The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is one of those events that can divide a room, or an X space, just by being referenced. The facts are deceptively simple. A Palestinian student at an Ivy League University on a foreign visa who organized protests at which some participants disseminated “Death to America” pamphlets, intimidated fellow students, and illegally occupied a university building is threatened with deportation by a duly-elected president wielding the constitutional power of the executive branch. The executive has called him a threat to national security, apparently (so far) based on his speech.
The legal questions in the case are thorny; Supreme Court rulings have gone different directions on the issue. The political questions are ugly, and shot through with self-interest; federal judges, liberal non-profits, the Democratic Party, and even neoconservatives are using Khalil’s arrest as a weapon against Donald Trump.
But all of this does little to alter the actual political or social significance of what’s occurring. Indeed, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and a host of associated actions by the federal government have very little to do with any of the questions above. Instead, they represent the silencing of one point of view about foreign policy in favor of another—and in ways that will likely redound on Americans now and in the future.
Crucial to the significance of what’s happening to Mahmoud Khalil is where it’s happening: a DC-funded research university, which is a very unusual space. As scholars have documented, the modern elite research university serves as a vessel for two mutually dependent activities. The first is training future national leaders via specialized instruction in political science, economics, management, business, law, and whatever other skills can be used in Washington DC’s civil service and its corporate outgrowths: “technocrats.” The second is training intellectuals to critique the very system of which these technocrats are a part and allowing them to promote vigorous protest against national leaders’ policies, via giving instructors tenure and allowing wide room for student protests.
The purpose of this divide is so that the same institutions which mint the operators who take us, say, into Vietnam, will also serve as bastions of resistance to this type of overreach. The technocrats move up through institutional ladders, beginning with the university, and exercise quiet power with outsized effects. Think of the rise of Robert McNamara from Harvard to Ford Motor Company to pulling the levers that got American into Vietnam. Conversely, the intellectuals and activists, lacking influential connections or access to the levers of power, make their point through disruption which sometimes gets out of hand, for example the takeovers of university buildings protesting Vietnam.
In this sense, the modern research university is a completely unique and uniquely balanced ecosystem. It has nothing to do with the tasks of state universities or small private colleges equipping students with a marketable trade and to engage in society and civic life. Instead, it deals in the zero-sum calculus of national power, both minting it and ensuring that it’s opposed. As one of the technocrats’ more vocal representatives, William Ackman, recently put it, “the real purpose of a university…[is] ‘to distribute privilege’” and to answer the question “‘Who is going to manage society?’” What he forgot to say is that its corresponding purpose, expressed via academic activists whose only recourse is loud disruption, is to make sure these managers exercise power responsibly.
Many America Firsters, myself included, believe that these management-and-activist-minting research universities should be defunded significantly, so that both technocracy and activism are reduced. But, so long as they exist in their current form, they should serve as a forum for differing geopolitical views—because the alternative is that they’ll become powerful vessels for the government to encourage the promotion of one view as opposed to another. This seems to be what’s happening here: the voices of technocrats are being given precedence over those who resist them.
For one example, the head of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where Khalil studied, is Keren Yarhi-Milo, who grew up in Israel, served in the Israeli Defense Forces and has extensive connections to Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The Belfer Center is where Jared Kushner first floated the idea of the “raze-and-rebuild” Gaza play I have reported on in the past. It is also where, the same week as deportation proceedings against Khalil began, former Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who along with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was most responsible for the proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza, became an affiliate; he also serves at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as the inaugural Henry Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order. Like Sullivan, Yarhi-Milo is a powerful pro-interventionist player with deep Washington connections, and, like Sullivan will help do at the Belfer Center, she works at Columbia setting the agenda for a flagship research university’s main institution for foreign affairs.
Historically, the check to perspectives like Sullivan’s and Yarhi-Milo’s has been provided by places like the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department at Columbia. These are not the paradises of DEI administrators and enforced speech codes which conservatives rightly despise. They are departments devoted to studying the effects of colonial agendas in areas which, unlike the American colonies in the 1770s, didn’t have the tradition of representative politics that allowed them to resist imperial encroachment.
Their practitioners’ perspective is a clear contrast with internationalist liberals like Sullivan and Yarhi-Milo. Where Sullivan and Yarhi-Milo would emphasize Israel and Saudi Arabia as flawed but vital parts of the post-World War II international order predicated on human rights, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies’ professors would emphasize the fact that both countries’ American funding have created regional backlash that led to 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this contrast may not exist at Columbia for much longer. Donald Trump’s administration, under penalty of withholding $400 million in federal funding, has instructed Columbia to begin the process of placing Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership. This process requires an outside chair, who could be appointed by the government, to run the department for five years.
This is not the only perspectival disparity currently at play on Columbia’s campus. In another example, no focus is being given to at least one actor who has been accused of actions similar to the ones allegedly encouraged by Khalil—an actor, what’s more, who has links to a major weapons provider to Israel which has benefited from Washington’s military-defense spending there. Columbia Professor Shai Davidai, an Israeli citizen also here on a foreign visa, has been accused by pro-Palestinian activists of harassing them. He was briefly banned from entering Columbia, with the university saying that he “repeatedly harassed and intimidated the school’s employees.”
And, even as Khalil is arrested and Davidai not investigated, “a flurry of recent cases” is being “brought by a new [Columbia] university disciplinary committee—the Office of Institutional Equity—against Columbia students who have expressed criticism of Israel.” This “criticism” extends, in one case, to writing an op-ed in the student paper calling Israel’s bombardment of Gaza “the most televised genocide of all time.” Agree with that claim or not, a university investigating a student for stating the claim is not a university engaged in free speech, which is an understood term of its existence. It’s engaged in silencing a point of view.
Yet another example of this silencing is another Trump Administration directive, which has demanded the university adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which academics and members of the Jewish community criticised as conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
This definition, via an international non-profit, includes “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”; “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel…than to…their own nations”; and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
Those of us who witnessed campuses affected by Barack Obama’s heavy-handed executive mandate regarding Title IX saw this process occur when it came to gender relations and sexual assault. Extra-legal university-backed judiciary boards wielding authority over students’ futures created what scholars called a “sex bureaucracy” to forestall federal investigations into a “hostile environment.” Then, too, the justification was protecting a threatened group of people; and then, too, questionable prosecutions were the order of the day. A latter-day version of this agenda via the Office of Institutional Equity is not what we want to see.
Troublingly, this trend is extending outward into society and politics at large.
The State Department, equipped with A.I. tools that scan the social-media posts of foreign students, has begun a deportation program for anyone flagged by those tools for posts that equate, in the administration’s view, with supporting Hamas.
Aside from the problems with using a dangerous new invention as a tool of government surveillance, there is the problem of defining what “supporting Hamas” means, since Hamas has political goals like the establishment of a Palestinian state. Does voicing support of this goal count as “supporting Hamas”? And how long will it take for American citizens, not just foreign students, to be flagged for comments “supporting Hamas” in the name of keeping the country safe?
Tellingly, the same silencing trend appears to be occurring in a more subtle way in the halls of power in Washington DC. In the last week alone, two foreign policy practitioners nominated by the Trump administration for top foreign policy positions, Elbridge Colby and Daniel L. Davis, who are skeptical of funding Israel, have seen their nominations stalled or foreclosed. This came after objections by interventionist senators and pro-Israel snd pro-Saudi groups, who have vested interests in American involvement in the region.
But the involvement of interest groups in pushing foreign plays is not the most troubling part of this political silencing. The most troubling part is that, in the bigger picture, the pendulum in Washington DC and its environs will always swing toward intervention, particularly in the Middle East, because that’s where the money is. In the context of an establishment teed toward these involvements, having voices from institutions with a lock on high-level knowledge production like Columbia making another case is doubly important. The current actions at and surrounding the Columbia crackdown, by contrast, weaponize Columbia and other academic institutions to speak with one voice rather than hashing out an issue of public policy. This hashing out, in the end, is what truly supports the aim of America First: a sovereign country where citizens, not institutions, determine our collective future.
