The Trump administration’s unprecedented pressure campaign on American higher education – which is forcing major universities to bow to its demands or risk investigations and the loss of millions of dollars in federal money – is so far facing little pushback from the schools affected.
That campaign escalated earlier this month, when the US government cancelled $400m in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University. In a subsequent letter, representatives of three federal agencies said they would reconsider that freeze only if Columbia agreed to conditions including more aggressively disciplining students who engage in pro-Palestinian disruptions, planning “comprehensive” reform of the school’s admissions policies, and placing one of school’s area studies departments under “academic receivership” – meaning under the control of an outside chair.
Other colleges and universities across the US have been watching to see how Columbia reacts to the letter, which is widely viewed as a test case for academic freedom. In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s former president, described the situation as “an authoritarian takeover”. Yet ahead of a Thursday deadline for compliance, the Wall Street Journal has reported that Columbia appears to be poised to yield to the Trump administration’s demands.
The government’s confrontation with Columbia, which critics describe as ideological blackmail and possibly illegal, is only one of a number of shots that the administration has fired in recent days across the bow of American elite higher education – and so far, opposition has been surprisingly minimal, as colleges and universities weigh whether to surrender, negotiate or fight back.
Many of the demands that the Trump administration is making are not lawful, Jameel Jaffer told the Guardian. Jaffer, who said that he did not speak for the university, is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia.
“They can’t require Columbia to take the steps that they’re demanding Columbia take, and no university could take these kinds of steps without completely destroying its credibility as an independent institution of higher education, or take these steps consistent with the values that are common to universities in the United States.”
A chill has descended on American academia, advocates for freedom of expression say, with professors, graduate students and researchers fearful that they’ll lose jobs or funding – because of their political opinions, or merely because they work at an institution that has come under the Trump administration’s Medusa gaze.
The government also announced a taskforce on alleged antisemitism at 10 major universities; sent a letter to 60 schools warning that they are under investigation for discriminating against Jewish students; and arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student who led pro-Palestinian protests, under an obscure provision that gives the US secretary of state the power to deport foreign nationals whose presence in the US has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.
On Wednesday, the administration also announced that it was freezing $175m in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania because of the university’s policies allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports, which the administration has called “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls”.
While the pushback from institutions themselves has been minimal, some college professors and university diversity officers sued last month in an effort to block a US Department of Education ultimatum calling for colleges and universities to cancel campus diversity initiatives or risk losing federal funding.
“There is extraordinary fear across university campuses at the very top level,” Veena Dubal, a law professor and the general counsel of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), told the Guardian.
“University administrators are terrified of losing millions and millions of dollars in funding,” she said, adding that “there is a lot of self-censorship going on” as medical researchers and others who previously considered their work apolitical reconsider that assumption.
Political winds are already forcing drastic budget cuts at many universities. Last week, Johns Hopkins said that it was eliminating more than 2,000 jobs due to funding cuts by the US Agency for International Development (USAid). Harvard has undertaken a hiring freeze.
The president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth, has vehemently criticized the Trump administration’s actions and what he calls universities’ insufficient response. Although he disagrees with many pro-Palestinian protesters, he recently told Politico that universities are suffering from an “infatuation with institutional neutrality” that makes “cowardice into a policy”.
Legal experts say that universities, such as Columbia, threatened with funding withdrawal have strong standing to sue, and expressed surprise and concern that they haven’t.
Although federal agencies can place conditions on money they give universities, Jaffer said, “they have the authority to demand those things only at the end of a [legal process] that they haven’t actually carried out.” In addition, “the first amendment still guarantees universities the right to shape their own expressive communities, and many of the demands that the administration is making would intrude on that right.”
Katrina Armstrong, the interim president of Columbia, said in a statement that this was “a critical moment for higher education in this country. The freedom of universities is tied to the freedom of every other institution in a thriving democracy.” She did not indicate how that rhetoric will translate into action. Columbia did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.
“I don’t think that it is wise for a university with a large endowment, that is the first university to be targeted in this way, to be taking this more conservative approach,” Dubal said of Columbia. “I think that if anyone is well-situated to lead the charge to help save higher education, it would be a university like Columbia.”
Others experts noted that many universities are probably calculating that resistance isn’t worth the cost. “I suspect we’ll see litigation over this,” Tyler Coward, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), told the Guardian, but also “see some universities capitulate and adopt the policies, including the speech-restrictive policies, that government is asking them to adopt”.
Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Inside Higher Ed that he believed that there were real antisemitic incidents on Columbia’s campus during anti-Israel protests, and that the university had mishandled them in a “clear violation” of federal anti-discrimination law.
But, he added, the federal government has “not been transparent” about what it is doing and not done enough to “convince me that these specific remedies are called for”.
Some observers have wondered if universities – some of which have lost millions of dollars as pro-Israel donors, unhappy about radically pro-Palestinian sentiment on campuses, pulled funding – are secretly pleased with the Trump administration’s actions, because it provides political cover to take decisions unpopular with students and faculty.
“I can only speculate,” Dubal said, “but it would not be surprising to me if, in fact, the board of trustees is playing a role in the non-aggressive approach that Columbia seems to be taking.”
Either way, she said, “I think it’s more clear to the public, to university faculty and students, that they are not playing the kind of role that we expect them to play in defending not just the university’s coffers, but all the values that higher education is built upon and, in fact, the laws of the nation.”
