Columbia University interim president, Katrina Armstrong, resigns amid Trump crackdown

Columbia University’s President Katrina Armstrong had only had this job since August.

Now she is resigning amid accusations that she folded too quickly to the Trump administration.

Last week, Columbia announced that it would carry out a list of reforms demanded by the federal government, including giving campus police arrest powers and new oversight for the Department of Middle East Studies.

That was in order to begin the process of restoring $400m of annual federal grants that the Trump administration cancelled for Columbia. That’s about a fifth of its operating budget.

And this punishment was for alleged anti-Semitism and for the university’s response to encampment protesters who have been demonstrating against Israel’s war in Gaza.

There is no guarantee that this federal money will be restored to Columbia, but Armstrong was recently praised by Trump’s education secretary for agreeing to the government’s demands.

Many of Columbia’s faculty, though, were not happy about what they viewed as their president’s acquiescence without even so much as a legal battle. And there’s also concern that this will further embolden the Trump administration to go after other universities, which it already has.

Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro reporting from Washington, DC, United States

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