Columbia University Caves
Door #1: Lose at least $400 million in federal grants.
Door #2: Lose at least $221 million and your institutional autonomy.
Not an enviable choice for any university.
Columbia University just chose Door #2 (as at least one professor warned it would, a few months back), and with that choice comes the risks of appeasement, not to mention a fair amount of uncertainty.
The agreement Columbia has made with the Trump administration gives the government considerable oversight over the university, and furthermore, “Nothing in this Agreement prevents the United States (even during the period of the Agreement) from conducting subsequent compliance reviews, investigations, or litigation” (sec. 17).
The agreement requires the university to, among other things:
- “conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting with the Middle East”
- “appoint new faculty members with joint positions in both the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and
the departments or fields of economics, political science, or SIPA [School of International and Public Affairs]” - “add an additional administrator… who will serve as a liaison to students concerning antisemitism issues, advise the University’s agreement Administrator and other University leaders and make recommendations to University leaders about ways to improve and to support Jewish students”
- “not maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets, or similar efforts”
- “not use personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity” in admissions
- “provide the Resolution Monitor and the United States with admissions data… showing both rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests”
- “provide that all hiring and promotion practices for faculty and administrative roles are grounded solely in individual qualifications and academic and professional merit, and shall not use of race, color, sex, or national origin as a factor-implicit or explicit-in hiring decisions across all schools, departments, and programs”
- not “use personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity” in hiring
- “undertake a comprehensive review of its international admissions processes and policies and will ensure that international student-applicants are asked questions designed to elicit their reasons for wishing to study in the United States.”
- “take steps to decrease financial dependence on international student enrollment”
- “comply with all requests for immigration information” regarding participants in its student exchange program
- “promptly provide the United States, upon request, with all disciplinary actions involving student visa-holders
resulting in expulsions or suspensions, and arrest records that Columbia is aware of for criminal activity, including trespass or other violation of law” - ban “demonstrations and other protest activities that occur inside academic buildings and places where academic activities take place”
- provide “the United States and its consultants and agents [with] access to all Columbia staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data related to the Agreement”
- “issue public semi-annual reports comprehensively documenting its progress and activities in implementing this Agreement”
- “bear all costs associated with implementing the terms of this Agreement”
You can read the whole agreement here, or below. Discussion welcome.
Not enviable, but nonetheless an easy one.
$400m in FY 2024 was equivalent to 33% of that year’s *return on investment* and ~ 3.7% of their $14.8bn endowment. Instead, they got Door #2 which effectively makes them pay ~1.9% of their endowment to become something other than a university.
But see David Wallace’s comments on Federal research funding amounts below. This complicates the analysis significantly because the losses would be much higher than the choice given above. It would be interesting to hear David’s thoughts in light of this analysis in yesterday’s NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/opinion/trump-columbia-deal-professor.html
What an embarrassment. Who knows how much long-term revenue they will lose based on the reputational hit the university will rightly incur.
As usual, there will be countless people inside the institution who opposed this as much as those outside it, so we should all guard against the instinct to collectively punishment.
For example, we should strongly oppose any blanket boycott on speakers from Columbia or anything of the sort.
I have the suspicion that they won’t suffer much reputational damage. It seems to me that this is just where the world is turning and soon no one (with money) will care about these ‘deals’. The collective result will be vastly inferior, but again, no one (with money) seems to care. (See also climate change, world poverty, nuclear proliferation.) The world is going down and we are cheerily inhabiting the sinking ship. At the past at least, collective rationality was sacrificed for individual rationality, now it is not sacrificed pretty much for nothing.
The purpose of a boycott is not to mete out perfectly proportional individualized justice, but to damage an institution to either put it out of existence or force compliance with a set of demands. Blanket boycotts enhance the reputational damage directly and do additional damage by creating an incentive to leave (or not apply to) the entity formerly known as Columbia University, and thereby accomplish their purpose more effectively. If one is worried about the effect on the ostensibly innocent bystanders within once-Columbia, why not focus on helping them find ways out instead of telling people not to engage in a legitimate tactic against an institution that deserves to be damaged?
The last thing you said is just an obvious false dichotomy so I won’t bother engaging with it.
Sure, under certain conditions it is justifiable to hurt innocent members of a group (why ‘ostensibly’ btw?) in order to bring about regime change. Those circumstances include a very high likelihood of success. No one could seriously think that obtains in this case.
Boycott’s can also be initiated or supported by the workers themselves within an institution to put pressure on the decision makers. Agricultural workers in the Eastern Washington wine industry are one example. In this case, the innocent members willingly take on the ‘injury’ of a boycott as part of an overall strategy of pressure for change. When Chateau Ste. Michelle finally recognized the workers, all those who were boycotting immediately started buying and supporting the winery as part of the overall strategy. But let’s face it, academic workers at elite private institutions are not super strong when it comes to this kind of labor solidarity and strategy.
In the interest of moral clarity: if you’re a tenured professor in a university in the US, and your institution signs exactly the same deal as Columbia (minus the part about paying 200+ million), would you resign your position in protest – with all that that entails for your career, livelihood, ability to take care of your family? I am not writing *in support* of this deal. I think that the Trump Administration is morally awful in too many ways to enumerate in a short comment. What I would like to see is more acknowledgment of the difficulty of making this sort of decision as the president or trustee of an institution.
Do we gain anything from good people resigning their positions of power out of protest?
Let’s say that there is a large exodus of faculty from Columbia out of protest. What would result? Likely speaking, you’d have a large influx of faculty who agree with this decision, and the administration would likely seek to curate those faculty to be the most amenable to the head honcho’s desires.
So, now you’d have one of the most prestigious universities in the world, with a huge research budget with who as their faculty?
Certainly a tenured professor could resign in protest of the undermining of the university’s mission this exemplifies. However, the professors have no power with respect to the decision taken, and neither does the president. The board gives the orders, as you know.
And why focus on tenured professors? If we are looking for moral clarity, why would the contract I am under determine whether or not I resign from an objectionable move on the part of the administration?
The decision as presented above is between paying $200m and handing over control to Trump, et al., and paying twice that (~3.7% of the endowment) and continuing as a university as opposed to a co-opted wing of the executive branch.
If my aim as a tenured professor is to protect the institution, I could see going on strike, holding a vote of no confidence, or speaking out as yesterday’s Hobbesian analysis in the NYT by a Columbia professor exemplifies. Also, massive non-compliance could be a form of protest against this authoritarian move, putting the pressure on Columbia to bend over even further for Trump or stand up and say enough is enough. Essentially giving them a chance to redeem themselves.
Tenure protections insure independence from just such state control, whatever one thinks of the current ideological composition of the current professoriate.
Given trends in the contractual composition of college faculty, if TT faculty resign, many lines would be changed to non-tenure full time faculty, and even more adjuncts, giving even more control to the administration (both university and executive branch.)
O, the horror.
I’m interpreting this comment as sarcasm, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Agreeing with specific rules isn’t the same as agreeing that the government should be enforcing those rules.
It’s also ignoring other objectionable rules, such as the government requiring that the private university hire people in particular fields, banning student protests in buildings, the violation of student privacy in forwarding information at request about students’ immigration, and so on.
Both of those are reasonable concerns, but would have been good reasons for Columbia to cave preemptively by being careful not to commit what is now unlawful discrimination. The relevant law is a classic case of “hard cases make bad law,” enacted (over President Reagan’s veto) to strip all federal funding from Bob Jones University because of its strange God’s prohibition against interracial dating.
The Ivy League (also including Harvard and my own alma mater) have been all but openly committing what is now illegal discrimination to placate its strange gods, in shifting directions, for centuries. That, plus increasing reliance on federal funds, gives the federal government what President Reagan and I feel is far too much power over universities. But given the realities, I’ve been predicting that Columbia and eventually Harvard will need to become over-scrupulous in revoking their discrimination.
Yes, the horror. The key phrase here is “unlawful efforts.” Read transparently we can all agree, but read opaquely it means what the current administration takes to be unlawful. Since I think their opinion on what the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Education Amendments Act of 1972 (as amended) require is a perverse interpretation of those documents, what will actually be enforced is very likely to be unconstitutional and illegal. Put bluntly, they and their conservative allies read legitimate efforts to improve the position of the oppressed as somehow a violation of the rights of those who are not oppressed. We truly are in the upside-down.
Do you mean that the administration’s interpretation of the law is perverse relative to the way the court system currently interprets it, or that the current court system’s interpretation are perverse relative to the correct interpretation?
For instance, affirmative action in graduate recruitment and faculty hiring might both be said to be legitimate efforts to improve the position of the oppressed, but current jurisprudence pretty consistently declares it to be unlawful.
If the current administration is getting the law wrong relative to what the courts currently say, I agree that’s worrying, but then it becomes relevant what the enforcement and dispute-resolution mechanisms are in Columbia’s deal, and they look reasonably robust.
If rather the idea is that Columbia caved by agreeing to comply with the law as interpreted by the courts rather than as interpreted by Columbia, that’s a much more radical position.
“If rather the idea is that Columbia caved by agreeing to comply with the law as interpreted by the courts rather than as interpreted by Columbia, that’s a much more radical position.” I do not understand this. Does Columbia get to pass on complying with court orders or judgments? What is the difference you have in mind?
I said it was a radical position! But I thought it might be what Richard Hanley meant – hence the request to clarify.
Thanks, David. To clarify, I was leaving the courts out of it. To the extent that SCOTUS has agreed with the current administration — such as in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions — their interpretations are likewise perverse.
I have no real power as a graduate student in Canada. But I can say that from here on out, until Columbia is no longer ultimately controlled by fascists, I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone attend its’ programs. For it has now become Trump University 2.0, only this time Trump isn’t keeping it a secret what you’ll actually learn.
Viewed from the outside, this attempt at appeasement seems likely to go the way history teaches; that is, it won’t succeed. The end goal of the Trump administration’s strategy is a general takeover of higher education, and giving in will only encourage them. When wealthy institutions like Columbia “cave” as Justin rightly describes it, things are made ever so much more difficult for the rest of us.
What Columbia agreed to is vile. I don’t know exactly the play should be, but somehow we have to stop individual colleges being picked off in this way. If we don’t hang together, most assuredly, we will all hang separately.
I don’t claim to be privy to the administration’s long-term strategy, but your claim does not seem consistent with the abolition of a federal Department of Education. (Making universities less offensive to parents and alumni seems more plausible to me…)
Their explicit long term goal is *something* pretty drastic, no? https://youtu.be/0FR65Cifnhw?si=qbI38kEg2EsSELNV
Thank you for sharing that. There are a lot of people who will be nodding their heads along in agreement with most of what Vance says there. We really should be paying more attention to that, it seems to me.
A palate cleanser, and the kind of exchange that I wish more of my friends and family nodding along with Vance were aware of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1MJb8AtbT4
Is it a palate cleanser or is it emblematic of (part of) the problem?—constant, droning intellectual virtue signalling from people who insist on posing as neutral, objective truth-seekers and casting everyone who disagrees with or challenges their often nonsensical commitments as “tribalists.” The IDW was notorious for exactly this sort of piffle. And where are they now? Surely deeply concerned about the state of campus speech and the crackdowns on speech supported by the administration? Or promoting the latest Covid conspiracy theory on their podcasts? Or melting down when one of these “tribalists,” these “DISC” inhabiters, challenges them on air?
Palate cleanser, for people with taste. I don’t see any “piffle” in what I saw of the conversation among those four men, and the rest of what you say just doesn’t seem on point. But who knows, Felix — maybe you see things better than they do.
If one has a taste for pablum, I suppose it’s very impressive.
I’m sorry Felix, maybe you have a more optimistic sense of our collective self-understanding than I do today. Because from where I sit, it is not pablum today to emphasize that the university has (both historically and as a telos) a core function in the making of good citizens; that it is failing at this task in certain evident ways today; that the wider culture is taking note, and so the academy is going through a period of instability and change; that academics have in some ways abdicated their role in fostering a free and collective pursuit of truth, and this is a fair criticism of the state of the academy; that the left and the right share a common core of agreement over some of what is most worthwhile in higher education; that this provides a point of orientation in thinking about how to intervene; that finding ways of productively engaging with, e.g., ICE protests and the presence of ICE enforcers on U.S. campuses, is a burden academics should be shouldering; that we need to rethink what we think we’ve come to understand about truth and faith. This is all from the first hour or so. And that’s not to say anything about the discussion of faith and reason they have together.
This isn’t pablum today. The presence of those four men, in a little dose suitable for cleansing the palate, washes out the taste Vance leaves in your mouth. I also thought the exchange between West and McWhorter on truth and trust (around the one hour and 3 minute mark) was something special. Personally, those are the kinds of moments I look for when I’m among academics. But I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a redneck in my sensibilities, Felix.
Indeed; I think both sides can agree that institutions which have allowed themselves to become dependent on taxpayers need to be careful not to offend taxpayers too severely.
Philosophise, but don’t offend, seems like it’s contrary to the spirit of what you’re advocating? RFK Jr. is offended by much of vaccine science, and sadly so are many in the electorate. But I don’t see how such work can occur effectively without offending those like RFK Jr. A lot of work on gender and sexuality is seen to offend religious and social conservatives, particularly insofar as it makes patriarchy, heterosexism, and so on visible in ways that dispel their seeming absoluteness and inevitability as forms of social organisation.
Even so, it seems like institutions, at least so far as they are administered, are desperate to be seen as not causing offence—to the point of not taking a stand, even when the institution comes under attack, and especially when students and faculty come under attack, as we saw with crackdowns on protest in recent times.
If you think only religious and social conservatives have been offended, you need to take the criticisms more seriously, or risk alienating a large proportion of taxpayers permanently. As for administrators’ responses, we’ve seen both unprincipled kowtowing in all directions, and the taking of obviously indefensible stands on dubious principles. I don’t think all that will end well.
To say that the university “caved” is to presuppose that it was opposed to this outcome, but that has not been proven. It seems to me that, given for example the university’s (or at least its leadership’s) earlier responses to pro-Palestinian protests on campus, it very well could have welcomed this loss of institutional autonomy. The wider point is that it is too simplistic to frame this as a simple conflict between universities and the US government. It involves at least three parties: the university leadership, the US government, and those university members and members of the public opposed to fascism.
Hmmm…. Suppose I grant the presupposition. Do you think the Columbia leadership was looking to do this anyway? They clearly “submitted under pressure” i.e. caved. Did they prefer caving over resisting? Sure. But if I prefer to give my wallet to a mugger than be shot, that doesn’t mean handing it over is what I wanted ceteris paribus. It is indeed complicated, by the fact that the Columbia admin seems staunchly pro-Israel, but that hardly explains everything else in this “deal.”
I know that these numbers are all quite abstract, but just for the record $179 million is a lot of money.
I’d put it a bit differently: for a institution with a 6 billion dollar turnover and a 15 billion dollar endowment, 70 million dollars a year for three years is not *that* much money, whereas 1.3 billion dollars a year indefinitely definitely is a lot of money. In narrowly financial terms this is a very good deal for Columbia. though of course there is far more to it than that.
Leaving aside broader questions for the moment, I think the financial isues aren’t best described by the headline comparison of $400 million (the current amount of federal funding being withdrawn) with $221 million (the settlement figure) On Columbia’s own estimate, it was in danger of losing $1.3 billion *per year* in research funding. That’s set against a one-off payment over 3 years of around $70 million per year, i.e. about 5% as much even if, optimistically, you assume that the federal cuts did not outlast this administration.
Thanks for this, it helps clarify and deepen what Columbia was facing. I wonder what your thoughts are in light of the analysis in the NYT yesterday?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/opinion/trump-columbia-deal-professor.html
It’s along the lines of analyses of authoritarianism that they don’t stop until they are stopped, so appeasement just delays full control, with evidence from the contractual analogues in the Trump admin.
The Rufo-ification of higher education will likely only deepen and intensify. It seems like any deal (on the part of institutions) that presumes to placate the administration will rest on a logic that just doesn’t apply anymore.
As an alumnus of both a university and prep school criticized by Mr Rufo, I would welcome a certain amount of deepening and intensification. Not that all of his criticisms should be blindly obeyed, but the intellectual diversity is a welcome change from the previous impunity.
I would like to sympathize with this, since many of the things Rufo criticizes are worth criticizing, but it is unfortunately very hard to see him as a good actor. His support for academic freedom disappears very quickly when the subject matter shifts to something he dislikes; he has been pretty overt that he wants to severely weaken higher education rather than reform it; he seems to see HE entirely through a culture-war filter, with no appreciation of the importance of scientific research or the large fraction of university teaching that is disconnected from culture-war issues.
I think this premise is questionable, at least in the terms of Rufo’s own project. I assume he’s a creationist, given his prior work for a creationist think tank. It’s plausible that he sees scientific work having abandoned any kind of creationist paradigm as related to the emergence of what he’d regard as “degeneracy” in culture. He can’t appreciate “the importance of scientific research” when that research opens the door to the various cultural boogeymen he’s constructed. Science too has to be targeted for this reason. Maybe he appreciates it in a purely instrumental sense. But because it’s embedded in society and, especially for sciences that study human beings, ethical considerations become a prominent part of the picture, it’s doubtful that he can form a view where it’s entirely disconnected from the culture-war crusades motivating him.
That might be right; possibly Rufo has active reasons to reject universities’ scientific research role rather than just being neglectful of it (though I jave never heard him mention it). Unfortunately it comes to the same thing in terms of the objective effect of his campaigning.
Interesting. I hadn’t been aware of that; it seems to have been early in his career, and I haven’t noticed any reflection of that in his (partly justified) attacks on institutions I care about. Wikipedia does note that he identifies as Catholic, but as an ex-logician I feel obliged to note that a man’s religion does not necessarily render his work invalid — my favorite example is valuable astronomical work done by Jesuits.
Except that Rufo doesn’t care about “intellectual diversity.” Nor do the “race science” folk, nor the anti-vaccine cranks. They crave attention and the credibility of a platform, whether that be one in the press, on a YouTube channel, or in a lecture hall. With the first and the last of these, they used to struggle to get it. But the guardrails have long since eroded away. So the deepening and intensification you welcome is upon us; although maybe “intensification” should be substituted with enshittification as a more generic descriptor. PragerU-tier for all. New classes in Racial Phrenology begin Wednesday. Bring your own calipers.
Plagiarism-AIU, you mean?
His feelings do not invalidate the facts he unearths. Even if he did oppose intellectual diversity, that would be an important part of the debate. (I disagree with, for instance, the standard “No freedom of speech for fascists” platform, but I support freedom of speech for those advocating it.)
His feelings are a relevant consideration as to whether we take him seriously when he, and others like him, invoke principles of free speech and the like. Otherwise we end up rubes, falling prey to those cynically invoking those principles solely to gain political foothold.
Rufo has been very clear that his tactics have nothing to do with the substance of the matters he’s commenting on, and everything to do with fostering negative sentiment about those matters, such that they become perceived as toxic in the public imagination. For instance, the intention isn’t to have a public debate on why critical race theory is good or why it’s bad; it’s to create a larger boogeyman construction called “critical race theory” that is elastic enough to apply to a whole range of issues, even ones that may only be tenuously connected to critical race theory. The goal then is to make the conversation itself so toxic that discussing critical race theory (for example) on the merits is impossible, and it’s only use in wider public discussion is as a rhetorical weapon in a culture-war crusade.
Whatever one might think of his commentary in relation to intellectual diversity, that background is relevant, insofar as it tells us that this is a man for whom such terms may mean little beyond how well they serve to sharpen a spear.
You’re free, of course, to care about Mr Rufo‘s feelings and to develop your own emotional attitude towards him. As noted, I’m interested in the facts he‘s unearthed about institutions I care about. As an ex-logician, I’m uninterested in argumenti ad hominem.
I think it’s entirely appropriate to form an emotional attitude toward hard right propagandists with power. It seems it’d be abnormal to not form such an attitude, if one cares as deeply about these institutions as one claims to.
I am not attempting to refute your feelings, only noting that your argumenti ad hominem are not a rebuttal to facts, even if uncovered by someone of whom you disapprove.
No “facts” have been presented to rebut.
> No “facts” have been presented to rebut.
You clearly haven’t been reading the critics you claim to disagree with. (Obviously their interpretations are open to disagreement, and I suppose you could accuse them of fabricating quotations, but your disapproval of their supposed religious belief doesn’t make the allegations disappear.)
I have mixed feelings (and I am not an expert here). I think it is a serious liability for universities in fighting the administration that many of them probably have been violating federal antidiscrimination law and would have reason to fear discovery if it went to a proper lawsuit; from that point of view it may be good politics to settle in a way that gets this issue off the table ahead of future pressures; doubly so since the public are not on universities’ side on that issue. It’s also true that the federal executive does just have enormous power to compel compliance from universities (the Obama “Dear colleague” letters on title IX demonstrated this in a more minor key) and in the long run there is a limited amount universities can do. That could amount to a case for playing for time by deals like this in the hope that subsequent elections alleviate the situation, especially as the Trump administration is fractious and unfocused and loses focus easily. Against that, in my judgement the courts have been reasonably good at blocking outright lawlessness, which might suggest that it’s worth fighting in court. But to a large extent that’s just playing for time as the admin could get much of this done more slowly through more regular policy-making.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Much to consider. The playing for time strategy seems risky to me as it pins a lot on the midterms and 2028. I think the situation is broadly more dire, and that a deal hoping for future change is quite hopeful. While fractious, I feel like any issue can be resurrected for purposes of distraction and as you note, public esteem for universities is low. Thanks again.
@ D. Wallace: I tried to post a response that the DN system for some reason did not like. However, I’ve decided not to retype and re-submit it as it focused on the role of SCOTUS (both to date and prospectively), and analyses of that are available elsewhere.
Fair enough! There’s obviously room for debate as to how much SCOTUS is constraining / will constrain admin lawlessness, and I don’t pretend any special knowledge here, hence my brief and undefended comment (as you say, there is more informed commentary elsewhere, though much informed commentary disagrees with other informed commentary). It may well turn out that I’m too optimistic here; we’ll see soon enough.
I think it’s helpful to separate substance and process here.
As for substance, there are certainly parts of this agreement that are deeply worrying on academic-freedom and institutional-autonomy grounds: the bits about new faculty appointments, notably, and the review of the portfolio of programs. Even if you’re skeptical of the intellectual trajectory of some university subjects and departments, it’s very dangerous to let the government meddle in them.
But a really large fraction of the agreement is about Columbia agreeing to comply with federal law. It’s not unreasonable for the government to enforce the law; there is really a lot of evidence that elite universities have flouted antidiscrimination law in pursuit of a more balanced faculty; there are prima facie good reasons to be skeptical that elite universities are moving enthusiastically towards compliance with post-SFFA-vs-Harvard antidiscrimination law in admissions too; there is plenty of precedent for financial and future-compliance settlements between the government and private bodies in lieu of a completed lawsuit or prosecution.
Other parts still rely on a more contestable interpretation of the law – notably the bits about what title IX compliance requires. But there is again plenty of precedent for the federal government to use the threat of funding withdrawal to compel universities’ compliance with its interpretation of Title IX: the Obama administration pretty much rewrote university policy on sexual assault, nationwide, that way, and subsequent court rulings have been pretty harsh to their legal interpretation.
So if this agreement had been reached in a more conventional way, through a mixture of Dear Colleague letters, settlements of individual legal actions, and evolving Supreme Court jurisprudence, I would think it was a pretty mixed bag with some things to hate, a lot to like, and some things that one might like or dislike but are democratically legitimate.
But as for process, it is incredibly disturbing that the government is so thoroughly bypassing congress, the courts, and even the partial regularity that comes from nationwide Dear Colleague letters. The government could probably have got most of this agreement through a more legally regular process if it had been willing to be patient; the fact that it rushed to brazen lawlessness is a really bad sign and worth vigorously opposing – though I find it difficult to blame Columbia for not sacrificing itself on the altar of governmental due process and rule of law.
This analysis, by a Columbia law professor, is relevant to the discussion:
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2025/07/regulation-by-deal-comes-to-higher-ed.html
The process is bad, and it infects the enforcement paths.
Yes, absolutely: very much my concerns, though Posen puts it better than I did.
Small point: it’s “Pozen.”
Noted; apologies.
My main beef with the Dear Colleague letters on sexual assault was that they traded on a general ignorance (or confusion) about the difference between federal agency advice and regulation, a benighted condition that college administrations either shared or encouraged. So I am with you there, David.
Yes, I wasn’t thrilled about the Desr Colleague letters on process grounds either, though of course what the current administration is doing is of a different order.