More than 1,800 academics, including art historians and art professors, have committed to boycotting Columbia University in a March 26 open letter denouncing the school’s agreement to comply with Trump administration crackdowns on pro-Palestinian dissent.
By caving to Trump’s demands and failing to protect international students, the letter says, Columbia has participated in an “authoritarian assault on universities” aimed at “destroying their role as sites of teaching, research, learning, and activism essential to building a free and fair world.”
“It’s not a coincidence that at the same time as the Trump administration is attacking higher education, they’re simultaneously attacking the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for Humanities,” Sarah Gilbert, associate professor of art at Pitzer College and one of the letter’s signatories, told Hyperallergic.
Boycott participants say they’ll commit to abstaining from academic and cultural activities held and sponsored by Columbia and affiliated Barnard College, including lectures, conferences, and collaborations with members of the institution’s faculty who also hold administrative posts.
It is unclear who started the petition. A media contact has not yet responded to multiple requests for comment.
Last month, the university acquiesced to a list of demands, including placing its Middle Eastern Studies department under receivership — effectively removing staff control of the department. The condition was set forth by the Trump administration in order to restore $400 million in federal funding revoked over its alleged failure to protect Jewish students.
Gilbert said Columbia’s acquiescence to Trump’s demands was an overreach that signals danger to other forms of expression.
“When a [presidential] administration that has shown authoritarian tendencies starts attacking speech, it’s not going to be in one realm,” Gilbert said. “They go after writers, and they go after artists, and they go after academics.”
Laura Kina Vincent, a professor of art at DePaul University in Chicago, emphasized the interconnectivity of academic disciplines.
“I’m a painter, but it matters to me that the sciences have funding,” Vincent told Hyperallergic. “We can’t separate the arts from these other fields.”
Vincent is the first signer of an open letter to administrators of DePaul, the nation’s largest Catholic university, asking the administration to protect pro-Palestinian students in line with the university’s mission and faith.
“I’m a full professor, and I’m a US-born citizen, and so with those two protections, whatever they mean, I need to stand up,” Vincent said.
Blake Stimson, a professor of contemporary art, critical theory, and photography history at the University of Illinois Chicago, said schools quickly “flipp[ed] the DEI script from protecting those who are vulnerable to protecting the state of Israel.”
Artistic and social science disciplines tend to be among the most critical of the “wider conditions of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and militarism,” added T.J. Demos, professor and chair of the art history and visual culture department at UC Santa Cruz. That’s why for those working inside universities, the status of artist and academic can be a double-edged sword.
“It’s a serious kind of new Red Scare,” Demos said. “Within the university, [artists] are vulnerable and being attacked because that’s the place where you have some of the most critical discussions, but also within the arts themselves.”
Demos paralleled a slew of canceled exhibitions and programming related to pro-Palestine expression in the art world since October 2023 and universities’ crackdown on criticism of Israel.
Similarly, universities and museums are spearheaded by boards of trustees whose members are “largely drawn from corporate CEOs,” he said, some of whom are invested in weapons manufacturing and directly tied to the Israeli military.
For Sarah Ganzel, an art history PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the decision to sign the boycott was more personal. Ganzel is friends with Grant Miner, a Columbia graduate student and union leader who was expelled from the university last month for his alleged involvement in the takeover of “Hind’s Hall.” The boycott letter explicitly condemns Miner’s expulsion.
Ganzel said she’s concerned that Columbia’s crackdowns on pro-Palestinian and other kinds of speech could affect exhibitions of works by Arab and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) artists going forward.
One of the only undersigned individuals who is not affiliated with an academic institution — though the letter doesn’t limit who can sign it — is Cindy Hwan, an organizer for Art Against Displacement, which has fought relentlessly against gentrification and overdevelopment in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood in recent years.
“We all have a stake in this, especially if we’re people who value creative expression,” Hwang said.
All the signatories interviewed by Hyperallergic agreed that the impact of Columbia’s crackdown on student protesters extends far beyond the Manhattan campus.
“This isn’t just about protesting Columbia’s capitulation,” Demos said. “This is a much larger battle for the very soul of the university.”
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