Even by its own standards, the weekly Friday news recap featuring PBS News Hour host Geoff Bennett, Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, and New York Times columnist David Brooks was especially tone-deaf and unintelligent. The trio would have you believe that Columbia University settling with the Trump administration is both a threat to universities through “institutional capture” and democracy itself. Nobody at the table thought that concerns about anti-Semitism on campus were worth discussing.
After recalling how Columbia will pay a $200 million fine to get its $1.3 billion in funding back, Bennett asked, “Jonathan, what's your take on Columbia's decision to settle? And what message does it send to other universities? I didn't know until I was talking with our team there's some 60 universities right now in active conversations with the Trump administration about protests and discrimination complaints. You see the list there. What do you make of it?”
Capehart declared, “It's terrible. I think we were talking about this months ago, when Columbia University did something, and I think David put his finger on it. It was like, on the one hand, you feel for the universities because the money that's taken away is money that goes to research, that goes to fund really important things that are not just important to the university, but important for all of us, in terms of advancing knowledge and advancing science.”
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