The Trump administration’s landmark settlement with Columbia University threatens the institution’s independence and academic freedom, higher education experts say. Many warn that the agreement marks a threat not only to higher education, but also to democracy at large.
The agreement, announced Wednesday, comes after Columbia faced months of intense pressure from the White House to address alleged antisemitism on campus and agree to a number of demands. It’s the latest example of how this administration is pushing the boundaries of its authority to secure changes that conservatives have long sought in higher ed.
In the end, Columbia agreed to comply with the government’s extensive demands while forking over more than $200 million to unlock $400 million in federal grants.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated the long-anticipated deal as an example of “commonsense reform,” saying in a statement that Americans have “watched in horror” for decades as the most esteemed campuses were occupied by “anti-western teachings and a leftist groupthink.”
“Columbia’s reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit and civil debate,” she added. “I believe they will ripple across the higher education sector and change the course of campus culture for years to come.”
But some higher education faculty, legal experts and free speech advocates say the settlement is unlawful, pointing to the quick investigation, vague allegations and unprecedented way federal funds were retracted before Columbia had a chance to appeal. Some went as far as to compare the executive actions to past power grabs by authoritarian leaders in countries like Hungary, Turkey and Brazil.
The very real danger is that if elite institutions choose to submit to the authority of the Trump administration, the whole rest of the industry will follow.”
Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at New America
Columbia’s capitulation “represents the upending of a decades-long partnership between the government and higher education in which colleges and universities nevertheless retained academic freedom, institutional autonomy and shared governance,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “It signals a rise in authoritarian populism in which higher education is positioned as the enemy in a fight against corrupt, inefficient and elite institutions that are out of touch with the needs of the working class.”
A federal taskforce convened to combat antisemitism first presented the university with the sweeping list of demands in March. The decision was simple: comply or permanently lose the federal funds that were frozen a week prior. The Ivy League institution agreed a week later to nearly all of the president’s demands. But the funds remained frozen.
McMahon and other Trump administration officials signed the agreement with Columbia.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Though Columbia was on the “right track,” McMahon and other task force members said the university had a long way to go. While talks with Columbia continued, the task force turned its focus to Harvard University and made similar demands. The Crimson, however, rejected the task force’s mandates and sued after it froze more than $2.7 billion in federal funds.
Many higher education leaders say that Columbia had a choice and chickened out. But regardless, they add, Trump’s ultimatum amounted to extortion.
“Whether you applaud or despise the terms of the deal, the way in which the government is operating, and getting universities like Columbia to make these deals is fundamentally coercive,” said David Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia. “Therefore, it poses a significant threat to the future of higher education as well as the rule of law.”
Pozen and others fear that this will only further embolden Trump to take similar strikes at more institutions.
“The very real danger is that if elite institutions choose to submit to the authority of the Trump administration, the whole rest of the industry will follow,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “It will be like a stack of dominoes one falling after the other.”
Chilling First Amendment Rights
The Trump administration has said the measures taken against Columbia were necessary to address antisemitism on the campus as officials accused the university of failing to protect Jewish students and later said Columbia violated federal civil rights law.
As part of the settlement, Columbia is paying $21 million to address allegations that Jewish employees faced discrimination. The agreement also requires the university to hire a student liaison to support Jewish students.
But the settlement goes beyond antisemitism and focuses on unrelated campus policies. For example, starting in paragraph 16, the administration says that Columbia students cannot reference race in admissions essays and mandates that the university must provide annual data showing both rejected and admitted students broken down by racial demographics, grade point averages and test scores.
When campuses like Columbia and Harvard allowed antisemitism to run amok, the consequences were going to follow. The chickens had come home to roost.”
Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute
The settlement also requires similar data concerning the admission of international students, bans the participation of transgender women in female sports and calls for Columbia to establish a process to ensure that all students “are committed to the longstanding traditions of American universities, including civil discourse, free inquiry, open debate, and the fundamental values of equality and respect.”
In Carey’s view, by buckling to the Trump administration, Columbia surrendered its identity as a private institution—and so would any other university that follows suit.
“The essence of an independent university is deciding who is part of your academic community, and Columbia University has surrendered that,” he said, referring to the admissions provisions.
Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that, in addition to admission practices, this settlement and its “blatant disregard for federal law” will upend academia’s core commitment to fostering First Amendment rights.
“The reforms themselves require Columbia students to commit to laudable values like free inquiry and open debate,” Creeley wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “But demanding students commit to vague goals like ‘equality and respect’ leaves far too much room for abuse, just like the civility oaths, DEI statements, and other types of compelled speech FIRE has long opposed.”
Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor and president of the faculty union chapter, said though administrators insist they won’t allow the government to interfere, that assurance doesn’t mean such acts won’t occur.
“Students and scholars at American universities must be free to think and speak their minds,” he wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “The settlement … risks imperiling this freedom.”
Ditching Due Process
Beyond the terms of the settlement itself, education advocates are primarily concerned with the process used to reach the agreement, which they said didn’t follow procedural norms.
Pozen, the Columbia law professor, outlined in a blog post Wednesday night how the task force bypassed nearly all statutory requirements of such an investigation.
This administration must return to following the rule of law.”
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education
Past administrations, Pozen explained, have pushed the boundaries of regulation, utilizing more guidance letters and fewer formal rule-making sessions with public comment. But even those enforcement strategies consisted of policies that applied to all institutions and were based on thorough investigations, not rushed accusations, he added.
“The means being used to push through these reforms are as unprincipled as they are unprecedented,” Pozen wrote. “Higher education policy in the United States is now being developed through ad hoc deals, a mode of regulation that is not only inimical to the ideal of the university as a site of critical thinking but also corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself.”
Conservative higher education experts who support the administration’s approach acknowledged that it lacked due process, but also argued that Columbia deserved the stipulations and financial penalty it faced.
“When campuses like Columbia and Harvard allowed antisemitism to run amok, the consequences were going to follow,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “The chickens had come home to roost.”
Hess added that the Trump administration was not the first to “short circuit” regulatory processes, citing the Biden administration’s loan forgiveness campaign and Obama’s use of the gender equity law, Title IX, to combat sexual assault as examples.
“We live in a time when concern for legal requirements and norms is increasingly dismissed across the political spectrum,” so to chastise one administration for skipping steps and not the other is problematic, he said. “I continue to be deeply troubled every time [the procedural statutes] are broken. But you cannot have asymmetrical expectations for the parties in these kinds of debates.”
Shifting the Political Paradigm
While a few figures, including former Harvard president and treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, applauded the resolution, many faculty members and higher education leaders expressed fear that their institutions could be next.
Columbia’s reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit and civil debate.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon
Kirsten Weld, a history professor and president of the Harvard faculty union chapter, said she is “very concerned” and rejects any suggestion that Columbia’s settlement should be a “blueprint” for her own institution’s negotiations.
“This is about deploying the coercive power of the federal government to dictate to universities, faculty, and students what they should teach, research, and learn, on ideological grounds,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “It is a dangerous abuse of federal regulatory and civil rights enforcement authority to obtain … what it would otherwise be unable to mandate through proper legislative channels.”
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, also suggested via email that “this cannot be a template for the government’s approach to American higher education.”
This administration “reached a conclusion before an investigation and levied a penalty without affording Columbia due process—that is chilling,” he wrote. “This administration must return to following the rule of law.”
But many policy experts are doubtful that will happen any time soon.
When looking beyond just Harvard and Columbia, one thing becomes clear, said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, the president is inciting an “outright attack” on higher education, and he has no plans of slowing down.
From the political ousting of University of Virginia president James Ryan to the legislative termination of countless academic programs in Indiana with little to no faculty input, Baker identified one defining thread: curtailing the power of democratic institutions.
“We are in a very dangerous time, both for U.S. higher education, but more importantly for our country,” she explained. “These types of outright attacks on colleges and universities are typically the moves of autocrats and dictators, often seen as signs of authoritarian takeovers.”
She later added, “if one wanted to overthrow our constitutional republic, these are the types of moves you would make.”
