21-03-2025
Columbia University grants President Trump's demands
Columbia also expelled students last week who had been involved with a building takeover during the protest movement, meeting another of the administration's demands. In the Friday announcement, the school said it has hired 36 'special officers' who will have the power to remove people from campus and make arrests.
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Although the announcement never mentions Trump or last week's letter, the four-page document closely tracks the Trump administration's demands, responding to them point-by-point with only minor departures.
The demands and Columbia's capitulation mark an extraordinary intervention by the federal government in a private university's affairs, which may presage how the Trump administration pursue its wider crackdown on elite universities. Some academics and higher education leaders have seen the Trump-Columbia confrontation as a test case, giving an early indication of how other university leaders may weigh values, such as independence and academic freedom, against the threat of devastating financial cuts threatened by the Trump administration.
Trump and his allies are seeking to reshape American universities, purging them of diversity programs and rooting out what they regard as leftist ideology that radicalizes students and undermines the academic mission. Supporters see the administration's funding cuts, DEI bans, and focus on antisemitism as an overdue corrective.
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'This is a smart, bold, forceful set of demands,' said Kenneth Marcus, a former Department of Education official in the first Trump administration who is now founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center, a Jewish advocacy group. Contrary to the department's usual bureaucratic approach to civil rights violations, he said, the Trump administration's methods have 'real teeth.'
But many academics, advocates, and higher education leaders — including those concerned about campus antisemitism or who are politically moderate or libertarian — see Trump's moves as abuses of federal power meant to punish institutions he views as hostile to his worldview.
'The major motivation for these measures I think is just raw punitive retribution,' said Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor. 'It's not that there aren't problems with universities, including protecting Jewish students against intimidation and harassment, which is a legitimate goal. But it's completely irrational to pursue that goal by withholding funding from biomedical research.'
Days after the Trump administration announced the $400 million of funding cuts on March 7, Columbia scientists began receiving notice from the National Institutes of Health of specific grants that were terminated, said Jacqueline Gottlieb, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University Medical School.
She lost funding for a PhD candidate who works in her lab. She has pulled funding from another grant so the student will be able to finish her degree, Gottlieb said. 'But that's not free. That's a cut' to her lab's overall funding, she said.
James Applegate, a Columbia professor of astronomy, said the Trump administration's punishments are disconnected from the protest movement or the university's handling of antisemitism.
'All of a sudden people who have been spending their lives and careers doing cutting-edge biomedical research discovered their grants had been suspended or canceled because of know nothing about, had nothing to do with, and don't sympathize with,' he said.
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Columbia was an epicenter of the nationwide student protest movement last year over the Israel-Hamas war.
Many protests were peaceful. Others involved vandalism and forceful entry into campus buildings resulting in injuries to Columbia workers. Protesters who set up an encampment on Columbia's quad said
After the encampment, Columbia revamped some of its disciplinary policies and suspended or expelled some students. Pro-Palestinian activists and their faculty allies said the university was repressing political expression, undermining the university's long tradition of student activism, and targeting pro-Palestinian speech as a matter of political expedience. Other professors, as well as Jewish students and advocates, said the university's leaders had allowed to protests to spiral out of control by failing to enforce existing rules. The school's president, Minouche Shafik, resigned in August.
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Jewish and Israeli students 'were on the receiving end of ethnic slurs, stereotypes about supposedly dangerous Israeli [military] veterans, antisemitic tropes about Jewish wealth and hidden power, threats and physical assaults, exclusion of Zionists from student groups, and inconsistent standards,' the report said.
Mike Damiano can be reached at
