On Friday, 21 March – two weeks after the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student from a refugee camp in Syria; a week after Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian graduate student, fled to Canada to avoid being detained by ICE; and just a few days after Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas, killing more than four hundred Palestinians in less than 24 hours – Columbia University capitulated to the Trump administration’s menu of demands, including a ban on the wearing of non-medical masks on campus, adherence to a broad and highly tendentious definition of antisemitism that would forbid almost any criticism of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, and the imposition of a ‘senior vice provost’ to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.