I'm John Batchel, visiting with my good colleague, Professor Richard Epstein, teaches law at NYU in the University of Chicago.

He writing for the Civitas Institute, he writes passionately about his alma mater, Columbia University.

Mine, too, I took courses there after I graduated from Princeton, enjoyed the campus for

nearly 50 years.

I wrote all my books thanks to the library at Butler Library.

It is a heavenly place to protect scholarship and have the feel of doing something worthwhile when you're in the library.

Now, Richard, Columbia University is under a very short timeline to make adequate decisions to address the concerns of the Trump administration that it is out of control.

And there is a department that is seen as a, if not a provocateur, then a co-dependent on criminal

activity in the spring of 2024.

The university is emphasizing freedom of speech, emphasizing First Amendment, talking about the independence

of faculty members. Your opinion is most useful because it's your alma mater. You had a very

happy experience. You're thankful for your education. But we now have the education of those

in the university now and to come

threaten. In fact, there's a news item saying people are withdrawing their applications

or thinking twice about going. So what is to be done with the university? Well, I think the first

thing I would say is there are two ways to approach this. One is through external coercion,

which the Trump administration is trying to put on. In many cases, it's trying to use shortcuts

that it should not do. And I actually supported a letter which says that the only one way

you can deal with a sort of massive disruption inside the university is to follow the formal procedure

which allow for the revogations of grants, which are generally limited to the department

that is engaged in the abuse and doesn't allow you to cut off huge numbers of grants for

scientific research done in other places. And I do agree with that. And so I think that there's

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