Columbia up against Trump deadline for meeting demands over campus protests

(Corrects to add dropped word 'arrest' in paragraph 21)

By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A deadline is looming for Columbia University to respond to nine demands on tightening restrictions on campus protests that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration says are preconditions for opening talks on restoring $400 million in suspended federal funding. 

Among the unusual demands, the administration wants the New York university to ban face masks on campus and seek arrest powers for its security employees. It also demands that Columbia reform its student admissions policies and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which lists certain criticisms of Israel as examples of antisemitism.

Trump's administration is also demanding that the university place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for at least five years, taking control away from its faculty. 

A two-page letter addressed to Dr. Katrina Armstrong, the school's interim president, and Columbia's trustees sent on March 13 spelling out the conditions did not explain why receivership was one of the demands.

The administration extended a Thursday deadline for Columbia's response to the end of Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported. Spokespeople for Columbia and the three government agencies that sent the letter did not respond to questions on Thursday.

The face-off between the private university and the White House is an extraordinary test of the extent of a president's executive powers.

Columbia's response is being watched by other schools the administration has sanctioned as it advances its policy objectives in areas ranging from campus protests to transgender sports and diversity initiatives.

Some professors and students have denounced the administration's actions as an assault on academic freedoms and the independence of higher education. Trump says he is trying to eliminate "anti-American insanity," Marxism and "radical left" sentiment from universities.

Trump has singled out Columbia repeatedly since returning to the White House in January over the pro-Palestinian student protest movement that roiled its campus last year. The Ivy League university's lawns filled with tent encampments and noisy rallies against the U.S. government's support of Israel. Pro-Israel counter-protests were also frequent.

Trump and some pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress say the pro-Palestinian protests intimidated Jewish students and staff, and accuse Columbia of allowing antisemitic harassment. 

The university has defended itself by saying it has worked to balance freedom of expression without tolerating antisemitism or other prejudice. Protesters, including some Jewish students, say criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism. 

The American Association of University Professors, some Columbia faculty and students and civil rights groups have accused Trump of authoritarianism and violating constitutional rights to free speech and due process.

"The subjugation of universities to state power is a hallmark of autocracy," Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said in a statement.

The Trump administration announced on March 7 that it was immediately cancelling federal grants and contracts at Columbia, without following the usual lengthy investigation and hearings process in the Civil Rights Act. The administration has declined to say which grants and contracts were targeted. 

The next day, federal immigration agents arrested Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent figure in last year's protests, saying the government had canceled his permanent residency green card because his presence was contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests.

Khalil said in a statement from a Louisiana immigrants jail this week that he is a political prisoner, and he is fighting the government's efforts to deport him in court.

UNIVERSITY SENATE

The administration did not say in its letter why it was targeting Columbia's Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department. However, some Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives last year criticized at least two professors of Palestinian descent working in the department for their comments about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Academic receivership is a rare step taken by a university's administrators to fix a dysfunctional department by appointing a professor or administrator outside the department to take over. It is unheard of for the U.S. government to demand such a step.

Many of the administration's demands entail policy changes that would have to pass its University Senate, made up of elected students, staff, alumni and faculty. Columbia has shared governance with the senate since the late 1960s, when anti-war students organized disruptive protests in which they seized control of buildings and briefly held a dean hostage. 

The senate has repeatedly criticized any signs that Columbia administration was side-stepping the body's governance powers, including in April when the administration, without senate permission, called police on campus to arrest student protesters for the first time since 1968. The senate declined to advance a proposed mask ban earlier this year.

In New York, only a state or local government can grant arrest powers to private citizens, such as Columbia security employees, as the administration demands.

In a campus-wide message on Wednesday, Armstrong wrote that Columbia "will not waver from our principles and the values of academic freedom and free expression that have guided this institution for the last 270 years."

She described the various ways the school has combated harassment and prejudice on campus and promised a new webpage to report the school's progress. She did not address how the school would respond to specific demands.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Mark Porter and Deepa Babington)