By Joshua Arnold

Columbia University students will finally face discipline for illegally occupying a university building in April 2024, school officials announced Thursday. The decision comes after the Trump administration pulled $400 million in federal grants from the university and subjected it to close scrutiny by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) anti-Semitism task force.

The University Judicial Board (UJB) handed out punishments “ranging from multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions” for the week-long occupation of Hamilton Hall. “With respect to other events taking place last spring,” such as the illegal tent encampments and the assault and harassment of Jewish students, the UJB simply “recognized previously imposed disciplinary action,” the statement added.

This line tacitly admits that Columbia University’s disciplinary process is capable of reaching determinations relatively quickly in a matter of days or weeks. Yet these students who committed the most serious offenses 11 months ago have faced no discipline, until now.

Hamas’s October 7 terror attack triggered a wave of anti-Israel incidents at Columbia University, which included assaults on Jewish students who tried to prevent pro-Hamas radicals from tearing posters of the hostages. The school eventually suspended the campus chapters of the radical groups Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for violating campus policies, but only inflicted minimal punishments against students.

The anti-Semitic demonstrations accelerated on April 19, when demonstrators erected a tent encampment on the campus quad, resulting in 108 arrests. After several brief suspensions, the illegal encampment returned two days later, and university administrators continued to do nothing when the activists broke into a campus building and declared it “occupied.” On April 30, the New York Police Department arrested 119 activists at Columbia, including 46 agitators charged with criminal trespassing for occupying the building.

The students who committed these disgraceful actions largely got away without punishment. Criminal charges were soon dropped for all but 15 protestors, and the university took no disciplinary measures — until now.

It bears repeating that the university repeatedly failed to maintain order on its campus. It refused to call in city police to disperse the encampment or building occupation, both of which were in clear violation of university policy. It declined to press charges against students arrested for criminal offenses. Then it failed even to inflict internal discipline through the end of the school year, the whole summer break, the entire fall semester, a presidential election, and half of the spring semester.

Based on this track record, it seems reasonable to conclude that the university would have continued on its course and never disciplined the offenders until subjected to outside scrutiny — scrutiny it never received from the Biden administration.

Enter President Trump, whose DOJ launched an anti-Semitism Task Force that wasted no time investigating Columbia University and other elite schools that tolerated vile displays of anti-Semitism in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terror attack. The task force recently pulled $400 million in federal grant funding from Columbia and threatened to pull more unless the school took action.

The Trump administration also signaled its willingness to step in with its own punishments if Columbia was unwilling to keep its students under control. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently arrested and sought to deport a foreign graduate student at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil, due to his participation in an anti-Semitic demonstration, which would be a strike against him entering the country in the first place (deportation proceedings are complicated by the fact that Khalil is married to an American citizen, who is eight months pregnant).

Certain cynics live by the maxim that “everyone has a price,” meaning by this that every person has something for which he will sell out his principles. This maxim does not hold universally, as it ignores the witness of Christian martyrs who “loved not their lives even unto death” (Revelation 12:11). But it may function as a stereotype of sinful human nature, seeded with the kernel of truth on which every stereotype relies.

I raise it here because, in the case of Columbia University, the principle seems to be working in reverse. Instead of “finding the price” at which Columbia will do something wrong, the Trump administration has found the price at which Columbia will do something right. It took losing $400 million for Columbia University to do what it should have done all along: discipline agitators and protect Jewish students.

Even at this price, Columbia University has made clear that it is acting under duress. University administrators issue frequent notifications about ICE activities on the campus. Most recently, Interim President Katrina Armstrong wrote Thursday that ICE personnel had searched two university residences overnight, explaining that the university only allowed them to enter because they were armed with duly approved judicial search warrants. Even though law enforcement detained no one and removed nothing, Armstrong professed to be “heartbroken” by the incident.

For Columbia Jewish groups, this reluctant reform is better late than never. “This ruling is an important first step in righting the wrongs of the past year and a half,” wrote Brian Cohen, executive director of the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, Columbia/Barnard Hillel. “I am grateful to the Rules Administrator and other members of the Administration for their roles in ensuring these cases were resolved.”

But belated reform under duress also demonstrates that Columbia University and other elite institutions cannot be trusted to do right by Jewish students on their own. Executive agencies tasked with enforcing civil rights law must remain vigilant to hold them accountable. This is what federal executive agencies failed to do during the Biden administration, which met the persecution of Jewish students with empty rhetoric.

The Trump administration has proven that elite institutions can be held accountable — and also that they must be held accountable.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.