Republicans May Come to Regret Trump’s Columbia Shakedown

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On Wednesday, Columbia University struck a deal with the Trump administration to unfreeze hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding that the government had illegally blocked. Under the agreement, Columbia will pay a $200 million fine to the federal government and another $21 million to settle employment discrimination claims. It will inform the Department of Homeland Security any time an international student is expelled, suspended, or even arrested. It will also gut its DEI initiatives and allow an invasive review of its Middle Eastern Studies program.

Mark Joseph Stern discussed this cowardly surrender to a brazenly unlawful threat and its dark ramifications for academic freedom with Balls and Strikes’ Jay Willis on this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mark Joseph Stern: This deal has been widely called a “settlement,” but it’s not really a legal settlement in any traditional sense. It’s more like a capitulation to extralegal bullying tactics seemingly designed to punish Columbia for speech that this administration doesn’t like. I’m wondering what you make of it as the first deal signed between the Trump administration and a university that it seemingly wants to destroy.

Jay Willis: At the top, I want to reiterate how ridiculous and embarrassing it is that we have to pretend that a political and ideological movement that cozies up to antisemites, bigots, and racists is concerned about the treatment of Jewish students on elite college campuses. It’s completely unserious. I promise you that if the Trump administration and the conservative cheerleaders weren’t framing this in relation to Gaza protests, they would be framing it as something else on a Newsmax bingo card. It would primarily be about transgender athletes in sports or something to that effect.

But this is how the Trump administration is couching its attack on higher education. And I really think that’s how you have to look at it—as an attack on higher education. It reflects the long-standing conservative skepticism of expertise, of information, of education, and the idea that the real crisis in American education is the underrepresentation of Republicans on college campuses. I think it’s really notable here that the Trump administration is framing its shakedown “settlement” with Columbia as a template for what it wants to do with other schools going forward. The critique of these schools is always that they’re basically real-estate hedge funds operating in expensive cities that sometimes award degrees to prep-school failsons. And Columbia, you’re just not beating the allegations here. The first time an aspiring autocrat shows up at your door and says, “You are doing things wrong, pay me a nine-figure settlement or else,” your response is: “Where do we sign on the line, Mr. Trump?” You are acknowledging that all you are doing is handing out an empty credential.

I want to drill down on a legal piece of this laid out in a piece by professor David Pozen of Columbia Law School in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Pozen writes: “The agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme—the first of its kind!—that defies the relevant statutes as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the First Amendment.” And he adds: “The federal government is seeking to reshape the internal operations of universities not through generally applicable directives, but rather through a series of bilateral ‘deals.’ The Trump administration has made clear that while Columbia is first in line, it intends to reach comparable agreements with other schools—to scale the Columbia shakedown into a broader model of managing universities deemed too woke.”

That really spoke to me, because I kept thinking about what happens if, in four years, the AOC administration decided to illegally cut off millions of dollars in federal funding to Baylor or another Christian university that receives federal tax dollars, and says: “Until you get rid of your Christian Studies department and guarantee absolute equality for LGBTQ students through a series of initiatives that we will either approve or disapprove, then you will no longer have access to the money that Congress has appropriated for you through the constitutional process.” I think the reaction wouldn’t be so swell on the right [even though this sets the precedent for it]. Yet here you see the right jumping up and down with delight that the Trump administration has completely circumvented federal law and the First Amendment in order to force Columbia to toe the Trump line and bring its policies closer to what Trump would want if Trump University had actually taken off.

It strikes me that there’s a parallel to his shakedown of the law firms. In his executive orders, in the part where someone with a functioning brain would outline what the law firm did wrong, the orders just mention tangential links between the firms and, like, the Mueller investigation. And they accuse firms of practicing DEI and hiring too many Black people. They’re just a grab bag of conservative grievances. And I think it shows that these attacks on law firms, like the attacks on universities, just reflect a desire to preemptively neuter elite institutions that stand in the way of Trump’s political agenda. There’s no serious point of contention with what these institutions are doing.

So, as Pozen says, there is no involvement of Congress. There’s no administrative agencies doing notice-and-comment rulemaking about conditions for federal funding and so on. This is just giving Trump a chance to do some angry tweets and expect university administrators to open their checkbooks.

And now Columbia has shown the way for other cowardly university administrators to capitulate.

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