For Universities, Trump’s Clash with Columbia Looms Large

The federal government stripped $400 million in federal funding from the university in early March because of its “continued inaction” in combating antisemitism on campus. But in a letter to university leadership last Thursday, the administration offered Columbia an opportunity for reprieve—kind of. Setting a compliance deadline for this Thursday, the administration said it would consider lifting the grant cancellation if the university institutes a series of sweeping changes to its disciplinary practices.

What comes next is unclear. But the battle playing out between Washington and the Ivy League likely portends future clashes, as the Trump administration seeks to leverage federal funding in its quest to impose top-down changes on American higher education. And although the changes seek to address very real problems emanating from college campuses, plenty of questions remain as to whether the White House’s approach is prudent.

Columbia began making headlines in the months following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as students and faculty took to the university’s public spaces to protest Israel’s actions in the ensuing war and eventually set up encampments in solidarity with Gaza—demonstrations that often veered into the outright harassment of Jewish students. As we wrote at the time: 

An almost week-long encampment of anti-Israel and pro-Palestianian protesters on the main lawn has become a national flashpoint, drawing condemnation from leaders at all levels of government and spawning copycat encampments at elite colleges across the country. Columbia’s administration has failed to protect Jewish students from the antisemitic harassment and intimidation emanating from the tent camp and protesters surrounding the campus, once again calling into question the ability and willingness of university administrations to safeguard some of their own students.

Anti-Israel demonstrators eventually overran campus buildings, forcing New York City police to intervene to retake Hamilton Hall. By August, the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, had resigned. But even as recently as this month, activists have occupied buildings at the Columbia-affiliated Barnard College multiple times in protest of the expulsion of two students who staged the dramatic disruption of a “History of Modern Israel” class at Columbia in January.

Vowing to root out antisemitism on college campuses, the Justice Department established a multi-agency task force shortly after Trump was sworn into office. On March 3, the federal body said it was considering stop-work orders for more than $50 million in contracts with Columbia and planned to conduct a “comprehensive review” of the college’s $5 billion in federal grant commitments. Protesters again occupied the Barnard College library, and by March 7, the task force announced that it would be canceling $400 million in grants to Columbia, along with over $250 million in HHS funding, which may or may not be included in the $400 million. “These cancelations represent the first round of action and additional cancelations are expected to follow,” read a joint press release from the Justice Department, Education Department, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and General Services Administration (GSA). 

But why the government chose to target those particular funds—and how it expects the move to reshape the university’s campus life—is unclear. “While I believe it’s entirely appropriate to discipline Columbia and to pull grants or terminate eligibility for federal funds, it seems to me incumbent for the administration to be transparent and clear about the process,” Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told TMD. “How was the $400 million arrived at? What was the process by which it notified Columbia? How were these determinations made? A decision like this should not be arbitrary.” 

Traditionally, potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act at a university would be investigated by the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), and if breaches were uncovered, the OCR would attempt to reach a voluntary agreement with the school. If such an agreement was unable to be reached, the Justice Department could then bring a federal civil rights lawsuit against the school.

With Columbia, however, the Trump administration appears to be bypassing these existing procedures. “To some extent this is speculation, but I think this is why we’re seeing the GSA sort of cosign onto these letters, because they have this power to terminate contracts without the kind of process that we are used to seeing,” Robert Shibley, special counsel for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told TMD. “In my time at FIRE, which is nearly 25 years, this does seem like an unprecedented way to go about doing this with regard to universities.”

For the Trump administration, the announced cuts represent a key point of leverage in its quest to change university policy. The Education Department, HHS, and GSA sent a letter to Columbia’s interim president on March 13 outlining their demands of the university—and they are broad. In order to maintain a “continued financial relationship with the United States government,” Columbia must: place the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies departments under academic receivership for a minimum of five years, provide a plan for comprehensive admissions reform, suspend or expel students involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation or the encampments, abolish the University Judicial Board, ban masks on campus (with exceptions for health reasons), and establish primacy of the president in disciplinary matters, among other changes. And the university has until tomorrow to comply.

“I don’t think that’s a realistic time frame for doing the things in the letter,” Shibley said, noting that some of the demands themselves also raise legal issues. “I don’t know on what grounds they can demand that people be suspended or expelled for multiple years.” Asking for academic receivership—essentially placing academic departments under the control of an outside party—could also violate the First Amendment with regard to academic freedom, though the Trump administration letter didn’t provide additional details.

Still, Columbia has already started moving toward implementing the directives. On the day the letter was sent, the university stated that it had expelled, suspended, or temporarily revoked degrees from students involved in the Hamilton Hall occupation last year. At the time of publishing this newsletter, however, the university has yet to formally announce plans to comply with the letter by Thursday.

Process concerns aside, plenty of people believe a reckoning for Columbia—and its leaders’ decision to essentially turn a blind eye to rampant antisemitism on campus—is long overdue. Demonstrators occupied public spaces for several months straight last year, and made implicit and explicit calls for violence against Jews and Israelis—with minimal intervention from school administrators. In April, a rabbi at the university warned students against coming back after Passover.

“Columbia, along with a few other institutions … has been a horrifically bad actor,” Hess said. “After years of aggressive policing of microaggressions and speech codes, suddenly, bullying and threatening Jewish students, occupying and destroying campus property, was no big deal. It seems to me absolutely that sanctions are in order.”

And Columbia is far from the university facing scrutiny over allegations of hostility toward Jewish students and faculty. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard alumnus suing the school over the antisemitism he encountered on campus, sees the Trump administration’s actions as a positive step. “The only way you’ll cause these universities to change is if their bottom line is being threatened,” he told TMD. 

But for researchers caught in the crossfire, the funding cuts are devastating. 

Prerna Arora, an associate professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, was attending a family wedding in Mexico on March 7 when she learned her project’s $4.9 million in federal funding was in jeopardy. “I got an email from a government office letting me know that the grant was terminated effective immediately,” Arora told TMD. The grant would have provided mental health resources for children in underserved communities, as well as professional development for faculty working in their schools. “These were people who could have spent their entire lives contributing to these sorts of services,” she said. “The community impact is huge.”

Columbia was an easy target for the administration given its poor handling of the anti-Israel protests, but it is likely only the beginning for the Trump administration. The Education Department last week warned 60 different institutions—from Arizona State to Yale—that they would face “enforcement actions” if they do not abide by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and protect Jewish students. “What we’re seeing at Columbia is not an isolated incident,” Hess said. “It is an effort to kind of lay down a marker that will tell all of these other colleges. … ‘You need to make these same changes in policy, or you’re likely to find yourself under the same kind of investigation.’”

• Anthony Dolan, an award-winning journalist and speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, died last week at the age of 76. He wrote some of the Republican president’s most memorable orations, including his 1983 “evil empire” speech—a scathing indictment of communism and authoritarianism under the Soviet Union. “In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely … declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil,” Reagan said. “While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith. … I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last—last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man.”

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The Major League Baseball season kicked off at 6 a.m. ET yesterday, with the Los Angeles Dodgers defeating the Chicago Cubs 4-1 in front of more than 40,000 fans at the Tokyo Dome in Japan. Here’s hoping the good guys are winning the second game of the series by the time this email hits your inbox.

Do you think the Trump administration’s actions against Columbia are justified?