Julie Cohen, who co-directed the Oscar-nominated documentary “RBG,” has resigned from the selection committee of the duPont-Columbia Awards, hosted at Columbia University, following the school’s decision to acquiesce to President Donald Trump’s demands (or risk losing access to $400 million in federal funds).
Cohen had been affiliated with Columbia for 36 years, since she got her master’s degree at the journalism school. When the school issued their letter “basically acquiescing to a whole series of demands from Donald Trump that I think a lot of us felt should have been fought in court,” Cohen felt she needed to do something. “I felt like I needed to dissociate myself from Columbia,” Cohen said.
Among the demands Columbia agreed to was cracking down on its protest policies (including banning masks and hiring additional “special officers” who could now arrest students), formally defining antisemitism and the appointment of a senior vice provost to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department. The Trump administration had demanded that the department be placed under academic receivership, which the New York Times described as “a rare federal intervention in an internal process that is typically reserved as a last resort in response to extended periods of dysfunction.”
She had recently taken a three-year commission as a juror on a nine-person jury for the duPont-Columbia Awards. Over the weekend, she thought it over and made her decision – she needed to step down. “I also thought there would be some meaning in me being the first person to do that,” Cohen said. And she was right – since she stepped down, three other jurors have also resigned. Now four of the nine jurors are gone from the program. “I hope that other people who are in similar situations and feel that it’s possible to speak out about what their institutions are doing in support of the Trump administration and the danger should do that,” Cohen said.
Cohen was inspired by the Los Angeles Times editorial director Mariel Garza, who stepped down in October and said when she resigned, that “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”
“We all need to find what our own ways are of standing up and what our own possibilities are. I realize not everybody can walk out of every job or every deal, but sometimes you can,” Cohen said.
Her resignation letter read, in part: “There’s clearly a cascading effect to people caving in to Trump. But I’ve observed recently that there’s also a cascading effect created when people stand up against the erosion of democratic norms. That’s the cascade I’d rather be part of – even if it means walking away from something that would be meaningful and enjoyable.”
She said she was encouraged by the fact that, when you go out to protest, you might look around and be amazed at the other people who are protesting with you. But she wanted to go out there first. “Rather than sitting around looking around to see what other people were going to do, in this case, I just decided to go ahead and do what I thought was right,” Cohen said.
What’s incredible is that Cohen had actually won the award three times in her career. “I’m quite confident I will now never win it again,” Cohen said. “I do think that we all have to live life a little differently now in light of what I see as real dangers to democracy. You have to balance out the importance of trying to put some brakes on the very fast slide into really dangerous terrain where we’re going to be living in a country two years from now that’s quite different than the country that I grew up in.”
Cohen said that she spoke to the administrators of the award, who responded “very politely and said they understood and thanked me.” They avoided “any big discussion.” And the filmmaker, whose other films include “Every Body” and “Julia,” said that she feels sympathy for the university, even after stepping down. “They were put in a terrible position. This was not an easy decision for them,” Cohen said. The $400 million included money for breast cancer research and “all of these important things that help further the course of academic research.” “Some of the concessions, in my view, are quite troubling. But having made the concessions, the Trump administration still has not given that money back, nor have they promised money in the future,” Cohen explained.
All you have to do is look at our recent past, Cohen said, to see where this is all going. “If you start reading about the history of how authoritarian regimes take over, you’ll see that capitulating doesn’t work and it moves everything in the wrong direction,” Cohen said. “There are some institutions that wouldn’t be able to fight back, but like these big law firms and universities, and I’m going to throw in Hollywood for that matter, people with resources should think about putting their resources into trying to fight.”
She points to McCarthyism as a clear example of Hollywood capitulating. “There was a period where forces of our government were aggressively and wrongly going after innocent people on free expression grounds. And a lot of powerful Hollywood people let it happen because they didn’t want to stick their neck out and they didn’t want to become the next target,” Cohen said. “It’s understandable, but when you look at it in hindsight, and you think like, Who did the right thing and who did the wrong thing?, know that the people who spoke up and then the people who stood beside them and defended them were the ones doing the right thing, even if they put themselves in a vulnerable position at that time.”
When we asked if she was worried that this would negatively impact her career, Cohen said, “Sure.” “But I am 61 so would I have made a different decision at 30? Maybe,” Cohen admitted. “I do think there are projects out there and entities that are not going to want to work with someone who says they’re willing to loudly speak out against Trump.”
She said that she would rather give up a project that she was passionate about, in order to stay true to her beliefs. “The work I do is not irrelevant to politics. I’m a documentary filmmaker and I’ve made films that are entertaining, but also are about political activism a lot of time – about the rule of law, about feminist heroes, about intersex activism.” Cohen said that these are all topics that “the Trump administration wouldn’t like anyway.” “I just feel more comfortable making my response to the current political situation and my work coherent and I think the way to do that is not to be meek and quiet in the time that calls for speaking out and standing up,” Cohen said.
