Columbia President Talks Out of Both Sides of Her Mouth on Masking and Disciplinary Process

Publicly, Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong says she's committed to implementing the reforms the Trump administration is demanding. Behind closed doors, she is telling colleagues not much is going to change.

In a weekend meeting with roughly 75 disgruntled faculty members, Armstrong told colleagues that, despite national news headlines indicating the school had genuflected before the administration, there would be "no change to masking" and that the university’s disciplinary process "remains independent" and "has not been moved to my office."

Armstrong said something different days earlier when announcing several changes to the school’s operating procedures. In a memo presented to the Trump administration on Friday, she indicated that "face masks or face coverings are not allowed for the purpose of concealing one’s identity" and that anyone wearing a face covering during a protest is subject to a mandatory ID check.

The memo also touts "improvements to our disciplinary process, including the University Judicial Board," which "will be situated within and overseen by the Office of the Provost, who reports to the President of Columbia."

The Trump administration released a Monday statement lauding those policies and other changes as "a positive first step in the university maintaining a financial relationship with the United States government."

Armstrong’s announcement on Friday did not trigger the reinstatement of the approximately $430 million in federal funds the administration has pulled from Columbia. But it was supposed to unlock "long-term" negotiations to restore the funding—if Armstrong implements them, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said.

"They have to abide and comply with the terms that we have set down and talked with them and they've agreed to," she told reporters on Monday. "And that was kind of the basis to get them to the real first step of total negotiations to restore the funding … So they'll have to do that."

Armstrong's doublespeak calls into question whether Columbia will indeed make it to the negotiating table. Recent developments at the Ivy League school's Morningside Heights campus suggest her private comments are more in line with reality than her public memo.

On Monday, their first day back from spring break, Columbia students donned masks to protest the new policy reforms. They mocked the medical exemption for masks outlined in the memo, with Columbia's Palestine Solidarity Coalition urging members to wear "a KN95, KF-94, or N95 mask for the most protection" and "protest mask bans and the fascist trustees." Many students wore keffiyehs instead. Still, they marched through campus unimpeded—no participants were stopped for an ID check, according to a source familiar with the protest.

Armstrong addressed the weekend faculty meeting hours after the protest's conclusion in a statement "regarding Columbia's commitments." She suggested reports on the meeting published in the Free Press and Wall Street Journal lacked "full context" and said the policy changes "are real, and they are right for Columbia."

"I regret any confusion and inconsistent statements and want to make sure our position is clear as we go forward," she wrote. "Implementation of these measures is fundamental to sustaining our academic mission without disruption and ensuring the safety of Columbia's students and campuses."

"Let there be no confusion: I commit to seeing these changes implemented, with the full support of Columbia's senior leadership team and the Board of Trustees," she continued. "Any suggestion that these measures are illusory, or lack my personal support, is unequivocally false."

A Columbia spokeswoman declined to comment further.

In addition to her private remarks on masking and disciplinary procedures, Armstrong said she would not place the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under "academic receivership," another Trump administration demand. Though Columbia's memo does not include the word "receivership," it does state that a newly appointed "Senior Vice Provost" will conduct "a thorough review" of the department's "educational programs," which aligns with a typical receivership.

Even as Armstrong downplayed and denied some of the policy changes, she warned faculty members that Columbia's failure to restore federal funding would be "devastating." Armstrong and her team, according to the Journal, "said six federal agencies are investigating the school and could pull all federal support from it." Columbia receives more than $1 billion a year in federal funds.

"The ability of the federal administration to leverage other forms of federal funding in an immediate fashion is really potentially devastating to our students in particular," she said. "I think it is a really critical risk for us to understand."

Faculty members who attended the meeting were not happy. Medical researchers complained that more liberal colleagues had threatened their funding, the Journal reported, while humanities professors argued that Armstrong should have stood up to Trump. One professor described the ordeal as "the biggest crisis since the founding of the republic."

Trump administration attorneys will visit Columbia this week in relation to their federal civil rights probe.

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