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The $221 million settlement with the Trump administration by Columbia University (and a similar $50 million deal by Brown University) represent a terrible capitulation by these campus leaders. AAUP president Todd Wolfson called the settlement “a disaster for Columbia students, faculty, and staff, as well as for academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the independence of colleges and universities nationwide. Never in the history of our nation has an educational institution so thoroughly bent to the will of an autocrat.”
Columbia and Brown had slam-dunk legal cases against the Trump administration, which clearly violated the processes required under Title VI when they suspended funding. (Brown was never notified of any reasons for the funding to be cut off, and there wasn’t even the pretense of a finding of antisemitic discrimination.) By making a settlement, universities give up their legal rights to challenge this repression, agree to impose massive censorship and pay a huge sum for the privilege of sacrificing their values.
It’s possible that the leaders of Columbia and Brown made this agreement because they concluded that Trump is a pathological liar, a petty dictator, a petulant lawbreaker intent on taking revenge against any perceived enemy and a president who will simply ignore any adverse judicial rulings. That analysis is accurate. But if you think Trump will ignore the law and violate any rules, then trusting his regime to obey a legal settlement is just as crazy.
The settlements include a bizarre amount of federal micromanagement of private universities, requiring Brown to provide single-sex floors in student housing, ban admissions decisions using personal statements that mention race and conduct a survey about antisemitism by the end of the year and take “appropriate action” in response. Even the smallest violation of the numerous requirements could be used to justify a future cutoff in federal funds.
The same officials who made ludicrous accusations of antisemitic discrimination to punish these universities will get to decide if the colleges are violating the agreement and deserve to be punished. While the agreements settle the old baseless charges, nothing prevents new baseless charges from being filed and leading to the same illegal funding cuts. Colleges that settle with the Trump administration have no guarantee of safety from further retaliation, and Trump officials will actually use these settlements to demand a tighter reign of censorship.
The New York Times reported about those praising the Columbia agreement, “Many have focused on a provision that said no part of the settlement ‘shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university hiring, admissions decisions or the content of academic speech.’” Far from being a positive protection for intellectual liberty, this language is actually a terrible threat to free expression on campus.
By only protecting academic speech, this provision leaves the door wide open for government-imposed repression. Most expression on college campuses is not academic speech. The extramural utterances of faculty, along with virtually all student speech, is not academic speech and therefore is open to any suppression by the government under this agreement. But protecting extramural utterances is an essential part of academic freedom and has been a fundamental aspect of its definition since the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles.
While the provision says that the government can’t “dictate faculty hiring,” there’s nothing about dictating faculty firings. By solely protecting hiring decisions, Columbia leaves the door wide-open for purging faculty, staff and students who are deemed undesirable by the Trump administration.
In an email to the campus, Brown president Christina H. Paxson wrote that the first key aspect of the settlement was that “no provision of this Agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate Brown’s curriculum or the content of academic speech.” (Brown apparently didn’t bother to follow Columbia and get a ban on federal control over its hiring decisions, which is an alarming omission.)
Some people might think that paying $221 million to get $400 million in research grants is a good bargain. Federal grants aren’t free money for colleges. All of the funding goes to research expenses. Now that the Trump administration has arbitrarily lowered the indirect cost rate to 15 percent, government-sponsored research is much less profitable for colleges—and possibly an expense they must subsidize. Certainly, Columbia will be losing money by paying $221 million to get access to $400 million in grants.
Paramount bribed Donald Trump a mere $16 million (and purged a few critics) in order to get approved an $8 billion merger that can’t be undone. As terrible as Paramount’s submission to Trump was, Columbia purged far more students and spent 13 times as much to get a deal worth 1/20th the value that increases ongoing federal control over Columbia. Paramount and Columbia executives may share a moral gutter, but at least Paramount’s bribe made financial sense.
Worse yet, by making a settlement, Columbia loses that $221 million forever, with no opportunity to prevail in court and receive the full funding their researchers are entitled to. By agreeing to obey the government, Columbia hurts its legal options to challenge future funding cutoffs, because the government can claim that Columbia failed to live up to the terms of the settlement. If the courts rule against the Trump administration’s illegal actions, Columbia and Brown will still be forced to pay these millions, impose repressive censorship and face retaliation without legal recourse.
The Columbia capitulation sets a precedent for Harvard to pay an even bigger settlement, estimated at up to $500 million. Unfortunately, hapless apologists for repression such as former Harvard president Larry Summers are urging Harvard to follow Columbia’s model, and Summers praised the Columbia capitulation as “the best day higher education has had in the last year.” Summers claimed, “The prestige of the university is not to be arrogated by faculty members in support of any set of political convictions, particularly those in leadership positions of academic units.”
Let me translate this: Professors should not be allowed to express political views. For believers in censorship such as Summers, the desire to suppress academic freedom finds a convenient partner in the Trump administration.
Universities are making these deals with the Trump regime not in spite of the requirements for censorship, but because of those restrictions. The provisions in these settlements enhance administrative power to suppress dissent, and that’s precisely what makes them so appealing to some campus administrators.
Columbia and other colleges are trapped in a no-win situation, but even difficult moral dilemmas have wrong answers, and that’s what Columbia’s leadership has chosen. Let’s hope Harvard is not the next lemming to throw itself over the cliff and sacrifice its core values, its donor money and its common sense in the vain hope that fawning obedience and bribery can satisfy the vengeance of a mad leader.
