How We Win the Battle for the Soul of the University with Professor Katherine Franke
President Trump is waging war on free speech and academic freedom. And too often, colleges and universities have waved the white flag. Over and over, places of higher education have given in to the Trump administration’s outrageous demands and allowed the federal government to have an unprecedented say in what gets taught and what people can say on college campuses. New York City’s Columbia University is at the center of Trump’s attempts to destroy America’s colleges.
Few have had a better seat to watch this assault on our cherished freedoms than Professor Katherine Franke. Franke is a former tenured law professor at Columbia who was put under investigation by the university in 2024 in the midst of the school’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech. Then in January, she entered into an agreement with Columbia to leave the school after 25 years as a distinguished professor.
Few people have spoken out with more passion, clarity, and insight about the ongoing siege on academic freedom. On this episode, we speak with Professor Franke about her experience at Columbia, the climate of censorship, fear, and repression at Columbia and schools across the country, and efforts to fight back against Trump’s attacks.
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Resources
Inside Columbia’s Crackdown on Pro-Palestine Free Speech
Mahmoud Khalil in His Own Words
What are the Stakes of Mahmoud Khalil’s Case?
NYCLU Letter: Columbia Should Not Capitulate to Trump
Transcript
Katherine: [00:00:00.00] And I felt like I have two choices here, either going back into a classroom and into a building where people, I actually don’t feel physically safe, or surrendering my retirement benefits. And I felt coerced into agreeing to this retirement, so-called retirement. I took it as a kind of firing.
Simon: Welcome to “Rights This Way,” a podcast from the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of New York State. I’m Simon McCormack, senior staff writer at the NYCLU, and your host for this podcast, which is focused on the civil rights and liberties issues that impact New Yorkers most. President Trump is waging war on free speech and academic freedom. And too often, colleges and universities have waived the white flag. Over and over, places of higher education have given in to the Trump administration’s outrageous demands and allowed the federal government to have an unprecedented say in what gets taught [00:01:01.06] and what people can say on college campuses. New York City’s Columbia University is at the center of Trump’s attempts to destroy America’s colleges, and few have had a better seat to watch the assault on our cherished freedoms than Professor Katherine Franke. She’s the retired James L. Dohrnprofessor of law at Columbia University and author of “Repair: Redeeming The Promise of Abolition.” Professor Franke, welcome to “Rights This Way.”
Katherine: Thank you, Simon. Great to be with you.
Simon: Yeah, it’s really great to have you. And I guess I’ll just start by asking you to kind of, yeah, give us a little bit of your bio, your professional background, and, you know, broadly speaking, your time at Columbia.
Katherine: Well, I was at Columbia as a tenured professor in the law school for 25 years, up until last January. And my teaching and scholarship was in queer theory, feminism, critical race theory. I wrote several books on racial justice and the racial history of the United States, and really loved being [00:02:01.02] on the Columbia Law faculty until recently. So there were some, as things shifted after October 7th, our campus transformed in ways I could never have imagined.
Simon: Let’s talk about your role in the pro-Palestine movement at Columbia in particular, and then you know, why you were eventually put under investigation by the university.
Katherine: Well, I have always worked closely with student groups, student activist groups at Columbia. Columbia prides itself of being a place where students are actively engaged with the events of the time, whatever time, whether it’s the Vietnam War or, you know, ending fossil fuels, use of fossil fuels, or Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd, or, you know, every one of the things that comes up in the world, particularly in the United States, gets activated on our campus. Columbia even has on their website, the proud history of being the home for student activism.
[00:03:02.01] But after October 7th, all of that shifted. So I had gained a reputation on the faculty at Columbia of being sort of the faculty member to go to, when students were strategizing their protests, but also when they were brought up on disciplinary charges for their protests. And I would help them either get a lawyer or acted as their lawyer in their disciplinary hearings. It was important to me that they got a fair shake. And I would often say to them, “If you do that action, you know there’s gonna be a punishment for it. This does violate the rules.” And that’s what we do as lawyers, is we advise our clients, you know, it’s up to you whether you wanna do it or not, but if you do, it’s likely you’ll get punished. And I certainly gave students that advice many times over the years, and sometimes they didn’t do the thing and sometimes they did.
And so when all of the student protests arose after October 7th, overwhelmingly protesting the disproportionate violence of the Israeli government against the Gazans, [00:04:02.06] I stepped up again and students came to me and said, “We’re gonna do these protests and we did, and we need some help with these disciplinary hearings.” So that was my primary role, was in the background, advising the students about their legal strategy, their legal options, and the consequences of undertaking the kinds of protests that they did.
Simon: And then how did you end up getting put under investigation?
Katherine: Well, one of the protests, kind of early on now, it seems like 20 years since October 7th at this point, but it was shortly after October 7th, there were students out protesting, demanding a ceasefire. And we are still looking for a ceasefire, all these years later. And as they were protesting, two or three other students showed up and sprayed them with a very noxious chemical. And the students who were protesting knew who those spraying students were. And they were Israeli students who were on our campus, enrolled as graduate students at Columbia. [00:05:03.01] And the students who got sprayed, some of them were hospitalized. They had pretty serious respiratory injuries.
And the university did very little about it, certainly didn’t speak out about it and condemn it. It got some media attention. And I went on “Democracy Now” and mentioned, talked about this event, and said that the students who had been the sprayers were known on campus as having just finished their military service in Israel. And for them, in my mind, the transition from the state of mind one needs to be a soldier, where you’re told that this is your enemy and they pose a mortal threat to your very existence, to the state of mind one needs to be a student where you are next to those people who are supposedly your enemy, is a tough one for some people. And it’s a university’s obligation, I think, to help with that transition as we bring people out of military service into being part of the student body. And we do welcome many vets at Columbia, [00:06:02.07] and it’s just something to anticipate. And I felt like the university had let the community down in not really thinking ahead about what that would be like.
I also noted that this has been a problem for many years, well before October 7th, that pro-Palestinian students, or actually Palestinian students had been verbally and physically attacked by Israeli students, many of whom proudly celebrated their military service in their social media presence, and that it was time that the university took this seriously. Those comments were misconstrued as me saying that I wanted all Israeli students banned from our campus. And two colleagues of mine at the law school, one of whom is Israeli, the other is very Israeli identified, filed a complaint against me that I was creating a hostile environment by my comments on “Democracy Now.” It’s where I stated facts, things I knew were true, and did not say at all Israeli students should be banned. [00:07:02.07] I don’t believe that. And I was investigated for bias against Israelis and found guilty.
Simon: Before you were put under investigation, did you have any concern you were at risk of?
Katherine: Absolutely not. I thought this was ludicrous. I thought, “Well, let’s watch the video.” You can see I didn’t say that. I don’t believe that. If you look at the record, I’ve had many Israeli students as PhD students. I’ve supervised their dissertations, you know, regular law students, others in my classes. I don’t bear a bias towards Israelis. I do have a critique of the Israeli government, and I do think it’s wrong to attack other students physically, verbally, and otherwise. And I’ll call it out when I see it. If it happens to be Israelis, I’ll say that. But if it happens to be somebody else, I will also. So I thought it was laughable that they had filed this complaint against me.
But during the many months where they investigated it, and I was deposed a number of times, the president [00:08:01.06] of the University of Columbia was called before Congress to testify. You’ll remember there were waves of university presidents. Elise Stefanik got up and questioned her and said, “What are you gonna do about Franke who thinks all Israelis should be banned from campus?” I had already talked to the president, Minouche Shafik, and said to her, “You’re gonna hear that this is what I said, this is not what I said. Here’s what I said and here’s why I said it.” And I expected her to say, either, “I can’t discuss a personnel matter,” which is the right thing to say, or, “I don’t believe that’s correct, and we will handle it internally.” Instead, she said, “I don’t support those comments. They’re discriminatory and she’ll be dealt with.” And I’m sitting in my living room and I’m like, “Oh, okay. This is a different place than I thought it was.” The president of the university is not standing up for her faculty. And the president of this university is allowing the university to be used [00:09:02.00] as part of a larger political campaign that is both about Israel and Palestine, but is also about destroying the university itself. And I’m a tool or playing a part in that. And I realized things had shifted.
Simon: And how did things ultimately end with you in Columbia?
Katherine: Well, as things progressed, I had colleagues in the law school who would stalk me, like professors I knew well, they would walk down the main part of Columbia yelling at me that I supported HAMAS, that I hated Jews, that I’ve supported violence against their children, the faculty’s children. I’m looking at them like, “What are you talking about?” There were people who posed as students who would come to my office hours and asked me questions about the things that were going on campus and saying they supported the Palestinian protests. Meanwhile, they were surreptitiously video recording me, and then these would show up on right wing Twitter feeds. [00:10:02.00] People would enroll in my classes who were not really interested in the subject matter, only to record me. And it wasn’t just me. This happened to Professor Rashid Khalidi as well.
I realized Columbia was not a safe place for me. And I spoke to my dean about it. I tried to speak to my dean about it to say, I feel like if I’m gonna continue working here, I need some protection from this harassment. I’m actually worried for my physical safety, ’cause I had received death threats at home as well. And the dean didn’t even respond to my email. And I thought, “Hmm, maybe this isn’t the right place for me.” And I approached the general counsel and I said, “How about we accelerate my retirement?” ‘Cause I had already entered into a multi-year, phased out retirement agreement, and I thought, this is good for everybody. You’ll get rid of me, I’ll feel safer, and we’ll move on. [00:11:00.07] I thought actually it was the adult thing to do. And their response was, “We will let you retire only if you surrender all of your retirement benefits, otherwise we’re gonna force you to teach in this hostile setting.” Next week. I’d been trying to negotiate with them, the provost, the general counsel for months, and no one would respond to me.
And it was only with a week before classes starting, I felt an obligation to the scores of students who had enrolled in my classes for the spring, that was last spring. And they waited ’til the last minute. And I felt like I have two choices here, either going back into a classroom and into a building where I actually don’t feel physically safe, or surrendering my retirement benefits. And I felt coerced into agreeing to this retirement. so-called retirement. I took it as a kind of firing.
Simon: Why do you think they, I guess, if you don’t feel comfortable speculating, I understand, but why do you think that they framed it not [00:12:02.04] as like, we’re going to fire you, but rather, you have to teach or else?
Katherine: I think they knew they had a negotiating advantage over me. I was really feeling pretty desperate about it. And I had been asking for help from the university, and I also felt, there’s so much going on in the world, like just with the Gaza issue and the students. Columbia was not my enemy. Columbia was not a worthy fight. And I felt my skills, my talents were better used in other fights. So I thought, “You know what, I’m gonna let this go.” They wanna do this. They wanna force me out. I am not welcome there anymore. A lot of people said, “You should sue.” I could have sued, but you know, then I’m in a legal battle with Columbia for years, and there are just other things I wanna do with my time than be distracted, which is really what this was about, by my colleagues who filed this complaint against me, was to distract me from my work, trying to defend the rights [00:13:03.03] and dignity of Palestinians and the students who were speaking up for them, than fighting this stupid complaint against me. And I didn’t wanna let them win by distracting me.
But let me just say that the faculty member who filed this complaint against me, I do call him the Stephen Miller of Columbia University. He is hand in glove with the White House and has been with Elise Stefanik and the others. And so Columbia hasn’t just been threatened from without. The call is coming from within the house. There are a number of faculty, including this law faculty member, who have been both drafting the White House letters to Columbia University, and then drafting Columbia’s response. And as I realized that we actually didn’t have a university that stood independent of the government anymore and that was willing to defend an academic mission, that this was not a community I wanted [00:14:00.08] to be part of anymore.
Simon: Yeah, and can you kind of talk about what it’s like now on Columbia’s campus, and if you can speak about it, like other campuses across the country in terms of, yeah, what the climate is like and, you know, how students are feeling?
Katherine: I don’t think that walking on Columbia’s campus feels anything like it ever has before. We still have to go through a phalanx of security. There are gates that lock us out and then in, which has never been the case at Columbia, you know, that 116th street is supposed to be a public right of way for the people who live in the neighborhood to get to the subway and shops and it’s part of the city. Columbia’s legal name is Columbia University in the City of New York. And that’s the thing it’s proudest, or one of them, is that it is part of the fabric of New York, but no longer. It is a locked enclave. [00:15:00.00] There are the highest tech facial recognition cameras, that cover you from the moment you get off the subway to wherever you’re going. So everyone feels absolutely surveyed, all the time, physically, and then your speech as well. I have several colleagues, faculty who have decided that they cannot teach at Columbia anymore because of the approach Columbia has taken to, it’s not even a critique of Israel or the occupation, it’s just anything that you might teach that would raise a flag. I’ve worked as a sort of advocate for faculty who’ve been brought up on disciplinary charges, just because they assigned a Palestinian poet in their classes. And there’s a student who said, “That makes me uncomfortable.” Just the fact that there’s a Palestinian poet on the syllabus, regardless of what the poem might be. So faculty feel enormously [00:16:00.00] censored in what they can say in class. Students do as well.
And then ICE is lurking right outside the gates. And the faculty, the students all know that it’s just a matter of time before they come on campus because the university has militarized the campus already through the allowing the NYPD on to arrest students and protestors to just stand around and, you know, watch what’s going on. They’re in ever presence. And then they agreed, the university did to have hire more public safety officers who are not NYPD, but then are deputized by the NYPD to have arrest powers and to carry weapons. So what’s it like to go to school in a context like that where you are surrounded by military and constantly watched? So it is not a place where we freely engage ideas, comfortable or otherwise. Everybody [00:17:00.00] I know who’s over 56 is trying to figure out how to accelerate their retirement.
Simon: That’s bleak.
Katherine: It is bleak. It is bleak. And it’s like everything else we’re seeing over the last several months, it’s so easy to break something and it’s so hard to build it in the first place. And the magic that was the place I worked for 25 years, I loved Columbia. I was proud to be a Columbia professor. In a matter of months, they broke this institution, and I don’t see how we rebuild it.
Simon: Yeah, and I’m curious because you were also teaching just a few, you know, maybe even as recently as like a year ago or two when right wing pundits and politicians spent time saying that campuses had become, quote unquote, safe spaces where students refused to hear thoughts and ideas that made them uncomfortable. To what extent do you think that was true, and what do you make [00:18:00.00] of, you know, the right now, mostly with some exceptions, going along with Trump’s attacks?
Katherine: You know, I, where do they make this stuff up? I mean, if we’re not making students uncomfortable, we’re not doing our jobs. You know, quite to the contrary, this whole move over the last, I would say 15 years to have trigger warnings at the beginning of classes. You know, I taught gender, racial, sexual orientation, queer theory, critical race theory, all that kind of stuff. And I would always do so in a way that would put people in the syllabus in conversation with each other. But I would teach rape, I would teach slavery, I would teach stuff that’s really uncomfortable, and the students demanded that we do a trigger warning around things like these issues that are uncomfortable. But if we’re not doing that in the sense of challenging their views, of both things they’re familiar with or things they’re not familiar with, [00:19:00.00] then we’re not educating them. That is what we’re supposed to do.
So this baloney about how we weren’t doing that is just wrong. And it’s like so many of the things they say, they set up a false target in order to then justify the kinds of changes that they want. What they’re doing now is saying, “We can’t talk about things that are uncomfortable.” They’re doing exactly that, and in so doing, I think destroying the academic mission, which is precisely the project, right? It’s not about Israel and Palestine. It’s about making sure that we produce a generation of young people who then become the leaders of the next era who don’t know how to critically think, or who are not comfortable critically thinking. And that, I think, is a tragedy.
Simon: Yeah, and speaking of that project to destroy the academic mission, in March, Columbia caved to Trump’s demands in exchange for the administration [00:20:00.00] unlocking hundreds of millions of dollars of funding Department of Education was withholding from Columbia. Trump’s demands included banning face masks on campus, hiring 36 new security officers with the ability to arrest students, and appointing a senior vice provost to oversee the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, and the Center for Palestine Studies. What was your reaction to the agreement, and what does it mean for Columbia and for academic freedom?
Katherine: Well, Columbia has chosen its board of trustees, and its kind of rolling wave of acting or interim presidents has chosen to be the paradigm of obedience and acquiescence to a bully. And we saw it from the very beginning of Congress at first during the Biden administration, and then now the Trump administration, that wherever there was an opportunity to surrender, [00:21:00.00] the university did. Part of that is that there are members of the board of trustees who actually agree with the politics of the Trump administration. They work closely with them, and there are some powerful faculty who also agree. And so it’s not that they did so grudgingly. This was actually something that they were happy about. Unlike Harvard that has put up a fight within the faculty and students and staff, have really tried to push Columbia not to surrender, to defend its academic mission, and to not enter into this kind of agreement which is unprecedented.
Claire Shipman, who’s the acting president of the university, said, you know, “We’ve done this and because we wanna get our money back,” of course, it was a ransom note that the administration sent Columbia and said, “If you don’t agree to this stuff, we will keep pulling all of your money.” “But we were still standing by our academic mission.” [00:22:00.00] And as you noted, Simon, that there is this unprecedented senior vice provost that’s overseeing the problem departments, but even worse, which you didn’t mention, is that there’s a monitor that was chosen that will report regularly to the administration on what’s going on, on campus. And that person, we’re very worried about. So too, all of the disciplinary cases, the identifying information of faculty, of students, of anyone is handed over to the government, not just the convictions where people are found to have violated the disciplinary rules, and part of this agreement is they changed the disciplinary rules in ways that also violate academic freedom and our academic mission, but just who’s been accused.
And so what it does is it emboldens the students and others on our campus who are in alignment with the Trump administration to just point the finger at someone on our campus, and have, then, a whole mechanism of discipline, [00:23:00.00] but also of doxxing go into motion, relative to those people who are, all of us, vulnerable to someone just pointing a finger at us. You know, it’s worse than a red scare. People often say to me, “Does this sound a lot like the 50s?” It bears a family resemblance to the 50s, but it’s so much worse. It’s not just a senator and a committee or a particular ideology. It’s the whole of government that is being brought to bear to gain our obedience with an authoritarian, and I think deeply sadistic project.
Simon: Why do you think that, not just Columbia, but so many colleges and universities have caved to Trump? You mentioned that there are members on the board that you think actually agree with Trump. Do you think that’s the case in other places? Or what’s your sense of why these kind of dominoes are falling?
Katherine: Well, the things we had been put in place long before October 7th [00:24:00.00] to make this kind of thing possible. I often described Columbia as a real estate holding operation that had a side hustle of teaching classes. And I’ve said that for a long time. You know, Columbia, through eminent domain, took over a whole swath of West Harlem and has built these buildings that are largely empty right now. There was not a huge demand for the spaces that they built. And it’s not just Columbia. It’s all of these elite universities.
Our boards of trustees are filled with hedge fund managers and lawyers and other people who are not committed to the academic mission, are actually not familiar with the academic mission. They’re running a business. It could be Pepsi, it could be Ford Motor Company, or Columbia University. And so I think reform of the boards of trustees, making them more transparent, more accountable and enfranchising the alums, the faculty, [00:25:00.00] the students, the stakeholders who are people who care about Columbia as something other than an endowment. So the people on the boards of trustees really at Columbia and many of these other universities are there to protect and grow the endowment, not to protect and grow our academic mission. So that’s part of what made I think it possible for Columbia so easily to surrender, that they didn’t actually see that we were losing much.
Simon: And it puts the emphasis on money, as you’re saying, unlocking those hundreds of millions of dollars. And finally, what is the status of the pushback against these attacks, and how can people interested in joining that struggle fight back?
Katherine: Well, we have a vigil every Monday at noon on the campus, the faculty and whoever else is part of the campus stands and bears witness to [00:26:00.00] Mohsen Mahdawi, to Mahmoud Khalil, to the other students who’ve been wrapped up in these horrible incidents and basically to the death of Columbia. I think we’re trying to figure out a different way to protest.
I will say, Simon, that organizing academics is an extremely frustrating thing. It’s worse than herding cats. You know, everybody thinks that they can write the best, most astute, most pointed petition or statement of the wrongs that have been done. And if we just circulate that, the truth will be brought to light and Columbia will be brought to its knees. And you know, I used to believe that too. But the time for well worded and very astute petitions is over. I think the time for collective action is here. And Columbia is a community. It’s a part of the larger community of the Upper West Side, Harlem, Morningside Heights. I think working more closely [00:27:00.00] with our larger community is something that would be, I think, powerful.
But I think ultimately, the faculty’s labor is the most valuable resource they have and the most powerful leverage point they have. And I don’t know what it will take for the Columbia faculty to strike, but there are many red lines I feel like have already been crossed, but it’s only at that point that I think it will get the attention of the university leadership. And we need a few university presidents. The president of Wesleyan, I think, is one who has really stood up to the Trump administration. Now, Wesleyan doesn’t really have a lot of federal grants, research grants the way that a large university, like Columbia or Berkeley or UCLA does. So in a way, they have a kind of privilege by not being dependent on those grants, but we need more voices of leaders standing up and saying, [00:28:00.00] khalas, enough, no more of this. So we’ll see who else is willing to do this. What we’ve learned is that if you don’t stand up and you’re a president of a university, you lose your job. So why the heck not stand up? And yes, you may lose your job, but you’ll do so with dignity and the respect of the academic community.
Simon: Well, with that, Professor Katherine Franke, thank you so much for coming on “Rights This Way.”
Katherine: Thanks so much, Simon. I really appreciate the chance to talk.
Simon: Thank you for listening. You can find out more about everything we talked about today by visiting nyclu.org, and you can follow us at NYCLU on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you have questions or comments about “Rights This Way,” you can email us at podcast@nyclu.org. Until next time, I’m Simon McCormack. [00:29:00.00] Thank you for fighting for a fair New York.
