When my college, Columbia, lately capitulated to President Donald Trump’s $400 million ultimatum, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. I had seen this earlier than—in Russia.
Earlier than coming to Columbia as a grad pupil, I went to Smolny School, a small liberal-arts college in St. Petersburg. The Smolny I knew was certainly one of Russia’s few unbiased faculties; college students and college had extraordinary autonomy, which they usually used to problem the federal government. Then Russian authorities intervened, and my alma mater began unraveling.
Smolny’s story presents a warning that Columbia should heed whereas it nonetheless has the prospect: When autocrats understand they will manipulate a faculty, they gained’t cease till they’ve complete management.
Earlier than Smolny was a school, it was an experiment. A number of years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Leon Botstein, the president of Bard School, in New York, paid a go to to St. Petersburg State College. Professors at SPSU—certainly one of Russia’s most prestigious universities—had proposed partnering with Bard. Botstein appreciated the concept, so he went to talk with the college about what he thought Russia and the West may be taught from one another. Apparently, he left an impression: Professors quoted him to 1 one other lengthy after he left.
Impressed by Botstein’s go to, SPSU joined with Bard to create a liberal-arts program that grew into Smolny. George Soros’s newly established Open Society Foundations funded the initiative, and Russia’s finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, supplied early political help. After Kudrin grew to become dean in 2011, Smolny matured into a real liberal-arts school, providing a twin SPSU–Bard diploma and majors together with literature, economics, and pc science. The college enrolled some 600 college students, attracted Western grants, amassed an endowment, employed ideologically various school, and hosted a lot broader political debate than could possibly be discovered on most Russian campuses.
Nikolay Kropachev, the pinnacle of SPSU, seemed on with growing alarm. Each he and Kudrin had ties to the federal government—President Vladimir Putin decides whether or not to resume Kropachev’s appointment—however the Kremlin ultimately got here to view Kudrin as a liberal outsider, somebody who couldn’t be relied on to implement orthodoxy. In order that job fell to Kropachev. His “place was that Smolny was an entire shame and needed to be shut down,” Dmitry Dubrovsky, the founding father of Smolny’s human-rights program, informed me. One of many college’s principal issues was the Smolny school, which regularly criticized SPSU’s administration. Certainly, Dubrovsky himself had publicly attacked a college coverage that required professors to submit their work to directors earlier than publishing or presenting it overseas. (In 2015, SPSU despatched Dubrovsky a renewal contract that he mentioned didn’t mirror the provisions he’d agreed to. The college fired him for refusing to signal.)
In early 2021, Kudrin introduced that Smolny would separate from SPSU. “Our training mannequin differs from the one used at SPSU,” he mentioned on the time, fairly diplomatically. However earlier than the divorce took impact, a pro-Kremlin group persuaded the Russian state prosecutor’s workplace to research Smolny’s ties to Soros, whose NGOs had been outlawed within the nation. The group alleged that Soros and Bard had been utilizing Smolny to show Russia’s youth right into a “protest voters” with a “pro-Western” and “hostile ideology in the direction of their very own nation.” SPSU cooperated with the prosecutors, who decided that Bard posed a “risk to the foundations of the constitutional order and safety of the Russian Federation.” As an alternative of separating from SPSU, Smolny was pressured to half methods with Bard, shedding out on funding in addition to the colleges’ student-faculty change. Graduates started receiving customary SPSU diplomas fairly than twin levels.
Julia, a Smolny pupil on the time, was baffled by the response amongst her professors. (She requested that we use solely her first title to talk candidly about them.) “We have to show that Smolny is unbiased and distinct from Bard—that it’s authentically Russian,” Julia remembers her academics saying. “I used to be like, What are you speaking about?” she informed me. “It was some form of prompt resignation. However you taught us otherwise!”
The crackdown intensified within the fall of 2021, when Russian authorities arrested Michael Freese, a Smolny professor and an American citizen who had helped handle the varsity’s partnership with Bard. They detained Freese on his approach to campus, held him for 3 days, revoked his visa, and deported him. In a sign of the tightening relationship between increased training and the regime, Kropachev signed a joint letter in 2022 endorsing Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and praising the function of universities as “the spine of the state.”
Over the following yr, Smolny purged dozens of professors, together with one who was fired for becoming a member of an anti-war protest. In the meantime, SPSU carried out a evaluate of Smolny’s curriculum, discovering that its courses had been “extremely ideological” and consultant of “the worst Western stereotypes.” Kudrin stepped down voluntarily, at the least within the college’s telling.
Quickly sufficient, directors aligned with SPSU took his place. They’d undertake “only a few corrections to the curricula,” certainly one of them wrote on social media. As an alternative, Smolny swapped out discussion-based seminars for lectures and reduce the variety of electives from 129 to 10. The administration additionally lowered the varsity’s 12 majors to seven and gave them new names resembling “Literature within the Context of Tradition,” “Economics of Tradition,” and “Music within the Context of Tradition.” (“Tradition within the context of tradition” grew to become a sneering chorus on campus.) Sensing that the modifications posed an existential risk to the varsity, college students began a “Save Smolny” marketing campaign. Two had been expelled after an educational committee determined to fail them.
Right this moment, the Smolny I knew survives solely in fragments. The college has maintained its measurement however now attracts solely half the candidates it as soon as did. With assist from Bard, a gaggle of former professors based Smolny Past Borders, an initiative that presents on-line courses outdoors the attain of SPSU directors and Kremlin bureaucrats. An alum lately informed me that with a view to educate an uncensored seminar, she needed to sneak onto campus.
Final spring, I heard an exiled Russian journalist, Elena Kostyuchenko, speak concerning the pro-Palestine protests roiling Columbia’s campus. “If I studied or labored there, I might stand beside the protesting college students now,” Kostyuchenko mentioned at a convention, one week after police started arresting demonstrators. “Not as a result of I agree with their opinion. However as a result of I do know what occurs whenever you don’t defend one other’s opinion. The day after, you your self gained’t be allowed to talk out.”
A yr later, the Trump administration introduced that it was canceling $400 million in federal grants to Columbia, ostensibly as a result of the varsity had did not curb anti-Semitism. The following day, March 8, immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and up to date Columbia graduate. A lot of my worldwide friends grew to become afraid to hitch protests and even come to campus, particularly after Division of Homeland Safety brokers scoured two pupil residences. Then the federal government despatched a listing of calls for to the varsity. Columbia principally obliged, empowering campus-security officers to arrest college students, for instance, and inserting the Center Jap, South Asian, and African Research Division below evaluate—all in hopes of getting the $400 million again.
It didn’t work; the cash remains to be gone. And now the White Home is reportedly planning to pursue a consent decree, which may successfully permit Trump to implement his calls for through the courts. Though Columbia stays extra insulated from state energy than Smolny, the issues I hear from my friends in America have begun to sound rather a lot like what I heard from my friends in Russia.
Final yr, Kostyuchenko’s warning that authoritarian forces may sway Columbia appeared far-fetched. I admit that I didn’t fairly imagine her. I do now.
