My friend Alex Gourevitch alerted me to Columbia’s statement on combatting discrimination, harassment, and antisemitism, which I had somehow missed. Alex points out how it’s essentially DEI from the right—new sensitivity trainings, for what the university calls antisemitism; new diversity hiring initiatives, for pro-Israel scholars; new administrators, to oversee the hiring—with a lot more coercion.

On that question of coercion, have a read of the statement and simply count how often words like “sanction” (as in punish) and “suspension” and “expulsion” appear. It’s hard not to read this as new constitutional order for universities, in which the onerous apparatus of crime and punishment that this country has veered to over the decades is simply dropped onto the university campus.

Is this a university that believes it can resolve its conflicts and disagreements through dialogue and deliberation and education or a private government that approaches each and every question of difference through the mechanisms of inquisition, incarceration, and deportation?

To me, the answer seems clear. This is no longer an institution of education. Like the national government, Columbia has become a regime and a ritual of purification.