Columbia Prof. Marianne Hirsch: Mahmoud Khalil Arrest Reminds Me of Growing Up Under Authoritarianism
Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch’s new article in *The Forward* is titled “I grew up under a terrifying authoritarian regime. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is right out of their playbook.” She tells *Democracy Now!* that seeing footage of the ICE arrests of Khalil and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk “brought back these feelings of terror that I had as a child.” Hirsch grew up in Romania under the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and says she sees parallels between the climate of fear she was raised in and the repression of speech and protest on campuses today. Hirsch, who is Jewish, condemns the “anticipatory capitulation” of universities, like Columbia, to the Trump administration’s threats to pull funding and says “the reason for this was never to fight antisemitism, but it was to decimate academia.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/10/columbia_mahmoud_khalil_marianne_hirsch
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2025-04-10 14:21:57
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2025-04-10 14:21:57Event JSON
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"content": "Columbia Prof. Marianne Hirsch: Mahmoud Khalil Arrest Reminds Me of Growing Up Under Authoritarianism\n\nColumbia University professor Marianne Hirsch’s new article in *The Forward* is titled “I grew up under a terrifying authoritarian regime. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is right out of their playbook.” She tells *Democracy Now!* that seeing footage of the ICE arrests of Khalil and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk “brought back these feelings of terror that I had as a child.” Hirsch grew up in Romania under the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and says she sees parallels between the climate of fear she was raised in and the repression of speech and protest on campuses today. Hirsch, who is Jewish, condemns the “anticipatory capitulation” of universities, like Columbia, to the Trump administration’s threats to pull funding and says “the reason for this was never to fight antisemitism, but it was to decimate academia.”\n\n\nhttp://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/10/columbia_mahmoud_khalil_marianne_hirsch",
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