After dinner last night, I had some extended thoughts on Columbia Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies Rashid Khalidi's decision to cancel his scheduled course this fall at Columbia (anti) University, so I wrote up a journal/opinion piece.
Needless to say, I agreed with his decision and think more professors at compromised collaborator universities around the country should be joining him. But this episode also says a lot about the way Swine Emperor Trump is conducting his war to seize control of American cultural institutions in both the public and private sectors, and repurpose them as organs of fascist propaganda devoted to the cult of Trump/cracker ethnonationalism.
https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/08/03/journal-courage-cowardice-and-collaboration/
Journal: Courage, Cowardice, and Collaboration
"Still, if educators in America had either half a brain, or half a heart, a great many more university professors would be refusing to teach at institutions collaborating with a fascist regime to subvert truth, journalism, and scientific reality this fall. Professor Khalidi isn’t wrong when he points out that the suits running Columbia have allowed their university to be transformed into a militarized security zone, and a fascist propaganda machine that fundamentally inverts the role of educators in our society – an “anti-university” as the professor noted. Not only is it impossible for a genuine educator to function under those conditions, but even attempting to do so will likely result in open fascist collaboration with an increasingly Third Reich-esque Trump regime. Society has a term for people who only collaborated with the Third Reich to spread racist, eliminationist, antidemocratic propaganda for a paycheck; that term is “Nazi propagandists” and history doesn’t speak of them kindly."