Four federal agencies announced Friday they are immediately canceling $400 million of grants and contracts to Columbia University over what they described as the Ivy League institution’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
The cancellation of the grants and contracts comes just four days after the Trump administration’s newly created Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced a probe into Columbia.
The four agencies — the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Education and U.S. General Services Administration — said more cancellations will follow. The university has over $5 billion in federal grant commitments, according to the announcement.
“Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a Friday statement. “For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus. Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer.”
A Columbia spokesperson said Friday that officials are reviewing the announcement and plan to work with the federal government to restore the funding.
“We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combatting antisemitism and ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff,” the spokesperson said.
The four agencies threatened to take similar actions against other colleges.
“The decisive action by the DOJ, HHS, ED, and GSA to cancel Columbia’s grants and contracts serves as a notice to every school and university that receives federal dollars that this Administration will use all the tools at its disposal to protect Jewish students and end anti-Semitism on college campuses,” they said in Friday’s announcement.
The antisemitism task force is already poised to review several other high-profile colleges. Last week, the Justice Department said the group would visit 10 college campuses, including Columbia, where antisemitic incidents have been reported since October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel.
The other campuses are George Washington University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley, University of Minnesota and University of Southern California.
Even more recently, the task force on Wednesday announced a probe into the University of California over allegations that it discriminated against employees by not doing enough to prevent an antisemitic and hostile work environment.
Groups raise concerns over free speech
Columbia has drawn Republican policymakers’ ire for months over the way university administrators have responded to pro-Palestinian protests on its campus. Protesters erected an encampment on the university’s lawn in April, sparking similar demonstrations nationwide that led to hundreds of student arrests.
This past fall, many colleges tightened their protest rules to deter encampments. Since then, Columbia and other high-profile institutions largely haven’t seen the same long-running encampments that rocked their campuses last spring, though protesters have held sit-ins and other demonstrations.
Columbia itself has made several policy changes — including some that have attracted criticism from free speech scholars.
The university’s Office of Institutional Equity — a newly created committee — has recently been bringing disciplinary cases against students who have criticized Israel, the Associated Press reported earlier this week.
“Based on how these cases have proceeded, the university now appears to be responding to governmental pressure to suppress and chill protected speech,” Amy Greer, an attorney advising the students under review, told AP.
According to Columbia’s website, the university has also hired more public safety officers, increased campus patrols, restricted access to the main campus, and streamlined the process for filing complaints about discrimination and harassment.
The canceled grants, meanwhile, follow through on President Donald Trump’s promises to crack down on universities for the way they’ve handled student protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
Trump supercharged those threats this week in a Truth Social post, saying his administration would pull funding from “any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.” He also threatened to deport or imprison students involved in demonstrations.
Free speech and civil liberties groups have slammed the post.
In an open letter, the American Civil Liberties Union this week urged college leaders not to bow to pressure from policymakers to curtail free speech at their campuses.
“Trump’s latest coercion campaign, attempting to turn university administrators against their own students and faculty, harkens back to the McCarthy era and is at odds with American constitutional values and the basic mission of universities,” Cecillia Wang, legal director of the ACLU and the letter’s co-author, said in a statement.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression also took issue with Trump’s post, arguing that the president couldn’t revoke federal funding over civil rights violations without the government taking colleges to federal court or holding administrative hearings.
“As FIRE knows too well from our work defending student and faculty rights under the Obama and Biden administrations, threatening schools with the loss of federal funding will result in a crackdown on lawful speech,” the group said in a web post Tuesday. “Schools will censor first and ask questions later.”
