On March 13th, the Trump administration sent Columbia University a list of demands it must meet as a precondition for restoring $400 million in grant funding to the university that the administration had cancelled. Last Friday, Columbia University said it would meet those demands.
Here’s the administration’s letter and here is Columbia’s response.
Columbia’s response has been interpreted by many as an utter failure to defend academic freedom, and one that sets a dangerous precedent for the administration’s dealings with other universities. The Trump administration’s extortionary tactics with Columbia were illegal, and Columbia University should have gone to the courts to defend themselves, not roll over. They are certainly wealthy enough a university to do so, and their failure here is disappointing.
There may be some disagreement over the damage to academic freedom, though. Two questions relevant to that assessment are: (a) to what extent did the Trump administration’s funding threat and demand letter affect decisions at Columbia University? (b) how extensive is Columbia’s capitulation?
On the first question, the letter from Columbia notes that “all of these steps have been underway,” meant as an assurance both to those worried about the University’s autonomy and to those interested in its commitment to compliance with the Trump administration’s demands. The letter leaves unanswered, “since when?” Presumably some of these steps have been underway longer than others, with some initiated well before the administration’s specific threat to its funding, and others added just last week.
The answer to that first question—which decisions were influenced by the government’s threats?—is part of the answer to the second. But we can also look at what Columbia’s proposed changes actually do. Looking them over, most of them leave lots of wiggle room to essentially end up doing very little. Even one of the more egregious-sounding concessions, such as the appointment of a new senior vice provost who will review Middle East and other area studies programs, is sure to say that the office will be “following academic procedures” when it makes recommendations about “any necessary changes, academic restructuring, or investments that will ensure academic excellence and complementarity across all programs in the given academic areas.”
So it may be that Columbia is trying to have its funding and its freedom, too, banking on its letter being conciliatory-enough looking for Trump to declare a win to his constituents while being vague enough to assure academics that the university is retaining its autonomy.
One problem with this strategy is that it legitimates government overreach into university operations and incursions on academic freedom. That such overreach may not have been so bad for Columbia this time around will be no comfort when—the precedent having been set, the power-grab politically normalized—things get worse later for it and other institutions. Better to join forces with other universities and hold the line. It’s not too late for Columbia to do so.
According to the Times, the goalposts have now moved. But now that everyone knows what kind of institution Columbia is, all that’s left is bargaining about price.
It is always instructive to see how all the very clever people who spent their careers devising strategies to resist such divide and conquer tactics, so utterly fail as soon as they themselves become the target. What is the best response to divide and conquer? Unity. The other institutions and Columbia should have made a deal that they cough up each other’s missing funding should the need arise. A solidarity fund, for example. Of course, the government could have attacked that too, or could have attacked them all participating institutions at the same time, but that would have been the kind of showdown that perhaps not even the orange man wants. And of course, the universities should also accept that they will have less money in the future, that their precious endowments will have to be used, and that their professors might have to take a salary cut. None of this happened. Instead, the worst possible strategy was chosen. As I said, clever people who turn out to be clueless as soon as theory becomes reality.
How many universities have funds that are unconstrained enough that they could be used for a solidarity fund? Would the solidarity fund replicate the specific grants that are cut, or would it just be a gift of unrestricted funds?
I don’t know but it seems to me just the idea that we sit down to work out some kind of a fund would be a powerful signal to the Trump administration. These are relevant questions that you ask but I assume answers can be found. In a way, the idea would be similar to NATO, i.e., if one university is attacked, the others would take this to be an attack on themselves (which, see my comments below, I think is in fact the case), and would step in. The solidarity fund would be one way to do this.
University customers have an interest in their stability and a predictable landscape of prestige/opportunities when they graduate after 4-7 years~ could be a small fee similar to the ones that pay for ping-pong tables and football stadiums.
Unfortunately, this is another example of a major elite institution caving to the Trump regime. Columbia joins the US Congress, which ceded both its bugetary authority and its oversight on executive declarations of emergency; the Paul, Weiss law firm, which Trump bullied into doing pro bono work for he and his regime; the Washington Post, whose owner has in so many words announced an intention to censor anti-Trump editorials; ABC, who paid off Trump to call off a lawsuit they should have won. This doesn’t bode well.
As prestigious and pioneering as Columbia has been in Middle Eastern Studies, it should not be surprising that Columbia administrators acted as they did. I would expect other institutions similarly positioned to act similarly when having to choose between biomedical research funding and Middle Eastern Studies (or other “politically tendentious” humanities departments – Gender Studies and African American Studies are in the crosshairs). At the end of the day, the targeting of “radical” academics is an easy thing for Republicans to give their voters. It costs nothing politically or otherwise and mainstream Republican voters can be satisfied their elected officials are “doing something.” Given the low cost and high returns of this strategy and the fact that universities (even elite ones, it seems) largely view humanities departments as low-priority entities, this is likely to be just the beginning.
Yes, but we should not forget that if the humanities departments can be targets, then anything can be a target, at any point, depending on the whims of the government. This is just the logic of fascism and more generally any kind of autocracy (and any kind of bully). So when these institutions don’t defend the humanities subjects, they inter alia don’t defend any research on their premises inviting further attacks. Fear then becomes dominant as Hobbes long ago theorised and the order, in this case the university, becomes degraded and destabilised. And that’s of course exactly just what Trum and Co want: they don’t like independent thinking.
I’m interested in whether, in fact, Trump’s actions were illegal. Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought the link originally pointed here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/nyregion/columbia-trump-administration-funding-fight.html
And now it’s pointing here:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/trumps-columbia-funding-cutoff-is-illegal?sra=true
I’m only thinking that because I was reading the article, then had to pick up the kids, then went back to it, and now seems to point elsewhere. That’s all fine, btw, no worries. However:
So I don’t take (2) to establish illegality, but rather to be an argument for it. Trump’s lawyers, of course, have an argument to the contrary. We ultimately don’t know which side wins, because Columbia chose not to litigate, and now the courts haven’t told us how this goes. If you think Trump’s actions are “probably illegal” because various liberal academics (including Dorf et al.) have said so, maybe that’s right. But I don’t find that satisfying, since we haven’t seen the alternate legal theory yet.
What I’d think, though, is that Columbia probably thought about whether it’d prevail in court. And maybe it saw that 6-3 Supreme Court, and thought a conservative supermajority would have a pretty expansive view of executive power. Columbia could therefore have opted not to litigate because they thought they’d lose. Which they might have. In which case the Trump stuff wouldn’t actually be illegal because SCotUS said it wasn’t.
It is not surprising that in the highly legalized American social culture, courts become the primary fighting grounds for the opposition to Trump. But even in this regard we should not forget that court battles are not necessarily just about who is right, whether Trump has the law on his side. Litigating or just threatening to litigate is often just a scare tactic, a way of making it costly for the Trump admin to push its will through. It is also signaling, that one is willing to fight instead of giving in. So in a sense it is not obvious that it matters so much whether Trump’s actions are in fact illegal.
But as I say above, while this tactic should have been used, Columbia should have set up a solidarity fund with other institutions – there is a long list of targets after all – demonstrating unity. This would have been, for all institutions potentially be in the cross hairs of Trump, the best way out of this situation. It says a lot about the way these universities are run and about their priorities (= short-term gain, minimal loss, like a capitalist firm, or worse in fact), that they haven’t even considered this option.
“If you think Trump’s actions are “probably illegal” because various liberal academics (including Dorf et al.) have said so, maybe that’s right.”
There’s an alternative to accepting or rejecting claims based on the authority of the speaker: assessing the arguments for them based on the truth-values of the premises and the strengths of the inferences.
Also, both links are still there. They’re in separate words.
The point I was trying to make more had to do with the following sentence: we haven’t seen the alternate legal theory, because there was no litigation. It’s not enough to say “X wrote [whatever],” so just assess that, because that’s not how law works: we’d need to see the best version of the other side, rather than take a Chronicle op-ed post in isolation. I say this as a former appellate clerk, where we start with two partisan case briefs, and go from there, with an open mind.
An argument can be strong enough to warrant belief in a conclusion absent any consideration of counterarguments. This happens in all domains, including the law. While there are hard cases about what the Constitution prohibits or requires, there are also easy cases. Based on what I’ve seen (relatively little, I admit), I’d wager birthright citizenship, presidential term limits, and the Vice President’s duty to count all state-certified EC votes (rather than picking and choosing based on his own beliefs or preferences) at the relevant Joint Session of Congress are easy cases. I don’t need to consider Trump’s lawyers’ arguments before reaching a conclusion.
To be persuaded by an argument without considering counter-arguments per se isn’t closed-minded. You can accept an argument in this way and remain open to counter-arguments should you come across them.
Maybe you think the specific argument in the linked article isn’t strong enough to warrant belief in its conclusion absent consideration of the Trump regime’s arguments. That might be true, but to argue for it would require addressing the specifics of the argument. My point is that it can’t be established by epistemological principles as abstract as those you’re appealing to.
How many of us can do that? I presume you need to be, not a legal expert, but alt least familiar with law and have some experience in assessing legal arguments.
It would be interesting to see the opinion of a legal scholar on this.
I bet exposure to Trumpian legal arguments reduces the veracity of the average person’s beliefs about what’s legal or constitutional. In other words, we’re generally epistemically better off without them (as far as the implicated legal issues go). Of course, capable people can gain insights from studying bad arguments.
The words “balance” and “fairness” appear one time each, if I recall correctly, in the Columbia letter, in connection with promises to review its Middle East programs for “balance.”
I would think that the vague criterion or notion of “balance” should probably not be a stated goal of a curricular program, and it’s probably (?) something that Columbia would not have said except under duress. If you hire competent researchers and teachers who understand, as good teachers usually do, that part of their job is to present different perspectives, then “balance” should take care of itself. But what’s problematic, IMO, is that it’s not clear exactly what “balance” means here or how it’s going to be implemented. On the other hand, perhaps this vagueness will allow Columbia to retain some autonomy, as the OP suggests. I’m not sure.
Yes, but from now on this is a master-slave relationship of dominance. Autonomy is graded, sure, and Columbia might retain some level of autonomy, but it won’t be really autonomy. As soon as attack priorities change and, say, vaccine research becomes the target Columbia will have to cave in to those demands. And so on.
Note there is now a lawsuit for the courts to weight in on:
https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/pwkvocf6z4
That lawsuit is about the Trump administration’s deportation policy and the climate of fear and chilled speech on campuses that the complaint charges it’s causing. The suit is not directly about the funding issue, although I guess it might have some implications for it.
What happened to Kant: “Only scholars can judge scholars.” That’s as good a motto for the university as I have seen, but by its standards we will soon be back at the McCarthy Era situation: no universities af all.
Now there’s a lawsuit on 1A grounds (I haven’t read the complaint):
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/columbia-faculty-groups-sue-trump-administration-over-funding-cuts-academic-2025-03-25/