Columbia University, like many American universities, has done a poor job in recent years of upholding its core mission of advancing and inculcating knowledge through education and scholarly free inquiry. Like many institutions of higher education, it has allowed the political commitments of campus members to overshadow its institutional imperative of welcoming individuals with diverse perspectives, commitments, and interests to engage in the common enterprise of learning, discussion, and debate.
Columbia’s own internal investigations have revealed serious antisemitism problems on the campus, and the university has been woefully inconsistent both in its application of free speech policies and principles and in its implementation of antidiscrimination and harassment rules. Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, now detained by the administration, had become the public face of the protests at Columbia, though it remains unclear whether he was among the worst offenders in violating university policies or engaging in harassing activities. The university has suffered serious reputational damage as a consequence, and deservedly so. It might well suffer legal repercussions as well if it is found to have violated its contractual and statutory obligations to its students and employees.
Recognizing the problems at Columbia should not blind us to the problems with how the Trump administration has responded to those problems. On March 13, 2025, several officials in the Trump administration sent a joint letter to the university demanding significant institutional reforms before the government would release some $400 million in federal funds—grants and contracts that the administration had put on hold. The administration did not publicly specify the grants being withheld or the legal basis for doing so, but much of the dollar amount seems to be for grants for scientific and medical research being performed by scholars at the university.
The March 13 letter demanded “immediate compliance” with the administration’s list of demands for “structural reforms” in order for the university to resume its “continued financial relationship with the United States government.” Those demands included the expulsion of students involved in the anti-Israel encampments and the occupation of a campus building and the “expulsion” of “student groups” on campus whose members violated, or provided support for others who violated, university policies. The structural reforms demanded included the centralization of student discipline into the president’s office, the creation of new speech rules on campus, a mask ban, the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the empowerment of law enforcement to “arrest” those who foster a “hostile work or study environment,” reform undergraduate and graduate admissions, and place the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies under receivership.
These actions by the administration do not comply with existing federal civil rights laws and severely impose on the independence of a private university to set its own policies regarding speech and scholarship. The administration has seized any weapon at hand—without much concern for the legality of how it is using that weapon—to try to bend a university to its will. In doing so, it goes far beyond attempting to remedy any particular civil rights violation. No, the White House wants to force Columbia to pursue its educational and scholarly mission differently. This is not something the government should demand of a private university.
The door that the Trump administration is trying to open because it does not like how some student protests were conducted in the spring of 2024 would allow for unprecedented governmental interventions in the core educational and scholarly activities of institutions of both public and private institutions of higher education.
The ideal of academic freedom requires order and safety—not safety from “dangerous ideas,” but from actual violence. Free speech on campus is only possible if students do not have to fear that their dissenting views will be met with threats.
Federal statutes require that the government demonstrate with a written report to Congress and after a full hearing that there has been a legal violation before an educational institution can have its funding cut off. Even if those procedural hurdles had been met, federal law does not permit administration officials to withhold any and all federal funds that might flow to an educational institution. It limits any withholding of funds “to the particular program, or part thereof, in which such noncompliance has been so found.” That is, if the National Institutes for Health thinks that a particular lab has violated its legal obligations under federal law, then the NIH has a legal obligation to show the violation in that lab and to withhold funds only from that lab (and even then only after the government has determined that the lab will not comply with its legal obligation “by voluntary means.”)
Such statutory provisions are in place for a reason. Like all procedural hurdles, they are designed to prevent a willful government official from using federal power to punish institutions it does not like on the basis of flimsy allegations alone or for entirely pretextual reasons. Moreover, the limitation on the scope of the remedy available to the administration in the case of civil rights violations prevents the government from imposing an effective “death penalty” on disfavored institutions on the basis of small, limited, or resolved violations. The ability to withhold federal funds from educational institutions found to have violated civil rights is an extraordinarily powerful tool. So powerful that it helped end massive resistance to desegregation in the South in the 1960s.
But precisely because the tool is so powerful, Congress did not grant the executive branch unlimited latitude. Under the Trump administration’s approach, a future Democratic administration could, in response to a single student claiming that a single professor “misgendered” her on a campus quad or an associate dean canceling a fraternity drag show in the student union or a university disciplinary committee declining to expel a student accused of sexual misconduct, order that all federal grants and contracts be withheld from the entire campus or even an entire university system. The Trump administration has now declared that it is withholding nearly $200 million in federal grants from the University of Pennsylvania because of its policies on transgender athletes participating in sports. Penn’s medical school will now have a funding crisis because of the policies of Penn’s athletic department. And, of course, a future Democratic administration could reverse course and instead demand that the athletic department at the University of Alabama allow transgender athletes to compete or have its scientific research hub in Birmingham decimated. Congress never intended that any presidential administration should hold that kind of power over the fate of an educational institution, and it is not a power that we would want to entrust to this or any other presidential administration.
The specific demands of the Trump administration in order for Columbia to have its funding restored pose egregious problems of their own. Some are substantively troubling in their own right. Others might well be good ideas but are far beyond the scope of any legitimate interest of the federal government.
Opposing Debate
The Supreme Court has emphasized that the federal government cannot use the threat of withholding federal funds as an all-purpose tool for forcing other organizations to bend to its will. In the 2012 case challenging Obamacare’s individual insurance mandate, Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that the government cannot use federal funds as “a gun to the head” to force states to adopt its preferred policies. He was building on an earlier opinion by Chief Justice William Rehnquist holding that any strings on federal grants must be unambiguous so that grant recipients “exercise their choice knowingly” and may not be “unrelated ‘to the federal interest in particular national projects or programs.’” That Columbia University may be subject to federal dictates as to how it does “international recruiting” or uses law enforcement to enforce university policies as a result of accepting a scientific research grant conditioned on the requirement that the science lab not discriminate on the basis of race or national origin beggars belief. The federal government has a legitimate interest in ensuring that Columbia University does not violate civil rights laws. It has no legitimate interest in micromanaging the details of the university’s time, place, and manner regulations of free speech.
Congress likewise cannot do indirectly through its spending power what it cannot do directly through its regulatory power by compelling universities to abandon their First Amendment rights. Private universities have a First Amendment and academic freedom interest in setting their own policies and priorities regarding the scholarly and educational activities on their campuses. In a concurring opinion in a classic case involving federal investigations of communists on college campuses, Justice Felix Frankfurter endorsed the view that it was essential to academic freedom that a university be able “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.” The Trump administration’s demand that it be able to determine how to “reform undergraduate admissions” and how an academic department should be reconstituted strike at the heart of the institutional academic freedom that private universities have long enjoyed and that they need in order to be independent institutions of intellectual exploration and free inquiry.
If the Trump administration can encroach on the heart of institutional academic freedom at Columbia through the threat of withholding federal funds, a future Congress could simply use its regulatory authority to direct Hillsdale College to adopt protest policies more to its liking or reconstitute its School of Statesmanship or School of Classical Education to the satisfaction of an Elizabeth Warren administration. Perhaps the Middle East Studies department at Columbia should be reformed, and perhaps the Trump administration would prefer not to award research grants to that department given its scholarly activities, but what ideas Columbia wants to teach, how it wants to teach them, and to whom it wants to teach them are decisions for Columbia itself to make. If the federal government can tell private universities which academic departments they are allowed to have and in what form, then the scope of scholarly inquiry in the United States is in grave danger.
The door that the Trump administration is trying to open because it does not like how some student protests were conducted in the spring of 2024 would allow for unprecedented governmental interventions in the core educational and scholarly activities of institutions of both public and private institutions of higher education. No matter how one feels about how Columbia University has conducted itself in recent months or years, one should fear the consequences of opening that door.
