The explosive letter the Trump administration sent to Columbia University on Thursday night included an unusual demand: that the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies be placed on academic receivership.
The stipulation places a spotlight on an obscure and rarely invoked process. Academic receivership occurs when a college administration takes over a department that has been unable to function. Typically, a college will take this step when internal conflict among faculty members has become so acrimonious that department members can no longer make basic decisions. The college will choose a scholar from a different department to serve as chair for a few years until tensions settle.
It’s a last-resort measure that has been imposed by campus administrators a handful of times over the last several decades, according to Chronicle archives. In every instance, it was an internal matter.
“It’s absolutely bizarre and unprecedented to imagine a governmental entity would intervene,” said David Damrosch, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Damrosch was a member of Columbia’s English department when it entered into academic receivership in the early 2000s. “I have never heard of it in a democratic society.”
The demand was included in a list of Trump-administration directives that officials said must be satisfied for hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants to be restored. The demands include discipline for Columbia students who protested the war in Gaza, empowerment of on-campus law enforcement, a mask ban for protests, and other directives that seem meant to squash pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus.
When Columbia’s English department was placed under academic receivership more than 20 years ago, the circumstances were fairly typical. The department was in a fight that “pitted feminists and multiculturalists against traditionalists,” The Chronicle reported in 2002. The university placed a classics professor in the role as chair for about three years, Damrosch said. That professor was a good listener, Damrosch recalled, and the department “picked up and carried on quite well.”
In 40 years as an academic who has written about the culture of scholars, Damrosch said he’s heard of a college placing a department under academic receivership three or four times.
The University of Cincinnati put its economics department under a kind of academic receivership amid a fight between factions that devolved into screaming matches and regular nasty emails, The Chronicle reported in 2002. One group wanted the department to emphasize research, while the other wanted to continue to focus on teaching.
University administrators also intervened amid disputes in the political-science department at Vanderbilt University and in the English department of the University at Albany and the philosophy department of Stony Brook University, both part of the State University of New York system.
Such a move is viewed “as a kind of a healing process to help the department get its act together,” Damrosch said. The Trump administration’s demand of Columbia, he said, seems more akin to Vladimir Putin or Victor Orban’s interventions into universities in Russia or Hungary.
“It’s kind of a hostile takeover from outside.”
The letter to Columbia was signed by three officials, each from a different government agency. They directed the university to place the department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years and to “provide a full plan, with date certain deliverables, by the March 20, 2025, deadline.”
Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute condemned the letter. In a statement, the institute’s litigation director, Alex Abdo, called it “an assault on the very foundation of higher education.”
