Columbia's Latest Anti-Israel Disruption, as Trump Threatens to Tax Harvard

WSJ Opinion: Potomac Watch

The Wall Street Journal

Society & Culture, News

4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After campus agitators make another scene at Columbia University, new Acting President Claire Shipman calls the NYPD, which makes about 80 arrests. Meantime, President Trump escalates his confrontation with Harvard University, threatening to take away its tax exemption, as Education Secretary Linda McMahon tells the school that it shouldn't bother applying for future funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by FTI Consulting.
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0:11.4	Learn more at FTI Consulting.
0:13.6	Experts with Impact.
0:17.6	From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
0:24.1	Columbia University is racked again with anti-Israel protests, but this time administrators call in the cops, resulting in about 80 arrests and nearly as many academic suspensions.
0:37.2	In time, President Trump escalates his feud with Harvard University,
0:41.3	cutting off future federal grants, and even threatening to take away its tax exemption.
0:46.3	Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal.
0:50.3	We're joined today by my colleagues, columnists Kim Strassel and Alicia Finley.
0:56.7	More chaos at Columbia this week, but notably different outcome this time, activists on Wednesday, bursting into Butler Library in New York, hanging banners, chanting pro-Palestine slogans, two security officers reportedly injured in the
1:13.9	crush of the crowd, according to the school. Yet after several hours, acting university
1:18.7	president Claire Shipman called in the New York Police Department a statement from New York
1:25.3	Mayor Eric Adams that night saying that at the written request of Columbia University, the NYPD is entering the campus to remove individuals who are trespassing, unquote. By about 10 o'clock that evening, the news was that there had been about 80 arrests, mostly for criminal trespass.
1:44.6	And then on Friday, the university saying that it has handed down about 65 interim suspensions
1:51.6	to students who were part of that activism pending further investigation.
1:57.1	Let's listen to a bit of what acting President Claire Shipman told Columbia University and the community there in a statement earlier this week.
2:04.6	Let me be clear. What happened today, what I witnessed was utterly unacceptable.
2:10.6	I spent the late afternoon and evening at Butler Library as events were unfolding to understand the situation on the ground and to be
2:19.1	able to make the best decisions possible. I arrived to see one of our public safety officers wheeled out
	...

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