that students and faculty at Columbia say that they hate more than than the state of Israel: inequality. The flip side is that there is one thing that students and faculty at Columbia love more than the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad: equality. Columbia has accumulated $15 billion in profits (its endowment) and, therefore, is near the top of the top 1% of the richest colleges in the U.S. (list; there are about 4,000 colleges and universities total in the U.S).

One would think thank these inequality-haters would be delighted that the Trump administration had decided to redirect money from their rich school, thus freeing up funds to be distributed to comparatively poor schools. Yet instead we learn that folks at Columbia are upset. Example video: “Columbia University staff, students aren’t pleased with $400M cut in funds”.

From the student newspaper:

From the article:

“The AAUP is actively working with our members across the nation in preparation to resist these draconian policies that severely undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education,” the statement from [union leader Todd] Wolfson reads.

An elite academic is truly free only if he/she/ze/they is receiving an unconditional paycheck from working class taxpayers? In a now-deleted tweet, a Columbia grad student wrote that her F31 grant was worth only $100,000 per year in salary and tuition and that this was “pennies”, serenely unaware at the time that quite a few taxpayers would consider $100,000/year to be actual money. (the BLS says that median wage in Q4 2024 for a full-time worker was $1,185/week = $61,620/year)

(Same question about Californians. They say that they hate inequality and then they complain that California purportedly pays more in federal taxes than it receives in federal spending. (Much if not most of this is due, I think, to Californians paying into Social Security and Medicare while working in California and then receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits in retirement after moving to other states.) Californians want money extracted from taxpayers in Mississippi for their gold-plated high-speed rail system, for example, when that is completely inconsistent with their philosophy of promoting equality.)

Another question about Columbia… most of the academics I know who get federal money said that they would leave the U.S. in the event of a second Nakba (Trump victory). Nearly all should be living in Canada or Europe by now. Why are there enough of these folks still at Columbia to soak up so much federal money?

Separately, how is the noble enricher Mahmoud Khalil doing?

Loosely related, a couple of official White House tweets, Shalom Columbia and Shalom, Mahmoud:

Related:

• the Inequality sub-department within Sociology at Columbia (14 taxpayer-funded faculty getting paid far above the median wage in the U.S. so that they can write articles about how it is bad if people get paid far above the median wage)
• “Economic Inequality Cannot Be Explained by Individual Bad Choices” (Columbia Public Health, 2023)
• “How the Trump Administration’s Efforts to Redefine Human Rights Threaten Economic, Social, and Racial Justice” (Columbia Law, 2019): “threaten to harm communities historically marginalized and discriminated against, and to further entrench inequality”
• “More Inequality, More Instability…More Walls?” (Columbia Teachers College, 2017): “border walls create more problems than they solve”