The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the deal the Trump administration struck last week with Columbia University in which Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government to settle allegations it violated the rights of Jewish students, was not a one-off. Citing a White House official, the deal is now viewed as a blueprint for negotiations with other universities facing similar allegations.
The Journal reports further that the White House is currently seeking fines from several universities, including such elite schools as Harvard, Cornell, Duke. Northwestern and Brown. The White House reportedly hopes to extract several hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard in a deal that would make Columbia’s $200 million payment “look like peanuts.”
President Trump seems all in to use the huge leverage created by federal research grant money to compel schools to come to the table to address the accusations of campus antisemitism and the schools’ indifference to it. Billions of dollars of Harvard’s federal research money have been frozen and the university has been cut off from future grants.
In March, the Trump administration unprecedently cancelled Columbia’s grants over the school’s antisemitism problems and its refusal to address them and the cash settlement was something never seen before in higher education.
The president of Wesleyan University told the Journal that “We’re in a world now where the government can say to all these schools, ‘Hey, we’re serious, you’re going to have to pay the piper to get along with the most powerful organization in the world which is the federal government.”
The Columbia agreement prohibits programs that promote “unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes” in student admissions and faculty hiring. It calls for the appointment of a senior official to review programs in Middle East studies and the appointment of new faculty members in Jewish studies, economics and political science to “contribute to a robust and intellectually diverse academic environment.”
There will also be a “resolution monitor” who has been jointly selected by Columbia and the government and paid for by the school, to keep tabs on Columbia’s compliance.
A spokesman for The Lawfare Project, which deals with claims of antisemitism on campus, said that they were optimistic that the agreement and fine would “deter Columbia from ignoring the civil rights of Jewish students in the future.”
Larry Summers, a former Harvard President and Secretary of the Treasury, said the Columbia agreement was an “excellent template” for other institutions, saying “it balances university autonomy with antisemitism reforms.”
We get the sense that in Donald Trump we finally have a president who is serious about doing something real about antisemitism and not just in a cosmetic, public relations way. And we think he has hit upon a practical and realistic way to approach it.
Institutions of higher learning are where our future leaders form their ideas. So enabling them to return to their roles as places for the free flow of ideas is a profound mission. Let’s hope this Trump initiative is on target.
